Inglorious as Ever

Rating: 10/10 (3 November 2011)

This out-of-the-box milestone in the American war genre kicks off on the edge of pure malevolence, the hanging of a pitiable, groveling military prisoner, pleading for mercy. Witnessing the execution is Lee Marvin's Major Reisman, who appears inflexibly distanced, but we soon find that this is in part a subterfuge. His presence at the hanging was somehow an infliction by his arch-rival ex-commander, Robert Ryan's Colonel Breed, who always finds new ways to make Reisman suffer quietly. The sole power mitigating these adversaries is Ernest Borgnine's competent but equally stubborn General Worden, who gives Reisman the newest in a string of patience-testing duties: Pending D-Day, Reisman is to head a squad of twelve soldiers to a remote French estate where various eminent German officers will be socializing to exterminate a key share of the Nazi pecking order just early enough to render the Germans powerless facing invasion. Desperate enough, and Reisman understands. The predicament is that his eponymous dozen are to be amassed from the lines of military detainees, condemned for murder or other appalling offenses.
So even before he ushers a platoon into its virtually guaranteed slaughter, Reisman must train that group from twelve brutal psychos, who are a colorful balance of archetypes: the honorable sort fallen into damnable circumstances, Charles Bronson's glacial Wladislaw; the livewire fueled by rancor and bitterness, John Cassavetes' Franko; Trini Lopez's pleasant Chicano Jimenez; Jim Brown's the self-protective black man Jefferson; Donald Sutherland's amiable dunce Pinkley; and Telly Savalas' smiling lunatic Maggott, whom God tells to slay loose women.
Deceptively formal, the movie smites into three quite clear-cut acts: In the first, we Reisman gather our crew of outcasts and swiftly learn that, to make good troopers of them, he must crack their angry spirits. In the second, the crew, having solidified under Reisman's authority, learns to collaborate implicitly and be a relentless force; in the third, they carry out their blood-spattered onslaught on the château. The dramatic tension crescendos, and so does the film's dissonant pitch. Indeed, the emotional arc divides into thirds, too, starting with the bleak and dishonorable introduction. That callous hanging supplies the threat over what ensues, whether it's the glare of utter hatred in the characters' eyes, or Reisman's unequivocally distant method of psychologically tormenting his underlings. The final act eschews implied horror for in-your-face brutality.
Aldrich, whose career beyond this film unfortunately hasn't much endured in the collective awareness, was one of those directors who was bold enough to gaze, undaunted, at the butchery his characters' behavior produced, and his staging of the climactic carnage is utterly unfeeling, truly one of the most acidic reminders of the battlefield's absolute amorality I've ever seen: There are no good and bad sides anymore. But there is definitely still camaraderie, as each character casualty feels both outrageously unexpected and excruciatingly protracted. Aldrich's unique, subversive vision is the prevailing influence on Tarantino's Inglourious Basterds, both portraying a massacre in which Nazis are annihilated in a manner that assumes distinctive visual ricochets of the Holocaust. It is, frankly, a very delicious war movie, bobbing and weaving sharply through one of its decade's most atonal screenplays, commandeered by one of the very finest directors of Hollywood's transitional phase.
But what of the mid-section, considerably the most protracted? All in all, the stage during which the Dozen begin to faithfully rally as an efficient brotherhood foreshadows not the bravado of its blood-doused culmination, but the terrain of Hogan's Heroes. The disposition of this innermost tier is emphatically that of Dude, Chance and Colorado making music in the jail, or Cool Hand Luke winning the respect of Dragline and his posse. Reviewing their grand imminent mission smacks of the cheerful bluster of a caper movie. There's an extensive sequence in which Reisman proves to Reed the efficacy of his men with a cunning war game that, aside from being thrilling in its own right, makes us laugh audaciously somewhat like when Duke and the other M*A*S*H boys uncover the shower tent to prove Hot Lips Houlihan's a true blonde.
The movie swings so very brusquely from blustery bit of cockamamie entertainment about mischief makers in war to revolting, spirit-demolishing picture of men dying in a genuinely throttling finale, with deftly unseen transition, brought off by Aldrich's harshly resourceful directorial style, and an astoundingly choice dramatis personae. Does Reisman need the weather-beaten apathy that Marvin brings to him, or does it just look like it because Marvin's personification of those ideas is so naturally graven? Likewise, the very corporal look of many other players fortifies the distillate of each character in fast-sketch, for instance Borgnine's bloated, beleaguered Worden, and Bronson's swarthy, pensive Wladislaw.
The first two hours are such a good-humored model of the Hollywood system fermenting a grim yet unchallenging war film. But Aldrich and his writers deliberately elicit that heavy sudden swing into capricious mayhem as a way of pulling the rug out from under the emblematic spirited combat picture. By bringing its curt climactic setback full circle to the grisliness of the beginning was able to be concocted into a willful and lasting bushwhack.