Reality intrudes on entertainment.

Rating: 7/10 (8 October 2002)

It's hard to figure what director Robert Aldrich and his writers meant to say about war with this famous 60's box office hit. Working from a script by veteran screenwriters Nunnally Johnson and Lukas Heller, (based on a novel by E.M Nathanson), Aldrich wastes no time on extraneous detail or historical context; he's clearly interested in keeping this 2-and-a-half hour epic moving along, as it contains a lot of characters, tough dialogue, and well-staged action.
At the same time, little effort is expended in disguising the story's schizoid nature. Its first half is a fairly standard, though rousing, WWII adventure with a skilled cast expertly portraying the typical band of misfits -- in this case, American military prisoners -- who bond under fierce training and are molded into an efficient fighting force.
Then in the second half, the results of this training are unblinkingly depicted with the assault on an R&R stronghold for the German high command in which the mission is simply to kill as many of the enemy as possible. That this happens to include a large number of civilian noncombatants, many of them women, seems of scant concern. The slaughter is mainly accomplished with gasoline dumped down ventilator shafts on those trapped in the cellars below, then ignited.
It makes for exciting spectacle, but might also leave something of a bad taste in your mouth.