Unpleasant After-taste

Rating: 6/10 (25 May 2012)

When this film first came out in the 1960s it was massively popular. There were queues all round Leicester Square in London. I queued for it twice and failed to get in and never saw it until years later on TV. When launched it was talked about as if it was a war-time version of the Magnificent Seven. It was nothing of the kind. The whole object of the mission was to kill Nazi officers and their wives and girlfriends by trapping them in a cellar, pouring down gallon after gallon of petrol on top of them and igniting it by throwing down hand grenades. There were some heroic deaths enacted by the stars, but the theme of the film seemed to be one of celebrating the burning of the Germans. Maybe things were different when the film came out, the bombing of London was still a fairly recent memory, but watching it many years later I found it left a nasty after-taste. I read that Lee Marvin who played the lead role, disliked it intensely and refused to appear in any of the sequels as he it felt the original glorified war. I think he was right.