Lee majors...

Rating: 7/10 (26 February 2012)

No pretensions at art here, this was a contrived, unbelievable, but ultimately very entertaining war movie. Following the multi-star cast approach of "The Great Escape" and "The Magnificent Seven", we get the naturally elongated running time, as much to allow us to familiarise ourselves with the individual characters as anything else.
There were aspects of the plotting and pacing I didn't take to though, especially the borderline psychotic character Telly Savalas is asked to play, a misogynist racist. I can only guess he was in there to show social awareness for the then current civil rights movement in his spats with Jim Brown, but why make him a woman-hater (and killer) too? I also felt too much time was put on the pre-amble where the dozen bond together at the expense of a miscast Robert Ryan as a pompous general. And I also took exception to the wanton slaughter of women in the Nazi stronghold cellar - yes, war is hell and all that, but such butchery brought the Americans almost down to the level of the Germans, especially when there was little in the film demonstrating the savagery of the Nazis, even if I'm not naive enough to not be aware of their barbarism during the war itself.
On the positive side, most of the casting is excellent, my only other carp being the inclusion if singer Trini Lopez who wouldn't you know gets to strum a guitar and sing at one juncture. Of the rest, Lee Marvin is excellent as the granite-hard maverick major, John Cassavetes is fine as the recalcitrant Franko and Charles Bronson delivers another effectively stoic performance.
The climax is suitably tense and action-packed, although I might have wished for the sequence to be extended at the expense of some of what went before, but for mindless, action-filled war entertainment, this was good stuff.