Attack

The Ardennes, 1944. Captain Cooney, who commands an infantry company, is a coward and incompetent, and his wrong orders are getting his men killed. Lieutenant Costa tells him straight: fail to send support one more time and I will kill you myself. Then the company is cut off in a town. The subject is not war but patronage. The only reason Cooney holds his command is his political connections back home, and his superior, Colonel Bartlett, protects him knowingly. The real culprit is not the cowardly captain but the system that put him there. The form is narrow and airless: ruined buildings, cellars, mud. Robert Aldrich strips out the usual exhilaration of the war film; there is little music, no heroic beat, and the deaths are sudden and ugly. The production could not get military cooperation; the Pentagon rejected the script for making the officer corps look bad, and the film was made independently on a limited budget. That is why there is so little hardware on screen and why the story is squeezed into rooms. Jack Palance plays Costa, Eddie Albert the captain and Lee Marvin the colonel. Palance's physical work in the final stretch is what the film is most remembered for. Who it is for: viewers who like hard war films that attack the system. Who it is not for: anyone expecting large-scale battle; almost all of this happens in a few streets and a few rooms.