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The war is tersely sketched as an ashen memory, American GIs through a gate and into an ambush in the Gallic woods ca. 1944, one of them (Rod Steiger) throttles a youthful foe in a flash that lingers like a head scar. Eight years later and he's a decorated Master Sergeant, scarcely impressed with the provincial base to which he's been assigned. "A very critical eye" that gravitates irresistibly toward the callow private (John Phillip Law), plucked out of field labor to be his company clerk. "Two dirty warriors," as toasted by the veteran, whose attraction to the square-jawed subordinate grows obsessive. Repressed longing in the barracks, like nothing so much as Billy Budd starring Emil Jannings. ("The kind that watches and waits" is a description of the protagonist that also applies to John Flynn's camera, the lad has an even more succinct term, "severe.") The grunt woos a fille (Ludmila Mikaël) in town, their outings are filtered through all the inspid "lyricism" conventional romance deserves. By contrast, his connection with the closeted officer simmers with the tensions of military camaraderie travestied, of anxious horseplay that yields to a jealous slap. The Army man on his downtime jabbers about hot dogs and takes potshots at birds, "I don't want to hit them, I just like to hear the noise." Emotional mobility within corporeal heaviness is the Steiger forte, tapping a bottle with his finger while trying to make small talk with the object of desire or wiping a bar counter with his cap when working up the courage for a lunging embrace. (The actor's mixture of the blunt and the delicate is shared by the director, a certain Chicagoan directness at Studios de Boulogne.) It circles back to the forest, a shattering quiet reworked as hysteria by Altman in Streamers. With Frank Latimore, Elliott Sullivan, Philip Roye, Ronald Rubin, Jerry Brouwer, and Memphis Slim.
--- Fernando F. Croce |