A very feeble attempt at affirmatie action

A Disappointing Continuation

if their story seems completely bonkers, almost like a feverish work of fiction, you ain't heard nothing yet.

The biggest problem with this movie is it’s a little better than you think it might be, which somehow makes it worse. As in, it takes itself a bit too seriously, which makes most of the movie feel kind of dull.

They certainly look and act as a squad except that they look more like a downed B-17 crew; so the beginning is missing some impact; The briefing, the downing, and ability to strip the bomber of gear, ammunition, and guns, after happening onto a jeep; and that's your point of taking the castle; something that Falkner curiously investigates before the mission, and most definitely a place of refuge if he managed to get there in some fouled mission gone awry. So there is the event of having the map of the area in Falkners possession, and some other details from a ranking officer about his briefing of the situation in the Ardens, before the mission as well.

Most of the components have been covered already as have most of the performances of note, dialogue excerpts, analyses etc. So what's left to say? It's a fine film, haunting, surreal, fey, a marron glace concealed within a turd, a symphony within a calypso, or, if you prefer, a film that defies description. The cast are not actors one would necessarily expect to see in an ensemble; Burt Lancaster cheek by jowl with Peter Falk and Patrick O'Neal is not as automatic as, say, Burt Lancaster and Kirk Doublas or James Cagney and Pat O'Brien although Lancaster had, of course, acted with Scott Wilson previously. None of the females had any kind of track record to the best of my knowledge and none is asked to carry any important scenes. Once seen ...

Skip it – This is the most disappointing World War 2 movie I've ever seen, and I've seen a lot of them. I would call it campy, even zany. It tries to be "artsy," similar to "Thin Red Line," only it doesn't work. Was the director on drugs? Burt Lancaster is a Major with an eye patch in the U.S. army commanding a squad of men charged with protecting a medieval castle. Sounds good so far right? That's what I thought. Well, his men don't even fire their guns till the very end. Ol' Burt is more concerned with having sex than fighting Nazis. Peter Falk co-stars as a soldier more concerned with baking bread. Seriously, he's a baker, and more importantly, he's not funny in this role. This is no action movie. This is a made-for-TV quality movie at best. I'm not a fan of most 70's war movies, and even though this was made in 1969 its close enough. 1.5 out of 5 action rating

This is a highly symbolic, artsy portrayal of American GIs in the Ardennes Forest, Belgium, preparing to sacrifice themselves (as so many did) in a last stand to stop Hitler's December 1944 counteroffensive. They are an exhausted, ragtag bunch of stragglers piled onto a wheezing jeep and its trailer, led with single-minded determination by Burt Lancaster's Major Falconer.They encounter an unexpected - imaginary? - castle at a strategic crossroads and settle in. The count and his castle have survived German occupation, and he does not want his world destroyed by GIs turning it into a modern war roadblock. His ally is Patrick Neal's Captain Beckman, who happens to be an authority on art and pleads with Falconer to continue their retreat so the castle and its art treasures can be spared.On the other hand, the scheming count wants his beautiful young wife impregnated for an heir and the predominating Major Falconer takes diversion from his unit and the war to do that duty, while killing a young German officer who had tried to return to see her. The girl feels used and falls in love with the hardened Falconer, turning against the count.Here I might mention a couple of historical precedents for this. We Americans bombed into rubble the abbey of Monte Cassino (with its library treasures) in Italy in 1944, although the Germans had said they were not occupying or using the abbey for military purposes. After the war it was easy to question the bombing, but to the troops on the ground there was no question the abbey should have been bombed.In the Battle of the Bulge - the Ardennes - the Waffen SS panzer divisions in the north soon met stubborn, insuperable resistance, after they had massacred a hundred American GIs at Malmedy. In the center, the regular Wehrmacht panzer divisions made greater penetration, thanks to more intelligent attacking. Leading the advance was General Eisenarsch (IronAss) Bayerlein's Panzer Lehr division.Bayerlein's friend and mentor in North Africa had been "The Desert Fox," General Ervin Johann Rommel, who had a few months before been forced by Hitler to commit suicide for supporting to whatever degree the attempt to assassinate Hitler in July 1944.Our forces were confused and dispirited and falling back in the face of the overwhelming German attack. Bayerlein had the strategic crossroads of Bastogne within easy grasp, but along toward evening encountered a U.S. Army field hospital wherein he encountered a breathtakingly beautiful, blonde American nurse. She gave him the nod, and he said to hell with Hitler and the war and spent the night with her. (After the war, she settled in the Wash DC area, and I had it on good authority from an Army historian that she retained her striking beauty all her life.) And all through that night we were rushing reinforcements like the 101st Airborne Division into Bastogne to hold it against all attacks, even when surrounded, mortally crippling 5th Panzerarmee's offensive.Knowing the above helps to understand the significance of some of the dialog in the film.While the film may seem anti-war, there was obviously no question in Jewish-American Sidney Pollack's mind that Falconer's battle - and the war against the Nazis itself - had to be fought, even if some European cultural treasures had to be sacrificed in the process. In his Wikipedia biography, Bergman's The Seventh Seal is listed as one of the films Pollack most admired, and Castle Keep's dialogs before the reckoning are similar.Note that each of the GIs is described, along with his own values and goals - even if those are just getting drunk and laid in the Red Queen.There is also the sense of virile Americans coming to the rescue of Europa, incarnated by the countess. The film is in some ways pretentious and cynical, but it strives to show the real heroism of the Ardennes reverently, nonetheless.And I agree that the battle scenes ... of the castle being stormed to nihilistic destruction by the Germans' modern weapons ... are very intense and well done ... if ultimately grim.It does remind me of 2 of the Combat! TV series: the château program with Joan Hackett as the count's daughter and the demolition - of all the beautiful statuary in the cave under the bombed out château and German observation point - program with Charles Bronson.Finally, Private Benjamin represents what Pollack may have thought was the most relevant and valuable art, chronicling the castle's last epic, and his and the countess's fate - dictated by Major Falconer - is the true climax and message of the film.Lou Coatney