Word: schelle
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...crumbling before a Russian onslaught. But within the German bunkers Peckinpah focuses on some old familiar attractions: the maverick sergeant who hates officers and war but is still a helluva soldier (James Coburn), the gutless captain who schemes to ride to glory on the bravery of others (Maximilian Schell), the worldly colonel who copes philosophically with futility up and down the ranks (James Mason). There is also a side excursion to a military hospital with a comely nurse (Senta Berger) whose ministrations include hopping into bed with her patient...
...horrors of war, lends a grisly authenticity to some of the scenes, but he cannot make it all fresh enough to justify the long, grueling trip. To the battleweary German soldiers, the enemy is not so much Russia as the militaristic strain in their own national character, symbolized by Schell's aristocratic captain who dares not face his family until he has won the Iron Cross. The script labors the point with a barrage of melodrama and moralizing. "What will we do after we lose the war?" James Mason asks his cynical, brainy adjutant (David Warner). Replies the adjutant...
Screenplay by MAXIMILIAN SCHELL...
...Away. All of this might have been made into a trim mystery of the puzzle-solving variety except for two factors. The first is that it is based on a novel by Co-Scenarist Duerrenmatt, who must cloud the simplest scenes with a thick layer of existential gas. Director Schell, who helped anesthetize the script, compounds that error by directing in a style that is virtually an anthology of antique art-movie clichés as practiced on the Continent...
...Schell is fatally dependent on fog machines for atmosphere, never makes a simple cut when he can use a stately and portentous camera movement. He loves strange visual juxtapositions - a leopard roaming around a mansion or a violinist sawing away under a tree in a meadow - because jarring imagery, though it conveys no useful informa tion, is fondly believed to wow the impressionable...