Word: sergeant
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...June 1967, Grant B. Cooper flew to Danang to win acquittal for a Marine sergeant charged with murdering a Vietnamese civilian. The boy's parents paid his fee, but the grizzled lawyer picked up the air fare. When somebody asked him why he went all the way to a battle zone halfway round the world, Cooper replied: "I've never defended a man in a military court before." Most probably he took on the Sirhan case-without pay-because he had never defended an accused assassin before...
...education, especially one in office not quite four months, is an odd target for terrorism. Moreover, examination of fragments showed that the grenade was a U.S. model rather than the Chinese type that the Viet Cong are likely to use. Police soon arrested a discharged South Vietnamese marine sergeant on the basis of what they described as incriminating evidence: a motorbike, notes on Tri's daily routine, and the Toyota's license (EG 0011) written in ink on his hand...
France, 1952. The country has changed, but the sergeant is the same: a psychotic homosexual who hides his desires from the world-and from himself-beneath a barrage of bluster. In the title role of The Sergeant, Rod Steiger continues his obvious fascination with the deviate character. Where he was the screaming, mincing Mr. Joyboy in The Loved One, and a coronation of closet queens in No Way to Treat a Lady, he is here appropriately disciplined as the doomed Sergeant Callan...
...acting Swanson as if he were a stricken deer, is literally driven off-screen by Steiger's agonies. Twitching his mouth into a tortured smile, roaring with a rage and a fondness he cannot separate, Steiger makes the sergeant's internal struggle so fascinating that all other personalities seem superfluous...
Like many of Steiger's minor films, The Sergeant could easily have degenerated into a one-man show. Instead, it is a two-man performance. The second man is Director John Flynn, who, faced with a prodigious actor and an undeveloped scenario, has fleshed out his film with nuances. The barracks life of monotony and loneliness is depressingly acute; the local pay sans, whose faces are maps of rural France, give an extraordinary sense of locality to a story that badly needed roots. Unfortunately for the film, neither Flynn nor Steiger bears the antidote for the sting of predictability...