Robert Aldrich’s most profitable movie presents war as mean-spirited farce: Major Lee Marvin offers a bunch of jailed WWII Gls?including John Cassavetes, Telly Savalas, Charles Bronson and Donald Sutherland?the chance to join him on a suicide mission into Occupied France. The movie wastes its greatest actor, Robert Ryan, but it’s a relentless work?violent, funny and deeply cynical.
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