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If you want to see just how Marxist our film industry has become, by all means watch this, Wonderful performances, and a total distortion of the Sacco-Vanzetti case. But drama has never had to be valid, just effective.

IF you want to check on the Marxist Progressives attempts to rewrite history, this is one of the most interesting. Forget history. Go with propaganda

And this is effective. Some terrific work by David Straithearn and others. And the scenery chewing of Mitchell Palmer is great fun...

The humble people (AKA immigrants) just trying to get their rights against the capitalist imperialists, who can resist?

Don't miss it.

If you want to know where Barack Obama has come from, make sure you watch THIS.

If you don't happen to be from that segment of the population like its producer Lynda Obst who finds misbehaving children who ruin their clueless parents lives cute, this movie is like finger nails on the blackboard.

The plot has more cliff hangers than the entire TCM DVD collection of film noir... each one dumber than the last, as a hapless pair of single parents try desperately to save their careers and meet the schedules and recreational activities of a pair of spoiled moppets as well.

The parents deserve everything that happens to them, and for once, the worst thing imaginable is that the meet cute couple get together in the end. And they DO... .

They will make one another's lives sheer hell!

And that IS hilarious!

The Indian subcontinent seems to have a remarkable paucity of mariners. Which is probably why J.C. Chandor and M. Night Shymalan seem to have a problem when things get wet.

Many Indians have post mortem experiences with seafaring as their corpses float down the Ganges and Indus, but the great Indian wonderful tradition of story telling comes a cropper attempting a nautical adventure.

Chandor floats his brain-dead mariner through a series of judgment calls that he blows with astonishing regularity. For some reason real sailors who know better want to give this hilarious series of screw ups credibility. Believe me... if you want to have an audience screaming with laughter as this lugubrious and interminable disaster unwinds, rent them a copy of ALL IS LOST and screen it for sailors.

Funny thing... the nautical day is divided into time periods called "watches." Presumably that is a reminder that being observant is a key part of passing time at sea and staying alive. Well our Ancient MarinerKlutz can't be bothered with that. He gets into the mess to begin with running into a freight car sized container that has fallen off some ship in calm seas in broad daylight while he is sleeping peacefully below. Then he only sees two container ships the size of Central Park when they are passing him in calm seas ten feet away. Forget the size, the noise, and his desperate need for rescue.

Enough... The ultimate hoot is the Ancient MarinerKlutz screwing up and setting his raft on fire in an attempt to signal what appears to be a boat far away, and then is interrupted in his suicidal sinking into the Mariana Trench by a rescuer "ex machina." Add it to THE ATTACK OF THE KILLER TOMATOES.... or save it for a double feature with Redford's next turkey devoted to the tragic suicide of the career of Dan Rather.

Watching Woody Allan making bad Jewish jokes in all the wrong places was as grating as the totally absurd Allen notions about what British society is all about. Shtick from a total nitwit. Woody at his most nervous and neurotic was an embarrassment in his own movie.

After VICKY Christina BARCELONA I had hopes.

A waste of good actors and some fine photography. Maybe Woody should class up his next script and do something more challenging... like THE MOOSE MURDERS.

In the meantime Allen should go back to running the gamut from A to B. That's about the extent of what is left of his talent.

If all he can do now is movies about nervous Jews out of their element like this and MIDNIGHT IN Paris, he can at least try to make them entertaining for a larger audience.

Starting with Owen Wilson's twitchy ongoing imitation of Woody Allen himself as Gil, every situation involving his grabby neurotic fiancée Inez (a perfect JAP if there ever was one), and her supposedly WASPY Tea Party parents (who come off more like a suspicious Scarsdale dentist and his shrewish Haddassah wife) MIDNIGHT IN Paris is an amusing ethnic exercise primarily because Woody Allen doesn't know that's what he has written.

It would be nice if Wilson's "blastoff into the past" didn't include constant ahistorical errors like "Hemingway" interrupting spouts of unintentionally parodic passages of Hemingway prose to discuss rhino hunting and bullfighting years before he had any exposure to either, and decamping to Kilimanjaro with Wilson's love interest (Marie Cotilard), years before he had ever been to Africa and while he was still living happily with first wife Hadley whose trust fund checks were barely keeping them alive.

But what the hell. Watching Wilson/Woody Allen's constant bug-eyed "Gee whizzes" as each celeb from the past (Fitzgerald, Dali, etc.) went into their star turn was unintentionally hilarious... rather like a reprise of the beginning of the guided tour of Jurassic Park, but the one truly touching sequence when Wilson/Woody somehow caught the right carriage to take a Marie Cotillard to her dream "golden age" to Maxim's and the Moulin Rouge of the Belle epoque made it all almost worth it.

Worth an Academy Award for the blurry postcard color of daytime Paris and the ability to pull the Woody Allen claque together behind a far inferior movie to the marvelous VICKY CRISTINA BARCELONA... .

THis is a lousy movie, but given the ethnic makeup of Hollywood, it is over-praised and at least Woody made some money this time.

Kerrigan's plot summary above misses the point. I suppose since the code of gentlemen hunters is so ignored these days that even a "conservative" Governor Tim Pawlenty leaves a deer he shot to die in the woods so he can make a rubber chicken political lunch, one must understand this.

But the point is precisely that Thorndike was making a stalk just as he told his interrogator, not attempting to assassinate Hitler. The challenge was being able to do it. Pulling the trigger was superfluous. The gun only went off because Thorndike got tackled by the SS men while sighting in with a round in the chamber.

There seems no indication here of the fine Fritz Lang film in which George Sanders played a deliciously civilized monster Nazi interrogator and Walter Pidgeon played Thorndike.

While it is always fun watching Peter O'Toole writhing in agony in another over the top performance... you might want to take a look at Man Hunt.

In trying to spin a script around Rudolf's vague attempts to carve out a role for himself in some kind of grandiose "one world" escape from the Dual Monarchy, the script writers reveal the truth about Rudolf.

He was exactly as his father's ministers thought he was and his father Franz Josef feared he was, a weak, indecisive, self-indulgent nitwit, who hadn't the courage of his convictions or the ones he so easily adopted in lieu of his own thinking.

Von Thun as Rudolf does a lovely job of conveying all this. In a nutshell an heir to the throne who can't have children because he passed on his VD to his wife and made her sterile, while having affairs with a mother and her daughter... and rewarding the familial devotion by taking the star-struck daughter along in his suicide.

If you love costumes and Viennese architecture and interior design enough, you may wish to endure the show (or you can sneak back and watch the Sissi trilogy which is now up on Netflix Roku). And there is some very nice acting by some of the minor characters.

This is about as dramatic and predictable as watching sand run through an hour glass.

So amusing to see how hard viewers will avoid the obvious in the face of political correctness that makes even accurate observation so unpalatable that key motivation and character must be ignored in favor of blithe disregard.

And this is the Trollop novel in which the famous Trollope ploy is played in the game between Mrs Hurtle and her lover. This was the key to solving the Cuban missile crisis according to Ted Sorenson and others all though disputer by others involved.

A fine series of performances, although Mrs Hurtle is less Southern, than Antipodean, with her accent

Director Kathryn Bigelow may not have gotten the word, but the crime problem we face isn't caused by "Magnum Force" cops... and we all "get along" just fine when some drugged-up black isn't resisting arrest.

There is a reason why such a high percentage of them are in prison.. and it isn't racial prejudice.

What a shame to waste such good acting and professional work on a snivel riots script like this one.

And if you want to know the truth ask any BLACK cop.

And black sports heroes and rappers lead the way. it is hard to see how any black kids can find anyone to model themselves on given those the media chooses to glorify.

Few know the story behind the film A Christmas STORY.

Jean, like most writers, (and I was his editor and indeed Leigh's too for several books) was not the best critic of his writing. He produced ideas and monologue material like an inexhaustible artesian well, but seldom knew which of them were the most salable. Like many artists he was always in love with the last thing he created.

Despite sellout shows at Carnegie Hall and elsewhere and a top rated talk radio show, Jean never made a lot of money out of his writing. And the best media use of his talents was a remarkable WGBH series he wrote and produced called "Jean Shepherd's America" some of which is available on a DVD.

Jean's producer for his public appearances and his radio show was a remarkable woman named Leigh Brown. Leigh had been a show jumper at competitive horse show on the circuit for years and had more broken bones and fewer teeth than any pretty blonde I knew. But her funny bone was in great shape and her sense for Jean's most commercial work was shrewd as well.

Anyone who wanted to extract something salable from Jean quickly learned to go through Leigh.

She had always believed that several stories in IN GOD WE TRUST (including the Red Ryder BB gun story) would make a Christmas feature that would run every Christmas for years to come and finally make some real money for Jean.

She was right and they were finally able to retire to Sanibel island. And her co-authorship of A Christmas STORY was probably the key to finding the best material for the film easily. Had Bob Clark tried to work with Jean directly, chances are the film would never have been finished.

That is about the extent of this film's contribution. If you think Todd Gitlin, or Tom Hayden know beans about any of this, their participation will disabuse you of that notion. And if you have forgotten how Mark Lane got rich off his speculations on the assassination, here is a reminder.

If you think polling a subset of less than 2% of the US population is key to understanding an issue in which Stone tells us more than 70% of the US population is united in having no faith in the Warren Report, you will love the wacky logic of OSWALD'S GHOST.

A LOT of opinion and very few facts. I find the musings of an Mailer on his last legs interesting because I find Mailer's thought processes interesting, but he adds nothing to the issues here either. One might as well hear yet another actor tells you what he/she "thinks" about politics. They do better when someone writes their lines.

The objective of this documentary is to show how "dark revanchist forces" (AKA Republicans, generals, intelligence folks, corporate types etc), as opposed to the good old-time lefty Marxist doctrine, resorted to assassination in the cases of JFK, Martin Luther King, Robert Kennedy, and the like to hold back "the future." If you have somehow missed out of on the many "documentary" efforts of film makers like Stone to get this point across, here is another chance.

Case in point, it is useful to have Edward Jay Epstein's send up of Garrison's numerological idiocies, but whatever viewers think about "who dun it," and we have a lot of evidence here on IMDb that there are a lot of opinions about that, Stone intentionally ignores the hardest evidence of what really counts right under his nose.

The key point is that there is no evidence as yet that ANY single assassin can have pulled off the JFK assassination... Oswald or anyone else. Trying to aim and fire all those shots and make two hits with a piece of crap like a Carcano bolt action with that scope... just hasn't worked.

Any fair minded analyst must concede THAT makes a lot of difference to evaluating a film like OSWALD'S GHOST which is more agitprop than Doc.

EVERY attempt to duplicate the marksmanship required of the "one assassin in six seconds" theory over the past 40 years has failed. One of the most detailed attempts to duplicate it was put together by CBS News a few years after the assassination. Stone carries a few feet of film showing the test underway. But Stone never tells us that CBS couldn't duplicate it either.

It does matter. Stone is just another tourist, putting together his idea of pretty faces that the PBS PC will find acceptable and same-old same-old commentary with no context and no understanding of what he is dealing with. Hey, they paid him and ran it.

Too bad that was enough for him

Well this will answer your question This is creme fraiche and caviar topping on a pizza.

Sofia Coppola has connections. Unfortunately she also has a lousy education.

So we see a classic milquetoast Jew playing Louis XVI as Woody Allen(frankly I find Robert Morley more dynamic) enduring painfully his Austrian wife's courage.

Lousy music... Bathos on top of pathos combined with terrible rock. poor Kirsten Dunst had to go into rehab after this... I totally sympathize.

What an appalling waste of money and effort.

You have to have flunked 3rd grade to get to the end of this.

But of course the gang that control entertainment showered it with awards! It is all about them and has little to do with history. They deserve 7 days in a locked room with a looped Barry Lyndon.

The author has taken Robert Stone's haunting "Dog Soldiers" and moved it to peacetime, Europe, and the tiresomely predictable FTA perspective of a minor English prof. It is 3.2 beer at best. Stick to "Mash" or "Catch 22" for this kind of thing.

"Buffalo Soldiers" is a term of honor coined by the Plains Indians to describe brave black soldiers they met in battle of the US Cavalry on the 10th Cav and other black units because of their nappy hair. Apparently the author hasn't a clue about what the term means.

The cast does its best, but the stereotypes kill the film early on. It is tedious, never generates any real tension, and is as predictable as a Roadrunner cartoon. The only difference is they are a lot more fun to watch.

Sorry, but the "historical accuracy" of this ROME is a joke. Just enjoy it as great fun I am tired of reading from the poorly-educated how "accurate" the history is here. At least Graves based his Claudius books on Roman historians.

And for real accuracy you need to read Coleen McCullogh's superb series MASTERS OF ROME on the Roman Civil War that precedes the last years of the Republic.... or Thornton Wilder's IDES OF MARCH which beautifully uses real characters like the poet Catullus, writing vicious diatribes at Caesar and lovesick poems to his "Lesbia," the brilliant and promiscuous aristocrat Clodia Pulcher. At least these two writers had earned literary license and knew how to use it.

Clodia probably did have sex with her brother, unlike the prudish family of the even more prudish Octavian who certainly never slept with Octavia. That makes Atia's character a ludicrous character as is Servila. Servila was Caesar's mistress and there were rumours that Brutus was his son which made his murder of Caesar all the more dramatically interesting. And Brutus had a hideous acne condition that was much commented upon that would make an interesting characterization.

Caesar was rumoured to be "every wife's husband and every soldier's wife" so there was a fertile area there unplowed by ROME. Some think Antony was his lover... but Atia sure wasn't and there were no mutual murder attempts between aristocratic Roman female rivals in the Republic. They had their little ways, but not the gross caricature shown in ROME.

Octavian himself was such a prude that as Augustus he exiled his own daughter, Julia, to a island off Italy for promiscuity.

Antony's rivalry with Octavian is real, but Antony was a real soldier and Octavian's squeamishness had him sick in bed for many of the battles that ensued in the early years. He was a great schemer and knew how to build step by step and find good subordinates while Antony was given to headstrong impulsiveness. THAT part ROME has right.

The producers know how little their audience knows of Roman history so they feel free to throw them red meat, at the expense of history, largely because they don't know the history well enough to take advantage of the REAL excesses they blunder by.

Here is an obvious mistake in plot regarding the fictional but interesting Vorenus--- Caesar elevated Vorenus to the Senatorial class... which causes a huge stink among the aristocrats. It is all fictional, but it is a nice touch. It is a huge move upward for a plebian. And Vorenus throws it all away in order to head the Aventine mob that runs the docks and the cattle market??? He throws away the purple striped toga of a Roman Senator? Not in a million years.

And Caesar wasn't murdered in the Senate House. (Shakespeare got it wrong too.) He was murdered in Pompey's Theater where the Roman Senate had to spend some years while the Senate House was rebuilt after a mob practically destroyed it. That's why he died at the feet of Pompey's statue.

As for Atia being showered in bull's blood. That is two centuries too early. Mithraism didn't take hold in Rome till the Second Century AD... about the same time as Christianity.

So enjoy Rome... it is great fun... but accurate? Not hardly, though the sets are great, benefiting from Pompeii and Herculaneum and a lot of touches like the amulets and the slave placards as Kamiya properly notes

Imagine you wanted to produce a PBS "American Experience" show on a fascinating multicultural city like New York over several centuries. And you decide to totally focus on the most miserable experiences of one of its many ethnic groups, let's say Puerto Ricans.

Now hire as talking heads only one native New Yorker who is not Puerto Rican and a fine minor writer, some Puerto Ricans no one has ever heard of or from before, and the rest "experts" from the Pacific Northwest. Forget covering anything that may have happened in the city that doesn't have a Puerto Rican perspective. Are you beginning to get the picture?

In Ives/Ferrari treatment, the ethnic group to be sniveled over happened to be blacks and the city was New Orleans. They achieved a miracle. They made one of the most interesting cities in the world a crashing bore, got most of the history and many of their facts wrong, and missed 80% of the story. They should retitle it "Alan Sharpton's New Orleans" As a New Orleanian it finally got hilariously funny to watch. As a media professional, I couldn't believe PBS accepted delivery of this lousy job.

No one has ever really pinned the "anti-Semite" label successfully on Disney... but Richard Schickle sure tried. And given the times he lived in... perhaps there is more than a grain of truth in it.

So once the new regime took over at Disney, and given the uncomfortable relationship between black activists and the Jews, who had done so much to support them and the civil rights movement for a century, it is not surprising that something as innocent as SONG OF THE SOUTH should suffer.

It is time to get this lovely work of art out of the line of fire.

HUCKLEBERRY FINN is not racist and neither is SONG OF THE SOUTH.

Enough.

Two films in my list of the top ten combine a remarkable parallel between the deep need of the director making the film and that of his principal character in his film's action: WILD STRAWBERRIES and 8 1/2.

Ingmar Bergman's Isak struggles at the end of a sterile life for redemption and the freshness of feelings and connections he had long lost. And his acceptance of what would have been just another empty honor at the University at Lund becomes the crowning of a life regained, confirmed, and renewed and deeply moving.

Fellini's Guido flounders trying to integrate the fantasies and facts of a life that seems so chaotic that he has lost total control of it. The fascinating thing about 8 1/2 is that Fellini has a great love and understanding of his fellow mortals that is Shakesperean in its scope. And Guido is finally able to put it all together in the great dance of love and acceptance at the end.

It never fails to make me weep uncontrollably

I thought it fascinating that a Jewish film maker had such a deep and sensitive understanding of the most powerful and most dangerous of the 7 Deady Sins -- PRIDE... many of the Christians posting on this item missed entirely.

Sharon wants salvation on her own terms and can not accept grace and forgiveness because she would have to accept a higher power than her own pride and sense of personal righteousness... and she is left behind.

I don't think the "anti-Christian" posters are really anti-Christian. They are just confused by the acid bath of the secular influence of the ME culture we all live in. I think we are all too eager to accept any excuse to indulge ourselves, me included, and we tend to mistake PRIDE as "rugged individualism" which we naturally find virtuous. Sharon can't understand that her sexual indulgence and her pride in her new-found virtue are both flights from the acceptance of the higher power that is the only way to the almost unknowable Divine.

The last thing in the world that concerned me in this film was the "running out of money" in the latter scenes. I think the whole film could have been shot in a black box stage like DOGTOWN and been just as powerful. The sound is particularly wonderful. And Mimi Rogers performance was astonishing.

We Christians of all denominations are all too eager to accept "cheap grace" and forgiveness without racking our brains and heart to do our best to accept our own failings... and some of us like Satan and Sharon prefer to pick a fight with God as a last resort to facing our pride.

I found the film mesmerizing. If anything can remind us of why Christ's sacrifice was necessary in the face of human intractability, this film can. There is no way we can redeem ourselves without accepting it.

It is a classic Medieval Mystery Play set in a comparable 20th century medium showing "everyman" in torment as Sharon with her soul in peril. And this viewer was as humbled by it as a superstitious, illiterate peasant in a feudal age kept from the mysteries of the high altar by the rood screen and given a revelation through a popular cultural event it was thought correctly he would better understand. It was truly art in the service of the mystery of the Holy Spirit we can only see through a glass darkly.

But I have no doubt that "the Hound of Heaven" will visit Sharon many times in many ways in the cold eternal Hell she has condemned herself to, for grace abounds... and this story is far from over as the film ends.

Somewhere there should be a private museum dedicated to memorializing one of the most important vanished species-- the lady.

While it is easy to see the fine acting of Gielgud, Mason, Fox and the other men, what no one has yet commented on is the equally fine work of a too-seldom seen actress... Judi Bowker.

As Lady Olivia, she shows the compassion, consideration, perfect balance, and dedication of an Edwardian lady at her finest. She is not only a luminous beauty, but she is moved by a gallant and delightfully indirect invitation to adultery by Lionel, but does not succumb for her own reasons. She notices what happens to the children, she treats every other person in the film as an individual, and her unselfishness in no way detracts from her presence. Miss Bowker's subtle performance is well worth a careful look.

THE SHOOTING PARTY is clearly an envoi to a vanished era. But in an age that can't see the difference between Melanie Wilkes and Scarlett O'Hara that was Margaret Mitchell's key contrast and thinks SEX AND THE CITY is a model for feminine conduct, Judi Bowker's performance is a revelation,

It is hard to remember that artists as diverse as Phidias, Leonardo da Vinci, and Michaelangelo, as well as great modern film makers like Sergei Eisenstein (under Stalin) and Leni Riefenstahl (under Hitler) had to be funded in a particular time and a particular place. And as their political masters changed, so did their ability to continue working and so did the focus of their efforts. The talent of da Vinci in his later years was diverted to the design of fortifications for the Sforzas of Milan and he died in France as another captured work of art stolen from Italy by Francis I.

The constant disregard of this recurring fact of life for many centuries causes us to constantly rewrite the history and misunderstand the accomplishment of their works in the light of our current political ideologies.

If there is one amazing thing about "The Triumph of the Will" it is the extraordinary acceptance and critical acclaim the film had all over the world at the time it was released, culminating with its being awarded the Gold Medal at the 1937 Paris World's Fair. The French had been driven out of their Rhineland occupation barely a year earlier and were rather unlikely to honor anything they regarded as a "propaganda film" for the Nazis.

It was a film Riefenstahl never wanted to make. She continually risked her career by refusing Goebbel's demands to make films like this and only weakened when Hitler asked her personally to make the film and gave her total control of its production and final cut. The Ministry of Propaganda constantly interfered with its "out of control" production during its creation as well. It was an unloved stepchild of the Third Reich from its conception to its birth.

Few of the millions who have seen it realize there is NO voice-over script cueing them how to react. Voice-over scripts were common in newsreels and documentaries then and now, and it impossible to think of a single propaganda film since the invention of sound film that has ever failed to contain one. Very few even know enough German to be able to understand what is said in the speeches unwinding before them. And fewer still realize how much the subtitles leave out. And few of us have seen the film in a cut that the director has approved, given the many bootleg versions floating around.

What overwhelms audiences is the power of the medium of film itself handled by one of its early masters. In capturing the mesmerizing experience shared by those participating in the multiple events of the annual Nurnberg Nazi Party Days. Riefenstahl exposes our vulnerability to the totalitarian temptation to throw away all the uncertainty of our individual responsibility for some great "cause" which can unite and thrill us with a sense of invincibility. And, of course, we blame her as the artist for that terrifying insight.

Riefenstahl's film work has one common theme: her love for the heroic. From her early Alpine films and adventure films as both actress and director, to her later work on the Nuba tribespeople of Africa, that has been the thread that unites it. There is nothing in this of the Aryan delusions of the Third Reich which would never have allowed her to find nobility in Sudanese black "subhumans" like the Nuba. Her "Olympia" on the 1936 Berlin Olympics neglects no nation's accomplishment in favor of the Germans who won the largest total of medals there. And she has the best and most exciting footage of any documentary or newsreel account of the triumph of American black athlete Jesse Owens. Any illusions Riefenstahl may have had about the heroic film possibilities of documentary making during World War II evaporated in her first trip to the front during the invasion of Poland that commenced it, when she fled after witnessing an atrocity and never made another contemporary film for the remainder of the war.

These are the simple facts. They have been tested in "deNazification" procedures, dozens of libel cases, and best and worst efforts of critics and social historians for over fifty years. And in spite of them, Leni Riefenstahl was effectively prevented from working on any major film project for the remainder of her career.

Unfortunately, heroes can be Spartan warriors destroying the glories of Periclean Athens, Confederate soldiers fighting bravely to maintain a slave state, Nazi troops whose heroism had been perverted to the spread of racist genocide, or Viet Cong attacking American soldiers against impossible odds during the Tet Offensive. But at least soldiers honor the heroism of their adversaries whichever side they may be on. Intellectuals and critics do their best to find any excuse to avoid being soldiers and only value what they find "correct," depending upon what ideological fashions blow them from one generation to the next.

No critic's name is long remembered. Great art endures. And so will the powerful documentary art of Leni Riefenstahl.

A hilarious assemblage of every stupid mistake a captain and crew can make at sea in storm conditions -- only Hollywood thinks these idiots are heroes. In a script only a focus group could love... to get the girls into the theater we cast George Clooney and insert female characters whose sole purpose is ball-busting the testosterone-drugged crew, and for the guys there are lots of toys and noise... the director forgot about the story. He decided to send a fishing boat to sea in predictable fall storm season without checking the weather forecast, making sure no hatch worked properly and everything fails at the crucial moment (the radio antenna falls off), and then he pitches his boat into hurricane conditions its net booms unsecured and careening all over the place, its decks awash with rolling equipment and crew members upended by it, and expects us to think the group of clowns under an incompetent captain are heroes. Too bad they didn't make the Coast Guard subplot into the movie. It at least made sense.

GO AND TELL THE SPARTANS was shot on a budget of barely $1MM just outside of LA. $250K had to be lent to director Ted Post by Burt Lancaster to get the film completed after the producer seems to have had trouble accounting for it. Then just after the NY Film Critics gave the film their coveted award for the year, its distributer went bankrupt, killing the tiny promotion budget, and the film was pulled. Nonetheless GTTS is a masterpiece.

Burt Lancaster plays a highly decorated major who will never be promoted for reasons that will only make sense to the perfumed princes of the Pentagon and Hillary Clinton. It is 1962 and with less than 1500 US MAAG advisors in Vietnam, Lancaster is buried in a dead end assignment deep in country that is supposed to be a"low intensity" combat zone,

After being ordered to send a green LT, some mercs and ruffpuffs and a burntout NCO on a senseless mission to a deserted former French Army camp at Muc Wa, Lancaster finds his team has created a major concentration of VC and he's going to have to go in and bring them out.

A gritty Wendell Mayes script, fine acting by a largely unknown cast and tight direction, set Lancaster's superb work in an ironic context well-suited to a time in which America still believed its Vietnam military presence was "making the world safe for democracy."

Some of the same feeling of Republic's undervalued classic--- LITTLE BIGHORN.