LYCOS RETRIEVER 
Robert Aldrich: Vietnam War
built 261 days ago
In this sense, Aldrich is a rigorous determinist. His fables about bands of outsiders remain remarkably consistent across generic lines. Attack!, Ten Seconds to Hell, The Flight of the Phoenix, The Dirty Dozen, Too Late the Hero, Ulzana's Raid (1972), The Longest Yard (1974), and Twilight's Last Gleaming (1977), adventure films, war films, and Westerns - all isolate a group of men in a specific, self-contained and threatening universe. The core plots are diverse: soldiers behind enemy lines; a bomb disposal unit in post-World War II Berlin; passengers on a plane down in the Sahara; inmates of a prison; ex-convicts in a missile silo. Yet in each situation, the characters undergo the same, inexorable moral reduction. And often both the idealists and the cynics - the social extremists - perish.
Source:
When preparing his anti-war film Attack!, Aldrich approached the US Army for its cooperation, as was the practice of the time (Aldrich needed, among other things, a Sherman tank). Unusually, the Army refused because of an image in the film. The image showed American troops quite deliberately shooting their officer. And worse: shooting him for very good reasons. The last line of The dirty dozen is: "Shooting officers could get to be a habit with me." Aldrich's instinctive relation to authority is always with the sergeants, not the officers.
Source:
Aldrich’s powerful dark drama, one of his major works, recounts a brutal cat-and-mouse game between the US cavalry and the Apache chief Ulzana, in flight from a reservation. Obviously intended as a commentary on both the Vietnam War and the piety of contemporary Westerns, Ulzana’s Raid is neither racist nor anti-racist. Evenly paced and tightly controlled, the picture contains some of Aldrich’s most cinematically stunning moments.
Source:
MORE ABOUT
Vietnam War