Anthony Quinn plays a gruff Basque sheepherder who agrees to ferry an important writer over the mountains and away from the Nazis. The matter is complicated by the fact he doesn't find out until he arrives at the meet he's also guiding the man's family over the mountains, including his ill wife (played by Patricia Neal).
Of course, they're pursued by an SS captain, played as a sadistic loon by Malcolm McDowell. I'm not sure the performance really fits the rest of the movie. McDowell portrays the Nazi as a real believer in the notion this is the start of a thousand year empire. But he also performs interrogations where he ties the prisoner in a chair in a kitchen while he cooks goulash, then eventually chops the guys fingers off while gleefully yelling, "chop, chop" over and over again. He wears a damn codpiece with the Iron Cross on it prior to raping the writer guy's daughter (which happens and is just sort of passed over once they rescue her.)
The movie in many ways feels very grim and grey. Quinn's character is concerned with getting this done as quickly as possible, before his sheep die. He's not quiet about the fact Neal's character is slowing them down and how annoyed he is with this whole job (which he could have simply refused to take, regardless of how much money he was offered.) Christopher Lee's in here for about 20 minutes as the patriarch of a group of Romani that Quinn and the family hitch with for awhile. Their fortunes don't appear to be too great before McDowell starts nosing around, as Lee correctly notes the Nazis are no fans of his people, either.
Maybe it fits that the only person enjoying themselves is the sadistic Nazi. Reveling in his capacity to inflict cruelty and death.
Although the movie's opening theme put me in the mind of The A-Team, and there was a whole bit where Quinn and the family manage to take a truck and bust through a Nazi checkpoint into Spain. Machine guns igniting truckloads of gasoline, that sort of thing. So sometimes it feels like a grim survival film, especially when they're trying to trudge up mountains. And others, it feels like a good old fashioned action flick. Doesn't manage to merge them successfully.
2 comments:
Wow, the first paragraph made it seem like one sort of film, then the subsequent paragraphs made it more and more wild as they went along.
that was pretty much my experience. I expected one thing based on the start, then that A-Team music hit and I wasn't sure what I was in for.
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