HELL IS FOR HEROES

I was expecting this 1962 World War II movie directed by Don Siegel to be lean, mean and exciting.  Which it is, towards the end, when a US company attacks a heavily protected German pillbox.  But before then, the film is very much a curate’s egg with some surprising elements, not least Bob Newhart doing a variation on his comic monologue routine.

It takes an unusual approach for a war movie of this period in zooming in on an insignificant incident, based on the experience of the screenwriter Robert Pirosh duirng the war, when a mere handful of US soldiers in France in 1944 are given the suicidal job of trying to defend part of the Allied line.  

Being woefully undermanned, at first they find some creative ways to give their German opposite numbers the impression of having greater numbers. 

This buys them some time but eventually they decide their only hope is a desperate attack on said pillbox.

After this fails, reinforcements arrive, leading to the exciting and successful full-on attack which ends the film.  It’s well enough done that I can well believe it influenced Spielberg when he made ‘Saving Private Ryan’.

Given that the film is aiming for a more gritty verisimilitude it is a shame that due to a small budget it suffers from mostly being shot in the studio, giving it the appearance more of a TV episode than a feature film.

The star is Steve McQueen, when he was on the cusp of superstardom, this film coming between ‘The Magnificent Seven’ and ‘The Great Escape’.  He had enough clout to get rid of the original director (Pirosh) and to get the script changed so as to focus more on him rather than the ensemble cast (which includes Bobby Darin and James Coburn).  

Even so it seems that he was always unhappy to be in the film, so it's not clear whether his grim and charmless performance is down to this, or to his commitment to the role, that of private Reese.

Reese is a guy who is badly damaged by all the combat he’s seen, with the result that he seems addicted to the business of combat, and is at a bit of a loss away from the frontline.  

There’s a scene, after a couple of horrific deaths, where he is in a state of traumatised shock, and it’s one of the few moments I can recall in McQueen's career where his character shows real vulnerability.

The film’s ending is both anticlimactic and bleak, with Reese sacrificing himself to destroy the pillbox, having been mortally wounded, so that the company can continue to advance, leaving the viewer to reflect on the amount of bloodshed incurred simply to secure a minor tactical advantage.