What Is It Good For: War Movies In June – The Wild Geese (1978)

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I wrote about this for a Now Watching segment but since it is a war movie I wanted to expand upon those thoughts here.

I’m usually a big fan of these men-on-a-mission type films. You know, the ones where a disparate group of men come together to perform a nearly impossible task. Movies like The Dirty Dozen or The Guns of Navarone are great fun, but The Wild Geese fails at nearly every turn. It isn’t the fault of the cast, which is pretty well stacked, featuring Richard Burton, Roger Moore, and Richard Harris amongst others. But I found it interminably dull.

Burton plays Allen Faulkner, a retired British Army Colonel turned mercenary. He’s tasked with rescuing Julius Limbani (Winston Ntshona), an imprisoned African President who is set to be executed by the military leaders who arrested him during a coup. Faulkner recruits Captain Rafer Janders (Harris), Lieutenant Shawn Fynn (Moore), and a host of others.

The men receive some training from a hard drill sergeant, and then are flown to the prison location and parachute in. They attack the base, rescue Limbani, but have trouble escaping. Later, there will be a (completely) obvious twist.

The plot is so basic, I knew pretty much what was going to happen once it began. You know exactly which of the main cast will die from their introductions. The script plods. There are lots of action sequences, but they are so dully directed that one hardly notices.

The film makes faint nods towards anti-colonial, anti-racist sentiments, but they are poorly done. One of the men is an out-and-out racist, throwing around the N-word and making sarcastic remarks towards the Limbani. But then he gets a scene in which he sits and talks to Limbani, and the President’s calm manner and reasonable discussions miraculously turn the racist around.

Limbani is regularly described as a great man, but as a character, he’s given very little to do and very few lines to say. He’s just someone these kind, white, British people have to rescue, not a real character.

You could almost forgive that if the action was any good. Or if you actually cared about any of these characters. Instead I just scratched my head at it all and hoped it would soon come to an end.

Now Watching: The Wild Geese (1978)

the wild geese

The Wild Geese (1978)
Directed by: Andrew V. McLaglen
Starring: Richard Burton, Roger Moore, and Richard Harris

Synopsis: A British multinational company seeks to overthrow a vicious dictator in central Africa. It hires a band of (largely aged) mercenaries in London and sends them in to save the virtuous but imprisoned opposition leader, who is also critically ill and due for execution. Just when the team has performed a perfect rescue, the multinational does a deal with the vicious dictator, leaving the mercenary band to escape under their own steam and exact revenge.

Rating: 1/10

Well, as yesterday goes to show, I’m really not cut out for this idea of posting several things per day. I just don’t have that much to say. Or maybe sometimes I’m just too tired. Or lazy. I’ll keep trying this week, but thus far, my numbers aren’t improving either. But I’m really not ready to give this site up, so I’m not sure what I’m going to do.

For now, I’m gonna keep writing when the spirit moves me.

I even forgot to mention that this month’s theme is War Movies in June.

The Wild Geese is a men assembled to do a mission movie in the vein of something like Where Eagles Dare or The Dirty Dozen. It has a great cast, but fails to be even a little bit interesting. It doesn’t help that the white mercenaries’ in Africa plot is steeped in colonialism and racism.

The film does acknowledge this somewhat with a brief scene in which the super-duper racist white guy has a five-minute chat with the sainted black politician (who is vaulted as this amazing human but is only given a handful of lines to speak) and changes his racist ways.

But honestly, you expect that sort of thing in this sort of film. What you don’t expect is action scenes that are poorly staged, poorly directed, and rather dull.

The Cassandra Crossing (1976)

the cassandra crossing poster

The Cassandra Crossing which is one of those star-studded disaster movies that was so popular in the 1970s. It is about how an eco-terrorist accidentally contaminates himself with a deadly virus and then boards a train. Once the government learns what’s happened they seal up the train and make sure no one can get off. They reroute it to Poland where they will be quarantined until a cure is found. To get there they have to cross a disused and likely hazardous bridge called the Cassandra Crossing.

Richard Harris plays a neurologist who just happens to be a passenger on the train and becomes the defacto hero. Burt Lancaster is the government, military guy back at the base barking all the orders to keep everybody aboard. The cast also includes Sophia Loren as the neurologist’s wife, Ava Gardner as the wife of an arms dealer, Martin Sheen as her plaything, OJ Simpson as the world’s worst priest, and Lee Strasberg as a Jew who is none too keen to be returning to Poland (apparently the train is going to quarantine them at an old concentration camp.

That’s a good cast and the basics of the story are interesting, but like so many of these star-studded disaster movies it spends too much time giving each actor a good scene or two, and not enough making me care. Or at least be thrilled by the suspense.

It is confusing, too, I’m not 100 percent sure they were headed towards the concentration camp. Wikipedia says so, and Strasberg’s character has a nervous breakdown, but I didn’t hear any dialogue expressly stating that was their destination. I’m not really sure why they have to go to Poland anyway. The train was originally a Geneva to Stockholm exchange. It seems like they could just park it somewhere relatively isolated, board it up, and wait until the doctors figure things out. A lot of the plot is like that – confusing.

The actors, for the most part, seem to be having fun, and I always like watching lots of cool actors in a film together. But I wish they’d tightened things up a bit and concentrated on making this thing as tense as possible. Instead, it is a bit of a bloated mess.

Things do get a little exciting toward the end when our heroes do battle with the military goons in order to stop the train before it pummels off the bridge and it’s got one of those terrifically bleak endings. But it takes far too long to get there to make this a recommendation.

Westerns in March: Major Dundee (1965)

major dundee poster

Made between his more traditional western Ride the High Country (1962) and his revisionist one The Wild Bunch (1969) Sam Peckinpah’s Major Dundee works as a kind of bridge between the two styles.

It stars Charlton Heston as Major Dundee a Union officer who is relieved of his command and transferred to run a prisoner-of-war camp in New Mexico territory. When an Apache war chief slaughters a family of ranchers and steals their children Dundee gathers a rag-tag group of soldiers, Confederate prisoners, thieves, drunks, and a small group of black soldiers to hunt him down.

They say Peckinpah was drunk for most of the shooting causing all sorts of difficulties with the studio and with Heston (rumors have it Heston once threatened the director with a saber). His original cut was over 4 hours long, the studio took control of the film after that and knocked it down to just over two hours. Some of that has since been restored but the bulk of the “director’s cut” is now lost to history.

What’s left is a bit of a mess, but there is enough there to make it worth watching.

The film is less interested in what normally would be the main story – that of these men going after the Apache – and more interested in the rivalry between Dundee and Captain Tyreen (Richard Harris) an Englishman turned Confederate officer. The two have a history together and Dundee can’t understand why Tyreen would betray his country in this war, and Tyreen can’t fathom how Dundee would raise up arms against people he knows, his friends and family members.

Tyreen regularly tells Dundee that once they’ve captured or killed the Apache he’s gonna turn his sights onto him. Dundee says he’ll be ready for it and the two square off throughout the film while maintaining an uneasy alliance.

There is a version of this film in which Dundee is a megalomaniac in the vein of Captain Ahab, hell-bent on his mission all other considerations be damned. From what I’ve read that is exactly what Peckinpah was reaching for. But Heston is too likable an actor to make that come across. His version of Major Dundee comes across as a decent officer, trying to make the best of a difficult command.

In the end, the film never quite satisfies. Oh, it is watchable enough. Peckinpah is too good a filmmaker not to make things unwatchable, even when he is half in the bag. Heston does some of his best work here, too. But it never coheres into something truly good. One wonders what that 4 hours version would have been like. If Peckinpah’s original film was an epic masterpiece or an incoherent mess.

We’ll probably never know. What we’re left with feels like an interesting transitional film for the director. One where he’s leaving behind the influences of classic western auteurs like John Ford and Howard Hawks and creating something new and modern. But he’s not quite there yet.