far too noisy and far too long and far from subtle . and it have lance percival in it . i do not really need to go on but i shall because too late the hero or ero a our professional cockney might have it and be one of the bad kind of movie . the kind that pretend to be one thing but turn out to be quite another . here we have a bash crash no prisoner war movie full of squaddies with gritted teeth fire machine gun at other squaddies with gritted teeth accompany by belicose music and dramatic sunlight through the tree and much crunching of the undergrowth . one by one the good guy be kill off until only the professional cockney and the smug yank be leave and then there a rousing climax a they race across a huge expanse of open ground the brit have inexplicably leave unmined outside their camp until one of them get his and the other collapse at the foot of his lantern jaw c. o. who clench his teeth manfully . ok. it a robert aldrich war movie and a sort of dirty half dozen and but hey and now it 1968 man and it not cool any more to make war movie and let pretend we have make an anti war movie and really clean up . and so they do . don not be fool and this be not an anti war movie any more than it big brother the dirty dozen be . a handful of misfit and psycho take on an impossible mission lead by a misfit and a psycho . ground break stuff it isn not . lance percival try a bewildering range of accent before settle on a vaguely scottish lilt but can not compete with full on nutter ronald fraser or frankly weird ian bannen in the barmy jock stake . our favourite cockney veers between bob hoskins and john gielgud a the whim take him . denholm elliot sweat far too much to make a convincing officer and we have a place in wiltshire he tell cliff robertson who absorb this nugget unblinkingly robertson himslf change from a man willing to resign his commission rather than go into combat to a gung ho battle harden leader of men in the space of ten minute . whatever he on they should have give the whole u. s. army and the war would have be over by 1942. the bad film about the war in the east since never so few .