The Comic Critic Reviews "Hell is for Heroes"

Hell is for Heroes is a unique war movie. It doesn’t play up war in the least. There is no significant objective mentioned. No general provides us with a clue of strategy. There’s just a squad of men hoping to go home and not face the terror of being on the line. That hope is dashed, along with the private plans the soldiers have made. The men are sent to the front. They don’t know why. They don’t really care. They just want to survive. Only a few of the men are fully up to the task of being a soldier. But Hell is for Heroes shows how most of the soldiers are out of their element. In case the cruel comedy of this is somehow lost on the audience, we are given Private Driscoll. Played by comedian Bob Newhart with his now well-known deadpan delivery, Pvt. Driscoll blunders onto the front with a jeep full of typewriters, a clerk plunged abruptly into the life-and-death struggle on the front line. All the men are trying to make the best decisions that their own experiences have given them. But with its unrelenting deadly nature, war is cruel, taking any decision and turning it into one that cost lives. Hell is for Heroes’ message is that war is men killing and dying. And not much else.

The Comic Critic Reviews "Mondo Cane"

Newsreels used to be a way of presenting news that was otherwise only heard on the radio or read in the newspapers. But it wasn’t long before the oddities of the world were also brought into theaters, the all too common history of sensationalism winning out over substance. While these short news features were a way to warm up the audience before the feature attraction, Mondo Cane is the first of these slightly blue voyeuristic vignettes I know of to arrive as a feature length film. Mondo Cane was the first to string together a collective of odd known and unknown cultural rites for the purpose of shock and social commentary. The depths of grief reflecting the deep love Americans feel towards pets was parlayed against dogs being used by different cultures as a meat source. Stereotypes were brazenly reinforced to a level of absurdity so that the audience fights back with the rational thought of the absurdity of stereotypes. The awful dubbing and odd selections of music* to go with the scenes are orchestrated to poke a stick at many societies’ conventions. Mondo Cane set the template for a series of exploitation documentaries. These in turn inspired others to craft their own documentaries in the same style. Sex, death, gluttony, and fanaticism have all been explored and have become a standard recipe used in reality television shows and Internet videos. Mondo Cane came out the year I was born and a lifetime of exposure has numbed me a bit to the movie’s original source material.

*The score, "More (Theme from Mondo Cane)," was nominated for an Oscar.

The Comic Critic Reviews "The Longest Day"

I’ve seen The Longest Day over a dozen times. But I’ve only seen it uncut a few times. Most of my viewings were via broadcast television where its three-hour-length jostles was compromised by commercials. The Longest Day is a docudrama about the Allies’ invasion of Normandy. A docudrama is just what it sounds like. Parts of it do a pretty good job of providing details of that fateful day, like names and locations. The drama part is everything else. The scale of production for The Longest Day was huge. So large, in fact, that three different directors were assigned to different countries at the same time to meet the production deadline. And there was no shortage of stars for this film. Both Richard Burton and Roddy McDowall flew over from the stalled production of Cleopatra to participate. The Longest Day would receive five Oscar nominations, including Best Picture. But there were a lot of great films that year and the Best Picture win went to Lawrence of Arabia.