Today's film is adapted from a play, which is a little bit unusual for a war film.

It's hard to imagine what it would even look like on stage because this is a war film with a diversity of settings, infantry charges,

machine gun nests, mortars, jeeps, tanks, and Jack Palance using crazy eyes to communicate

fragmented emotion.

The on-stage version would be necessarily confined to drinking booze, seething, and being

bitches to each other.

This is one of the few movies where the battle scenes actually lighten the air.

We open on a weirdly staged battlefield betrayal, a thing you don't see too often portrayed.

Polance is leading a squad to take out a German pillbox.

Their captain, Eddie Albert, ensures them reinforcements wait in reserve.

But their captain is a coward.

He hesitates and withdraws and Paulience's squad is cut down.

The two men, imbalanced by rank, are pitched against each other for the rest of the film.

Albert plays maybe the most contemptible officer

we've ever seen, not cruel but unfathomably incapable of leadership.

Remember, this is peak motion picture production codes so stories about cowardly officers betraying

their men walked pretty thin ice. Really, it's meant to be a submarine film. That's

a place where officers can go out of control.

Come to think of it, a submarine setting would be pretty easy to imagine as the basis of a play.

Wait a minute. Playwrights of the world why are there no submarine plays is it because

there's no down stage hmm everyone enters stage left and then just stays on stage for the rest of the play?

What about a modern dance set in a summary?

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