During the Battle of the Bulge, an anachronistic count shelters a ragtag squad of Americans in his isolated castle hoping they will defend it against the advancing Germans.
Ardenne '44 - Un Inferno, Un château en enfer, Η Μεγάλη Μάχη της Φλάνδρας, Το Κάστρο του Πολέμου, Das Schloss in den Ardennen, Un Château en enfer, La fortaleza, Ardenne '44: un inferno, A Defesa do Castelo, Hájili jsme hrad, Den enøjede falk, Obrona zamku, Охрана замка, 고성을 사수하라, 基堡八勇士, Vártorony, Rautaiset sankarit
USAR
Italy
France
Czechia18+
Czechia
France
Italy
USA
Action! - Lumet/Pollack: The Fight of the Century
Pollack directs his own version of The Dirty Dozen, this time set almost entirely in a castle in Belgium that a band of soldiers has been deployed to safeguard. In the process, our group gets to know each other in the surrounding town and falls in love, and we learn more about their lives and personalities. There are also some amusing scenes straight out of M*A*S*H, such as the entire prank with the Volkswagen, as well as moments that highlight the horrific nature of the war, such as the German soldier with the flute. The last sequence is amazing, and the cuts to other clips between shots not only give the film…
Sydney Pollack trying to graft LAST YEAR AT MARIENBAD onto CATCH-22. Works about half the time, but never hypnotic enough, and the surreal-comedy-of-war shtick is about as forced as you'd expect. Needed a real stylist, but I don't care how much dope he's smoked with Harrison Ford, Pollack is too straightforward for this material.
What a strange little picture. Imagine Last Year at Marienbad meets The Monuments Men and Where Eagles Dare but directed by Dennis Hopper drugged out of his skull and you've got Castle Keep. The poster art is very misleading, those going in hoping for a conventional WW2 actioner along the lines of The Dirty Dozen will be sorely disappointed by this disjointed attempt at arthouse by a director well out of his depth and possibly too enamoured with his source material.
The whole film is one elongated, surreal anachronism - a dark European fairytale occupied by very real American soldiers. It uses the Battle of the Bulge as the background for its own peripheral fantasy narrative that it suggests is…
An argument between multiple forms of barbarism with everyone losing. The late 60s man on a mission war film perverted into theatre of absurd. Plenty of meaty acting (that's a great bunch of character actors serving under Lancaster, one can always trust late 60s action movies to deliver on that), oddball touches, hard swings between talky arguments and hallucinatory images, strong action, Resnais-lite editing, and the final raid is pretty great. It is very cynical and bleak part informed by Vietnam, part by the certainty that the world order unleashed by WWII is mad, but what there was before was hardly worth preserving either. An ugly exciting mirror. By far, my favorite Sydney Pollack movie.
I recall seeing a bit of Castle Keep as a kid whilst on a caravan holiday in Fleetwood, near Blackpool. We had just come in for the evening and were due to leave for home the following morning. It was way past my bedtime anyway so there was no opportunity to watch all of it but I remember it because it was striking to see TV cops Columbo (Peter Falk) and Sgt. Phil Esterhaus of Hill Street Blues (Michael Conrad) play American GI's opposite the film's star, Burt Lancaster.
I finally caught up with Castle Keep today and it's a little disappointing to say that the film isn't really worth the memory. It's essentially a deeply pretentious, existential and woozy…
20 Films x 5 Decades: 1960s
Ranked: Sydney Pollack
Elk and I have a plan to end the war.
What's that?
Win it.
Its been tried before.Winning is for children, generals, and recruits. Get over that.
Castle Keep is a rare beast. While an anti-war film like many others, Castle Keep is a film set in World War II as a group of eight American soldiers try to defend a 10th or 12th or 15th or whatever Century castle in Europe from the approaching German soldiers. Set shortly before the Battle of the Bulge, this group of soldiers led by one-eyed Major Falconer (Burt Lancaster) traverse the locales of the castle, frequenting a bakery and a brothel in town, while…
Rocha: Wait a minute! I read an interview with John Frankenheimer a few years ago – it might have been in Cahiers or Positif – and they asked him what he thought of the Nouvelle Vague. He replied like any worker in the American industry: ‘As soon as we find certain of, say, Godard’s experiments ... interesting, we can do the same things in Hollywood. That’s to say, if you like, that everything on the level of the cinematic language that was being done around the beginning of the New Wave, around the beginning of Italian neo-realism, things like that.’ It doesn’t matter what director in the US – Peter Yates, Mike Anderson – they produce this ... toying around…
I watched this after enjoying Kelly's heroes and saw some recommendations however this is much dryer and more cerebral. It is ambitious but I couldn't really get into this movie. Great cast but I felt it was trying to be too art house and felt a bit stuffy pointing things out and lingering shots that made me feel that they were forcing me to get it. It was just kinda bland.
Burt with an eyepatch is my new fetish.
I know the poster makes it look like just another generic war movie, but this is an absolute oddity—with its blend of tragedy and surrealism, I was gonna say that it’s like a cross between Catch-22 and Last Year at Marienbad, but then I saw that somebody else had had the same thought, so now I feel like a copycat. It also has a touch of Visconti, and occasionally almost a fairytale feel. I can’t quite say if I enjoyed it, but it’s too interesting a film to dismiss. There are specks of dialogue that are quite brilliant, while some of it makes you scratch your head (but not necessarily in a…
Y'all are severely underrating this shit, it's like an episode of Sealab 2021 mixed with the Twilight Zone. Peter Falk as The New Husband of the Old Baker's Wife deserves his own movie.
During the Battle of the Bulge an American major and his men occupy a medieval castle situated on a strategic point at Belgium. But the local duke who owns it, and gives his consent, has also a personal agenda.
Psychedelic anti-war war movie that is perhaps Sydney Pollack's most unconventional one. The whole film is shot like a cross between a dream and a fairy tale and is decidedly not for every taste. If you manage to immerse yourself into it, then you will love it. But if you don't, then you'll probably dismiss it as a pretentious bore. Thankfully, I belong to the former camp.
Burt Lancaster plays it straight as the experienced, no-nonsense major who will do everything…
