Twilight's Last Gleaming

Twilight's Last Gleaming is a rather far fetched and fanciful tale about a rogue general taking over a missile silo, isolating it from remote control at the Pentagon and White House and having 9 Titan missiles with atomic warheads at your command. Burt Lancaster who was railroaded into a murder conviction to silence him escapes with Paul Winfield, Burt Young, and William Smith and they take over the missile silo and issue demands.

The film is fascinating in one respect how this crisis is isolated from the knowledge of the public. The deliberations over the Cuban Missile Crisis had nothing on this and even that went public. The closest real happening in our history was when Grover Cleveland went missing for about 5 weeks to have cancer surgery and that never came out in his lifetime. Of course it worked out far better for Grover than it did for this president.

Charles Durning plays the fictional president David Stevens and what Lancaster demands of him is not just the usual money extortion. He wants a document read from a National Security Council meeting from the Vietnam war years which would have a calamitous impact on a lot of people and our national credibility involving our very reasons for being in Vietnam. Durning did not even know the existence of it as his presidency is way in the future. But sly old time Defense Secretary Melvyn Douglas knows and as it works in these cases his reputation and national security seem to blend in.

Another sly man from the past is Air Force General Richard Widmark who was once Lancaster's superior. Other members of the cabinet include Secretary Of State Joseph Cotten and Attorney General William Marshall.

Despite Oscar winners and big box office names like Widmark and Cotten, walking away with the acting honors here is Charles Durning as the president who is thrust into a crisis involving the distant past for him. His scenes with military aide Gerald O'Loughlin have some real feel and poignancy for both men.

Twilight's Last Gleaming though far fetched is well worth a look.

Things are far too strange here to just say "so bad it's good". Far, far too strange.

Instead, let's say there are three ways to make a film out of a Walter Wager novel. First we have the Telefon example: do a straight-up, linear, by-the-numbers thriller that is so straightforward and escapist that you get a rather wooden, unmemorable--if somewhat entertaining--potboiler. Nothing risked, nothing lost nothing gained. That's Telefon.

Or, there's the 58 Minutes/Die Hard 2 model: change main-character Malone to John McClane, keep the airport-in-jeopardy setting while massively rewriting the novel so it works as a movie sequel to something it wasn't even connected to in the first place, and make sure it's more exciting than Telefon. Your cinematic thriller has soul, and is safely attached to a successful franchise. And for goodness sakes, stay away from polemic, political commentary or deep meaning.

This brings us to our third case of filming a Walter Wager escapist thriller tome: attach thought-provoking socio-political concerns to the escapism. Try to address some lingering bitterness or cynicism in the US macro-psyche over, say, the Viet Nam war. Homegrown terrorists as anti-heroes, trying to out the government's secrets over a futile conflict that lingered on as a political peeing contest that cost too many lives, by way of a captured missile base. Rogue Major Burt Lancaster tries to stare down US President Charles Durning with nine nuclear warheads set to ferment, unless some dirty laundry is aired right quick. Of course it's previous administrations' decisions that Durning's version of the President is getting slapped around for, but that's all part of the...fun? Uh, no, sorry, all part of the moral conundrum. The fun is somewhere else in the movie...and quickly seeping out of the movie, the more director Robert Aldrich decides this is not just going to be escapist thrills.

Personally, I feel the movie gets most obviously unwieldy, and dangerously over-ambitious, once it starts to abandon Burt Lancaster, in favor of Charles Durning. There's a big shift in focus as soon as we start hanging out with Durning and his boardroom full of mucky-mucks--and shut-in Lancaster becomes sort of a bit player in the proceedings, even though he's got nine nuclear missiles. This switch in character focus directly corresponds to the diminishing thrills, and the emphasis on deeper questions and concerns that Robert Aldrich decided were in tune with the USA zeitgeist of 1977. Less booby-traps, ambushes, shoot-outs, torture sessions and stealth attacks gone wrong--more talk, talk, talk, by suits, suits, suits, sitting comfortably in chairs, chairs, chairs, who wants more coffee? Meanwhile, the split-screen effect used deftly during action sequences (much in the way of the TV show 24 years later) gives way to less suspenseful split-screen sequences showing Burt Lancaster almost looking bored while the President dithers.

Then the ending comes along and finds a really unexpected and daring way to combine stark cynical commentary with a shockingly brutal final confrontation such as you would find in only a truly bold and cutting-edge thriller. And so, I'm going to do what the movie does: I'm going to end a review of what sounds like a bad movie deserving its flop status by shifting gears and saying Bravo! Why? Well, 8 out of 10 for this because--despite everything wrongheaded about the project- -I can honestly say that there is no other thriller, or quasi-thriller stuffed with deep thoughts and dark commentary, quite like it. It's a glorious misfire. I didn't take it seriously, but it had me trying. More lively than Telefon, less cheesy fun than Die Hard 2, and a unique experiment: sort of Inside Man meets Sum Of All Fears meets Point/Counterpoint. Crashes and burns in one of the most compelling ways I've ever seen, and that ain't hay!

In the 1960's three "nuclear" movies stand out: Dr. Strangelove, Fail Safe, and the much under rated Bedford Incident. All tried in their own ways to raise awareness of the implications of both the Cold War, the mind set of Nuclear Warriors and their political masters, and the dangers implicit in the possession of nuclear weapons. While Twilights Last Gleaming is not as good as these three, it is an excellent well crafted film that not only explores the mind set of the military and politicians, but also how a power structure will protect itself, particularly from that most dangerous of threats: the truth. Its also explores ONE of the reasons that once in Vietnam, the US found it so hard to get out. If you enjoy this one, check out another Burt Lancaster movie, CONTROL. Again, an excellent treatment of a nuclear subject.

And If it says Richard Widmark on the cast, you know he's going to play a top general, and even more ridiculously than in "The Swarm". Here, Burt Lancaster--playing the mad-dove equivalent of his mad-hawk general from "Seven Days in May"--hijacks a nuclear missile silo, demanding the President (Charles Durning, uncannily resembling the present-day Bill Clinton) as hostage, and threatens to launch it if the government doesn't release the secret memo of why we went to Vietnam.

The whole "Ironic patriotism" is laid on a little too thickly, as if the German filmmakers were trying a little too hard to make an American Picture, but the real problem is director Robert Aldrich: The ex-Baby Jane director didn't quite survive the 70's ("The Longest Yard", "The Choirboys"), the Aldrich touch was never elegant or subtle, and the opening "heist" scenes of hijacking the silo are spoiled by turning Lancaster's partners-in-crime into foul-mouthed cliche' thugs. Also, for almost half the film, Aldrich tries to borrow Brian dePalma's trick of split-screening parallel plots and phone conversations, but doesn't seem to understand how dePalma used them for "suspense"--Here, he just lets things play out like we're watching the movie on dual security cameras, or a film-school editing assignment of "How would you intercut these two scenes to make it more exciting.?"

Stil, worth a watch if it comes your way.

Despite the thick-ear dialogue, lack-lustre performances from most of the cast, (Charles Durning being the notable exception), and the frankly ridiculous premiss of a renegade general taking over a nuclear missile silo and holding the US government to ransom, Aldrich's dip into the Cold War paranoia genre is surprisingly good, working both as a highly suspenseful thriller, (Aldrich makes great use of split screens), and as a reasonably serious picture on American foreign policy. It's also funny enough to work as political satire and I'm not sure that Aldrich took it all that seriously. It may not be in the same class as either "Seven Days in May" or "Fail Safe" and television dramas such as "The West Wing" and "House of Cards" are much closer to the mark on what goes on in the Oval Office than anything here but it's also far from negligible and if it's hardly Aldrich's best film it's still well worth seeing.