Na Solidão do Desejo

I haven't seen "The Sergeant" since its first release more than 30 years ago, and I've been disappointed that it hasn't been made available on VHS or recycled on cable TV. The ending of the movie is a cliche, and an unfortunate one, that likely would anger certain gay interest groups today. Yet I recall this film as one that opened the mind of a young heterosexual male who, until then, had been extremely homophobic. Rod Steiger's performance, as a supermacho soldier who is horrified of his own feelings of attraction to another man, is riveting. The outcome of the film, while dated, reflects the conflict and repression that gay men and women often experienced in our society prior to the advent of enlightenment in the 1970s (and, in the case of gay people in today's U.S. armed forces, still do). For my teenaged mind, it aroused the prospect that ALL human beings have the capacity to be sexually attracted to another person of the same sex, and that such attraction should be accepted and understood, rather than dreaded or shunned. Nothing in my subsequent experience has altered that perception. Despite the cliched ending, this is a film that displays empathy for its tormented lead character and demands that he be understood. It deserves revival.

I believe this is one of the most sensitive films about hiding your gayness in the military. Even though it takes place many years prior to the 'don't ask don't tell' motto, it speaks of the difficulties a gay man must cope with.

Now that the industry has lost one of its more brilliant character actors, I hope this movie will find its way to DVD, along with "The Loved One" which has been on moritorium for some time.

A real tour de force for Steiger, whose riveting portrayal of an Army sergeant wrestling with his own repressed desires is both realistic and compelling. Another top-notch Steiger character study.

After wanting to see this film for a long time, I finally tracked down a VHS copy taped off TV in Philadelphia (I found the copy in California). The performances are very good. And it's well made, until it gets close to THE BIG MOMENT, and then the editing goes awry, as if studio executives had gotten nervous about the subject matter and deleted whole sections, so that the time line of the behavior of the title character - played by Rod Steiger - is all off. One minute he's telling John Philip Law to get lost; the next minute he wants him near. I know people change their minds, and LOSE them when they're obsessive, but it feels choppy here, and glaring. And between THE BIG MOMENT and the denouement there is an odd black and white montage that seems to be some kind of memory device (could the copy I saw be missing something?), so that seemed like another obvious studio error. Still, the movie is worthing seeing and should be on a double bill with "Reflections In A Golden Eye," another well made, failed film from around the same time and on the same subject (repressed, lonely, older, closeted military man fascinated by a handsome younger guy).

I'm a Viet Nam vet who spent 6½ years in the Army, 5 years as sergeant or staff sergeant. This movie is the best and most accurate portrayal of army life I've ever seen. It's accuracy and correctness is uncanny. It makes me wonder how they did it. Most audiences would not be interested in the real McCoy, but this is it. It is also a top notch war film! The bleakness, emptiness, alienation, and devastating isolation, meanness, poverty, ugliness, and frightful brutality of army life are there in spades. The wreckage both of war and of the unnatural regimentation and peculiar dual hierarchy (that of commissioned officers and of non-commissioned officers) of the military are portrayed with accuracy and near perfect verisimilitude. Steiger is 110% convincing as a seasoned, career, First Sergeant in the regular army. I didn't bother with the theme of repressed homosexuality. It's the loneliness and debilitating harshness (often self-imposed by those who opt, or more likely fall into the trap of rootless expediency, of military life) that count here. Is it any wonder that soldiers commit atrocities in war? Watch this movie and see for yourself.