Rent Attack (1956)

Good character portrayal adds to war action film - Attack review by LR

This film is very well cast. Jack Palance is excellent as a decisive, courageous Lieutenant answerable to an unstable, cowardly Captain, also very well acted by Eddie Albert. Lee Marvin fits his role perfectly as the calculating General, keeping his eye on the advantages to be accrued for his political career when the war is over. So there is drama of the straight-forward kind as GIs fight Nazis, but there is also drama of a different kind as tensions simmer between the officers. An engaging story well told.

Combat Dystopia. - Attack review by Steve

Attack is a cynical, tough war film which deals with a complex dynamic between the soldiers fighting within a defective hierarchy. The Lieutenant (Jack Palance) is a classic square jawed GI, but his bravery is undermined at every crisis by his incompetent, cowardly Captain (Eddie Albert).

The Captain is kept in position by the Lieutenant-Colonel (Lee Marvin) who seeks to gain politically from his stooge's family connections after the war. But how many men will he allow to die before he intervenes? This is a dystopian vision of the US infantry in the Battle of the Bulge which portrays the officers as a privileged elite, benefitting from the same preferment they expected back home.

The weakness of the film is that Palance is too much of a hero and Albert too much of a gutless zero, which makes the film schematic and less realistic. The sets are basic, though Robert Aldrich finds striking imagery among the ruins. It's a talky film with good action scenes. The usual running commentary of pessimistic infantry wit is punchy and funny. Lee Marvin always looks convincing in an army uniform (all the leads fought in WWII).

Its great strength is the nerve-shredding suspense. When Palance leads a dozen lightly armed soldiers into a heavily fortified village held by hundreds of Germans, with tanks, his superior doesn't even man the radio.  The Lieutenant's isolation and abandonment is excruciating. Attack was ahead of its time. Its motifs of disillusionment and mercenary individualism would become more typical in the war films of the sixties.