Rating: NR
Genre:
War
Release Date: 05/21/2002
SubTitles: English/Espanol
Dubbed: English/French
Sound: 2/5.1
Run Time: 167 Minutes
Flags: Not For Children
Distributor/Studio: 20th Century Fox
Though several concessions to the censors and the box-office were made in adapting
Irwin Shaw's bestseller
The Young Lions to the screen, the end result is generally effective and satisfying. Set during World War 2, the film concentrates on three individuals, one German, two American.
Marlon Brando (whose accent ebbs and floes from scene to scene) plays an idealistic German whose early fascination with Nazism leads to doubt and disillusionment. American entertainer
Dean Martin, on the verge of the Big Time, does his best to dodge the draft but ends up in uniform all the same. And American Jew
Montgomery Clift, so sensitive that he's practically breakable, must come to grips with anti-Semitism, not only from the Germans but also from his fellow soldiers. Romance enters the picture in the form of
Hope Lange as
Clift's gentile girlfrind,
Barbara Rush as the socialite who shames
Martin into joining up, and
May Britt as
Brando's vis-a-vis. Screenwriter
Edward Anhalt was obliged to shoehorn in a boot-camp sequence indicating that the Brass disapproved of the bigoted behavior of
Clift's topkick
Lee van Cleef (as if racism was a mere aberration during the 1940s), and to "slightly" alter the ending of the book, in which the embittered but still patriotic
Brando character, shouting "Welcome to Germany!," machine-guns the
Martin and
Clift characters (in the film, it is
Brando who bites the dust, symbolically dying for Hitler's sins).
Maximillian Schell offers a starmaking turn as
Brando's cynical comrade, while an uncredited
John Banner, "Sergeant Schultz" on
Hogan's Heroes, shows up as a pompous burgomeister who feigns ignorance of the hellish concentration camp in his community.
~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide
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