cult film freak: STEVE MCQUEEN STARS IN DONALD SIEGEL'S 'HELL IS FOR HEROES'

Title: HELL IS FOR HEROES Year: 1962 Rating: ***

When Bob Newhart is doing the same one-way-telephone bit that made him famous enough to have a comic relief role in director Don Siegel's otherwise intense World War II flick HELL IS FOR HEROES, he actually surprisingly fits since there's a reason behind that call...

Otherwise HELL is one of those sparse, brooding and melancholy vehicles... involving a meager troop of eclectic American soldiers, ironically having to do what the anemic production was actually saddled with — stretch a little into a lot, herein providing only a few men to do the job of an entire platoon, and with very limited special effects or extras...

Steve McQueen in HELL IS FOR HEROES

All to reach a perilous goal in a craggy final-act battleground, liken to Stanley Kubrick's PATHS OF GLORY, which is far superior and less stagy: this cast seems part of an actor's workshop... but only before the important attack begins, where Siegel's finally in his potboiler element of blending action with urgency and suspense...

Starring Steve McQueen in one of his loner roles, only more dissociated than usual... his signature cool is downright cold to everyone... until partially bonding with an extremely miscast (and way too tall for a foxhole picture) Fess Parker's sergeant/leader, seeming more like a bland captain or lieutenant on a TV-series...

James Coburn in HELL IS FOR HEROES

So there's Harry Guardino as a more fittingly durable sergeant; Nick Adams overacting as a young Russian; James Coburn underused as a resilient mechanic while pop star Bobby Darin's perhaps the most natural and unpretentious, resembling a regular-guy character-actor who'd blend neatly into any older war picture... that would have been the usual patriotic propaganda a decade earlier... which Siegel intentionally avoided... and would be more realistic ten years later, when directors could go anti-war without such obvious messages that these actors seem almost forced to spout...

Yet only before they're desperately active — which is when HELL redeems itself through a tense and grungy campaign that thankfully, for a programmer length of 90-minutes, fills up most of the screen-time.