A Kino Lorber release, it sources what appears to be a recent HD transfer from MGM.

Brief (91 minutes) and with only a handful of characters, The Fourth War features wholly unnecessary reflective narration by General Hackworth (Harry Dean Stanton). The narration, by its very existence, essentially gives away the ending and serves no useful purpose. The movie would have been a bit better without it, thus preserving an element of mystery about how things are going to turn out.

Col. Jack Knowles (Scheider) is a highly-decorated career soldier whose military life peaked early, during the Vietnam War. He's become a loose cannon, unable to function in the current glasnost Cold War climate. Nonetheless, Hackworth secures for Knowles a position at a lonely, snowy rural post along the West German-Czechoslovakian border.

Knowles's aide and second-in-command, Lt. Col. Clark (WKRP in Cincinnati's Tim Reid, very impressive in a difficult role), senses trouble and doesn't have to wait very long for Knowles to find it. During a routine patrol, Knowles and his men watch helplessly as an apparent refugee makes a break across no-man's-land and is killed by Russian troops led by Col. Valachev (Prochnow). There's really nothing Knowles can do, but in anger Knowles orders his men to prepare to fire on the Soviets anyway and, in defiance, eventually throws a snowball at Valachev, who in the best Laurel & Hardy tit-for-tat tradition throws one back at Knowles, hitting him in the face.

Knowles, in turn, throws more gasoline onto the fire by getting drunk that night, gearing up, and secretly crossing over into Czech territory. He terrorizes a three-man tank crew, holding them at gunpoint and forcing them to sing "Happy Birthday to You" to him (it's his birthday), and he tosses a grenade at a tree. Somehow, he makes it back unscathed. The next day, however, Valachev fires a rocket from his side of the fence, blowing up Knowles's Army Jeep on the other side.

Unbelievably, for most of the picture Knowles is rarely at the military base he's supposed to be supervising, instead spending all his time slipping back and forth across the border, packed to the gills with weapons and other military hardware his own troops never notice are missing, and for the most part evades Soviet troops on the other side.

The picture is a real mess and indifferently directed by Frankenheimer, during a string of commercial and critical failures while battling alcoholism at the same time. The picture was also ill timed; during its production Czechoslovakia ousted its communist government and the Berlin Wall fell. By the time it hit theaters, Soviet republics were breaking away and the collapse of the Soviet Union seemed inevitable. Released in March 1990, it accidentally became the first post-Cold War thriller.

Perhaps for this reason the movie criminally under-develops Scheider's charcter, who's little more than an antsy, unhappy soldier-in-peacetime cliché. The movie might have worked better had the screenplay initially presented Knowles as likeable or at least a strong leader in which the audience could invest some interest, then challenge them by gradually showing his actions to be increasingly foolish and dangerous. Instead, Knowles comes off as a total jerk from the very start. No sympathy, no shading. By the end, predictably, Knowles and Valachev are literally at each other's throats, in hand-to-hand combat more in line with distributor Cannon's Chuck Norris movies.

Adequately produced, with Alberta, Canada locations convincingly doubling for West Germany and Czechoslovakia, the film nonetheless is gray and pretty lifeless. The leads are wasted because of the inferior material. Harry Dean Stanton at first appears miscast, but his hangdog weariness fits that character nicely, and Tim Reid is a pleasant surprise.

Video & Audio

Kino Lorber's 1.85:1 widescreen Blu-ray of The Fourth War looks okay, but the movie itself isn't visually appealing, so there's not much worth seeing anyway. Credits list this as a Dolby Stereo release theatrically, but I noticed zero separations in the 2.0 DTS-HD Master Audio mix. No subtitles, no alternate audio, and region A encoded.

Extra Features

The only supplement is a series of trailers, including for this film, starring Scheider and/or directed by Frankenheimer.

Final Thoughts

An atypical Cannon release that plays more like a preachy TV-movie-of-the-week, The Fourth War is bland, disappointing, and frequently ridiculous. Rent It.

Stuart Galbraith IV is the Kyoto-based film historian and publisher-editor of World Cinema Paradise. His new documentary and latest audio commentary, for the British Film Institute's Blu-ray of Rashomon, is now available.