Reviewed by Glenn Erickson
Too Late the Hero was touted as a followup to Robert Aldrich's smash hit The Dirty Dozen,
but it made little impression on 1970 audiences. Although the acting is fine the script is little
more than a hyped "lost patrol" story that hinges on a particularly unbelievable gimmick.
Synopsis:
Japanese interpreter Lt. Sam Lawson (Cliff Robertson) is loaned out to the British to
accompany a
foray through Japanese territory on a jointly-held island. His patrol leader Captain Hornsby
(Denholm Elliott) isn't respected, while Pvt. Tosh Hearne (Michael Caine) heads a sullen
group of Brit "volunteers" who are less than happy with what they perceive is a suicide mission.
It sounded great: Another Robert Aldrich tough-guy war film. But Too Late the Hero has mostly
mutiny on its mind, and in Lukas Heller's script there's no room for non-cynical attitudes. Cliff
Robertson's lieutenant is incensed that he has to go anywhere near
a battle front, and behaves like a snooty athletic star in front of a captain played by Henry Fonda.
Since Fonda carries himself like an admiral, this scene never seems quite right. The British are a
kind of sub -
Bridge on the River Kwai cross-section
of types. Harry Andrews is the tough Colonel, Denholm Elliott the "jolly good," over-polite Captain,
and Caine and company a borderline-mutinous bunch of layabouts. Ronald Fraser and Ian Bannen, both
from Aldrich's
The Flight of the Phoenix are
excellent, but we can tell that most of the others are there to be picked off one by one in various
skirmishes with the Japanese.
As lost patrol movies go the bulk of Too Late the Hero isn't bad, although its complete
negativity couldn't have been reassuring to 1970 audiences with relatives in Vietnam. An ambush
on a trail results in Hornsby's men shooting each other. Most of the soldiers are thinking of ways
to abort the mission before they're all killed. One even asks if the mission will have to be
cancelled, should the Yank Japanese expert meet with an accident.
The movie bogs down with good scenes we expect (various ambushes) and awkward scenes we don't
expect. Japanese guest star Ken Takakura (The Yakuza) broadcasts surrender offers to the Brits
over a system of wired loudspeakers that seem to cover twenty miles of jungle trail. The Japanese never
see fit to simply cut the Allied patrol off, even when they're separated by only a few hundred yards.
There's always time for an argument or other dialogue scene before the action restarts. When Takakura
is revealed as a reasonably civilized foe, we don't have any particular reaction.
Likewise, the important "big mission" turns out to be the last thing our heroic soldiers are thinking
about, as all they want to do is survive. The actual literal meaning of the film's title is a blur.
It's obviously trying to be ironic but it escapes me just the same. We know what kind of picture we're
watching when the title sequence shows American, Japanese and British flags decomposing into rags across a
series of lap dissolves.
Too Late the Hero suffers terribly from an unconvincing basic setup. The Japanese hold the
entire island except for an English base at the southern tip. To leave this base, any patrol must
pass through a large open field, running a gaunlet of Japanese mortars and sniper fire. The British
mention a "safe line" that their soldiers must stay behind to be safe, but we never believe any of it.
Why the Japanese aren't lobbing their mortar shells into the enemy camp isn't clear, and why they
just don't rub the whole thing out isn't clear either. This silly gauntlet idea seems to have been the
motivation behind the whole movie, as if Aldrich dreamed it up after the enthusiastic audience
response to Jim Brown's "broken-field run" in The Dirty Dozen. It didn't work on 1970
audiences and still seems like a foolish miscalculation. 1
MGM's DVD of Too Late the Hero is one of their releases of an ABC holding through Buena Vista
(No explanation has surfaced for the arrangement). The pleasingly enhanced 1:85 image looks good but
not great throughout. The IMDB says that there were 70mm stereophonic prints made of the film but the
track here appears to be mono.
The only extra is a loud trailer that stresses the film's action.
On a scale of Excellent, Good, Fair, and Poor,
Too Late the Hero rates:
Movie: Good ---
Video: Good
Sound: Good
Supplements: Trailer
Packaging: Keep case
Reviewed: June 5, 2004
Footnote:
1. Too Late the Hero
makes me want to see a scarce English film by Val Guest from 1958 called Yesterday's Enemy. The
late critic Raymond Durgnat praised its rebuttal to the typical "we won, rah rah" combat film of the time.
In it, a British patrol in S.E. Asia soon drops any pretense of following military rules or even
human decency in order to survive: torturing and shooting prisoners, etc. I'd like to see if it's
really as good as it sounds; Val Guest's other contribution to war movies was the exploitative
Camp on Blood Island.
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DVD Savant Text © Copyright 2007 Glenn Erickson
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