The late '70s were banner years for the popularity of mercenaries, those hired guns who fight for money. Movies have always had a romantic streak for them; even Rick Blane of Casablanca was supposed to be one before Ilsa Lund made him all soft and patriotic. In reality, mercenaries break down into three clearly-defined types. Ex-soldiers who just can't get combat out of their blood are celebrated in the gory Dark of the Sun (The Mercenaries). A mercenary general-turned thief masterminds the hijacking in The Taking of Pelham 1, 2, 3. The second kind is the political idealist, the sort that found themselves fighting in the Spanish Civil War. And the third is the civilian adventurer that books like Frederick Forsyth's The Dogs of War made seem so attractive. This kind has been around since time began; a famous one in American history was the filibuster William Walker, who invaded Nicaragua twice in the years after our Civil War.

Christopher Walken is excellent as the mercenary leader who keeps a .45 in the fridge, and has been beaten, wounded, infested and diseased so many times, his doctor just throws his arms up in defeat. Around him he gathers a group of disaffected adventurers with real qualifications and abilities. Unlike the designer-chic cowboy guns of The Magnificent Seven, these guys are a fairly colorless bunch of brutes who are failures in home life but utterly reliable in combat. Besides a muscular, young Tom Berenger, whose character volunteers so as to be absent while his wife is pregnant, the group includes Paul Freeman, fresh from The Long Good Friday and soon to become a wonderful villain in Raiders of the Lost Ark. Hammer fans may be interested in seeing a hearty-looking Robert Urquhart as a shady sea captain, 23 years after his role in The Curse of Frankenstein.

The Dogs of War is a interestingly detailed and credibly mounted tale of a dirty mission to overthrow a fictitious West African dictatorship. It's a little gun-happy, but only to the extent that the mercenaries are themselves; a lot of time and effort are expended explaining how the arms for the mission are rounded up and smuggled to Africa, before the excellent battle scenes at the end. John Irvin's direction does such a nice job of keeping things low-key, that even the signature scene of Tom Berenger whooping in delight while firing an exotic multipurpose grenade gun hits just the right note. No Rambo theatrics here.

When action stories are taken seriously, they usually become character studies that try to fathom what kind of man would do work like this. The Dogs of War avoids scenes where people discuss the topic, but pretty much decides that the attraction is combat for its own sake, coupled with a need for the Howard Hawks-like macho-buddy relationships that form. Anybody else related to these losers seems to get the sticky end of things. How are the survivors going to cash those life policies Shannon arranges, after the insurance company discovers that 'acts of war' were involved? Shannon himself cannot keep a wife, and he cannot make a friend, even when the amiable television reporter played by the great Colin Blakely (The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes) goes out of his way to help. In a nice touch, Shannon deeds his insurance benefits to the sullen black kid (Kelvin Thomas) who is his only friend in New York.

The other given is the double cross, which in the case of The Dogs of War, gets nicely complicated. Shannon openly despises his employers, and has no trouble torturing and killing the private detectives they send to snoop after him. In trying to guess Shannon's motivations for taking the job, we have to factor in his desire to revenge himself upon the petty tyrants who tortured him in Zangara. The look of wide-eyed, hyper-stimulated rapture in Shannon's face at the peak of his strike finally explains his character. This seems to be the only time he's really alive, in total control of his surroundings, at full power, so to speak.

MGM's DVD of The Dogs of War is a far better-looking show than the previous dull vhs amd laser versions. Legendary cameraman Jack Cardiff, who made a career out of shooting in difficult locations (The African Queen, Legend of the Lost, Dark of the Sun) goes against his Technicolor style and tries to make the image look as natural as possible, with subdued colors in the jungle. Where he excels is in his night photography, where the entire African township is realistically illuminated without our questioning where all the light is coming from. The lighting effects during the battle are actually quite brilliant, with detail, contrast, and focus so controlled in shot after shot that we soon forget about such concerns, and soak in the story instead. Contrast this with the (differently-styled, true) photography of something like Escape from New York, where, for better or worse, we're always painfully aware that the night streets have been lit, and the image quality goes all over the map.

The DVD includes just a trailer for an extra. The only negative appears to be in the DVD mastering. The image looks fine most of the time, but certain detailed shots break up, as if the bit rate were set at some barely-adequate setting and the final product not re-processed to address problem spots. A recurring flaw (noticed 5 or six times) is a glitch just a split second after a cut to a new shot, as if the digitizing computer were overwhelmed by the new information coming in, and had to recover. I think this all might be evidence of an attempt to assign a one-bit-rate-fits-all standard, to streamlines production by eliminating careful scene-by-scene adjustments.

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