It was a minute or so into the opening credits of Robert Aldrich’s Twilight’s Last Gleaming that I wondered: “Is there going to be a single woman in this movie?”
There are, but just barely. A few glimpsed in a control room; no speaking parts to speak of. The most radical element of Aldrich’s rather radical movie is how altogether homely it is. The cast is all men, a gender that is, let’s face it, awful to look at to begin with. I’d put the median age of that cast at sixtysomething—and those who are younger aren’t exactly what you’d call lookers. That the late, lamented Ernest Borgnine doesn’t at least make a cameo as Secretary of the (McHale’s) Navy can only be explained by some kind of scheduling conflict. Richard Jaeckel practically registers as eye-candy, fer Chrissakes!
Twilight’s Last Gleaming (1977) concerns the takeover of a nuclear launch base by a trio of prison escapees. Convicts Powell (Paul Winfield) and Augie (Burt Young) are working under a former Air Force General named Dell (Burt Lancaster) who was put away for, long story short, expressing the wrong opinions (I know that Lancaster is a handsome man. He is not handsome here.) While Powell and Augie just want to hold the USA hostage for a fat payday, Dell has the loftier, democratic motive of forcing the President to give a full disclosure to the American people with regards to a classified Pentagon Papers-like document, “NSC 9759,” which pertains to the government’s acknowledged motives for continuing involvement in Vietnam: Namely, that it was a piece of political brinksmanship undertaken with no objective other than to display America’s suicidal resolve, calling the Soviet Union’s bluff. (My father, who participated in the conflict, has for as long as I can remember referred to Vietnam as a “politician’s war,” and I hardly feel qualified to contradict that judgment.)
Played by the beefy Charles Durning, the President is a jovial-if-slightly-oleaginous Chicago ward-heeler who’s been, to his mild bafflement, kicked upstairs until being dropped into the Oval Office. Towards the end of the movie, there is a scene where Durning plops into a Jeep next to another heavyset actor (William “Bill” Hootkins), and I was taken aback, because you never see two fat actors sharing a scene unless the subject of that scene is their shared fatness. President Stevens’ cabinet consists of Ivy League-minted Defense Secretary Melvyn Douglas, earlobes pendulous; Joseph Cotton, letting his Virginian drawl off the leash as the frankly-wicked Secretary of State; a recently-exhumed Leif Erickson as the Director of the CIA; and various other liver-spotted worthies. The on-the-ground response to Dell’s takeover is handled by Richard Widmark’s Gen. MacKenzie, a long ways from South Street now. If ever a movie deserved a poster by Drew Friedman, this is the one.
The ostensible heroes of the piece? Lancaster has all of his famous leonine pride but very little of his dignity: “There are no midgets in the military,” Dell barks back at Powell when he dares to suggest that the Air Force may be employing pint-sized sharp-shooters—and the rigid certitude with which this line-reading is delivered makes clear that Dell’s principled stances, however valid they may be, are the ideés fixes of a hopeless kook. Young, who always does good work with the last two bites of a hoagie, is deprived of his favorite prop here, and so turns to expressive nose-wiping instead. Winfield looks like the proprietor of a behind-on-rent used hubcap place, and is, as such, the most dignified person in the movie.
One might attribute the advanced years of Twilight’s Last Gleaming’s cast to Le Gros Bob’s calling in favors from old friends. Whatever the case, I don’t think the odor of senescence that clings to the corridors of power has ever been so well-captured: “Politics is just show business for ugly people,” as the saying goes. Also worth noting is the fact that the impending threat of global thermonuclear warfare does not disrupt anyone from taking a five o’clock tumblerful of their brown liquor of choice; come the film’s climax, everyone must be pretty well in their cups.
It is not, as I say, a glamorous movie, but the claustrophobic, hanging-on-the-telephone Twilight’s Last Gleaming works quite well as a nail-biter, thanks in part to Aldrich’s deployment of split-screen, which he’d already used extensively in 1974’s The Longest Yard. The widescreen frame is frequently partitioned into three sections and even into quadrants, so to simultaneously take in Dell and company in the control room, the President and his Cabinet in the White House, and the surveillance footage that they’re both watching. The set-piece involving a stealthy attempt by (ugly) operatives to smuggle a briefcase-sized nuke into the silo with Dell—which employs nearly-seamless scale model exteriors of the base—is beautifully handled, and epitomizes the itchy trigger-finger idea of the A-bomb armed world that Aldrich had held since at least 1955’s Kiss Me Deadly. (Not for nothing was a 1994 Lincoln Center retro of Aldrich’s work titled Apocalypse Anytime!)
Twilight’s Last Gleaming was a US/ West Germany co-production, a relic of the short-lived days of Hollywood on the Elbe, when Sam Fuller picked up his German frau, and unexpected movies could be made far from the surveillance of Southern California. I saw the film as part of MoMA’s To Save & Protect series, but it’s now domestically available on Blu-ray and DVD from Olive Films—though at home you’ll lose the 4D enhancement of watching the film’s fraught, anxious atmosphere in a theater full of crotchety, pissy-panted zombies who zestily boo the Stan Vanderbeek short preceding it.
On a not-entirely-unrelated note, in the course of writing a eulogy for longtime Village Voice contributor and all-around friend of cinema Elliott Stein, I had occasion to visit Mr. Stein’s autobiographical 1977 piece “My Life with Kong” at the Rolling Stone archives, which offered yet another perspective on the history of audience etiquette, to which I’d referred in last week’s dispatch:
“When Kong was shown at the French film museum—the Cinémathèque—and anyone laughed, tittered, or even chattered during the film, [Jean] Boullet would rise, walk over, and slap the person in the face with his gloves, usually accompanying the blow with something like: ‘Imbécile! King Kong, c’est un film sérieux et poétique!’ Then he would calmly return to his seat.”
Sounds more effective than the usual mousey Shushes, dunnit? There is, I hasten to add, no critic in whose taste I had more implicit trust than Mr. Stein’s, and I’ll never forgive myself for not making time earlier this month to see his presentation of Andre de Toth’s S & M Western Ramrod, which de Toth made with wife Veronica Lake whilst running her out of pictures entirely. A stern warning: Let the people that you admire know that you admire them, lest you wind up writing them a post-mortem tribute before you’ve been properly introduced. (I remember Whit Stillman saying something along these lines on a commentary track—that they should print obituaries a few years in advance, so you could call up interesting people first.)
Spare yourself such regrets, and please come see the de Toth double-feature that I have wholly-coincidentally planned for this Saturday. In exchange, I leave you with a song in honor of the last days of Hostess, and Galaxie 500′s $0.21 payday from Pandora. If both the band and the manufacturer of the Twinkie had seen some cash whenever I put this on a jukebox, maybe this could’ve all been avoided.
Nick Pinkerton is a regular contributor to The Village Voice film section, Sight & Sound magazine, and sundry other publications. He lives in Brooklyn, NY.