Robert Aldrich plays politics with a TV-movie-of-the-week plot about the takeover of a Montana missile base by a quartet of escaped convicts. By his string-pulling, he transforms this pulp thriller into a turbulent confluence of political undercurrents extending over an entire generation: the bomb fears of the Eisenhower era, the imperialist guilt of the Kennedy-Johnson-Nixon years, the penitential spirit of the post-Watergate Ford term, and the neo-populism of the Carter campaign. His preaching is crude, virulent, inflammatory -- perfectly consistent in style with his usual action-movie brutality. Because he maintains his muscle-bound manner even when he is rubbing elbows with Mr. President in the White House, he establishes a chummy confidentiality between himself and the moviegoing mob. And that slob appeal is straight to the point, because the real hero of this men-only political melodrama is, in absentia, the American populace. With Burt Lancaster, Charles Durning, Richard Widmark, Paul Winfield, Burt Young, Melvyn Douglas. (1977) — Duncan Shepherd
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