Product Description

A renegade USAF general, Lawrence Dell, escapes from a military prison and takes over an ICBM silo near Montana and threatens to provoke World War 3 unless the President reveals details of a secret meeting held just after the start of the Vietnam War between Dell and the then President's most trusted advisors.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #100776 in DVD
• Published on: 2007
• Rating: PG-13 (Parental Guidance Suggested)
• Format: Import
• Subtitled in: Portuguese
• Number of discs: 1
• Running time: 143 minutes

Customer Reviews

Great lost classic.
I haven't seen this movie since it came out over 30 years ago, but not from lack of trying. There are either legal issues preventing it's re-release or else, as this film itself wants to convince, the powers that be do not want anyone to see it.

Robert Aldrich had already made his great moral parable about the insanity of the Vietnam War with Ulzana's Raid (1972) and now, five years later, he was to team up with Burt Lancaster once again for a full frontal assault. The Lancaster-Aldrich team is right up there with the great actor-director teams of American cinema: Deniro-Scorsese, Lemon-Wilder, Dietrich-Von Sternberg, Scott-Boetticher. This time they add Richard Widmark as Lancaster's nemesis and then get some of the best character actors of the era to contribute some of their finest performances - Roscoe Lee Browne, Joseph Cotten, Melvyn Douglas, Richard Jaeckel, Paul Winfield, a very young Burt Young, and especially noteworthy Charles Durning in what might be his best role as that of the very human President Stevens.

The story is totally improbable, the momentum unstoppable and the action breathtaking with the finest use of split screen ever seen in a Hollywoood movie (a technique Aldrich employed to good effect in The Longest Yard a few years earlier.)

I won't say this a a great movie, or even a good movie. I will say this is an important movie to see, made by America's greatest anarchist action filmmaker, and should not be missed, even though it's not possible to find. Call your congressman.

Weird
This is an odd film. Loosely -- and I do mean LOOSELY -- based on Walter Wager's novel VIPER THREE, Burt Lancaster plays an embittered ex-officer who, along with several others, seizes a misille flight, demanding the military admit the real reason for the Vietnam war. Note worthy only because of a brief appearence of William Smith as a really crazed nut.