ROBERT Aldrich made some mighty fine films in his time. Alongside gems like Kiss Me Deadly, The Dirty Dozen and The Flight Of The Phoenix, recalled lovingly in this very column a few short months back, Twilight’s Last Gleaming is easily forgotten.
Placed squarely against those big hitters, the film has struggled to stake a claim for a place at the top table of classic doomsday movies. Released in 1977 it failed to connect with audiences in the manner its director expected it to and while its reputation has grown considerably over the passing decades it still remains something of an undervalued beauty and a fully formed cult curio ripe for rediscovery.
Made in 1977, it’s a proper race-against-time political thriller that reeks of the pure paranoia that fuelled so many great films of that disturbed decade.
Former United States Airforce general Lawrence Dell (Burt Lancaster) fronts a team of escaped convicts on a mission to take over a nuclear silo that houses nine fully primed warheads. With Dell’s experience they swiftly succeed and hold the American government to ransom.
Alongside the usual wads of cash and flight out of the country, Dell also wants the US powers that be to release documents that will expose the real reason America has been at war in Vietnam. He feels the public must be told the whole truth about the conflict and if Washington refuses to play ball he’s ready to press the big red button and blow the entire country apart. The president (Charles Durning) and his advisors believe such truth telling would lead to global chaos and so the great stand-off between government and crazy renegade begins.
Were this to be re-made today the screen would be awash with CGI action sequences and suchlike but given that we’re in 1977 much of the tension comes from the neatly observed verbal interplay between the quality cast. It’s a lengthy journey as well, clocking in at nearly two and a half hours, but Aldrich milks the moral dilemmas on show for all he’s worth and the sheer weight of old-school Hollywood talent like Lancaster, Richard Widmark and Joseph Cotton keep the nerve-shredding atmosphere at nail-biting levels throughout.
The film’s themes of government cover-ups and the questions about who holds the real keys to power in the White House are sadly as relevant today as they were in 77.
Through it all Lancaster rules the roost as the outsider who’s got a very reasonable beef about government wrongdoing but who is willing to put the lives of millions on the line to make his point.
Aldrich's visual style feels a little clunky at times, with his over reliance on split screen and bright lighting rendering it all a bit dated looking sometimes, but there’s a bigness on show here that genuinely impresses.
Lancaster delivers those big speeches like the Hollywood heavyweight he was and as the excitement rises and the standoff draws to its close. It’s hard to see why Twilight’s Last Gleaming isn’t held up as one of the finest political thrillers of it’s time.
