Richard Burton is a fine actor, just not as a macho action lead, especially at this point in his life.
Mitchum, as US Col. Rogers, looked as if he was sleeping too.
The original movie was based on a convoluted German novel that was a lot stupider than it seemed to be. But it was cool in its own way and used the (deceased) Yugoslavian Army and their Soviet Bloc weapons for good Eastfront Realism and some incredible action scenes.
I watched 30 minutes of this one before shutting it down because of one stupid scene after another. First off, Steiner and his squad have to blow up a railway tunnel to stop the Red Army from advancing through it during one of the innumerable East Front retreats. Where in western USSR, flat swampy country, tunnels may be?? So all they had to do was just block it off and maybe take out a Red tank or two. But as they are setting up demolition charges, a number of men in his squad run into the tunnel towards the advancing tanks armed only with small arms. WHY?? They get shot down by the tanks for no good reason, and because there are some of Steiner's men still in the tunnel, where they never should have ventured into to begin with, they don't blow the tunnel. This is akin to a cheap horror film where the trapped protagonists/victims all separate in a creepy house to find dark isolated rooms to be attacked in alone by the nemesis.
Then Sargent Steiner gets 2 weeks leave, and the next day he ends up in Paris, France. Mind you, he would have had to used the over-worked, constantly under attack by air and partisans railway network to travel a 1000 miles, which in Summer of 1944 would have taken all of his 2 weeks to get to Paris.
Then he gets assigned, after the D-Day landings which happened the next day, along with the rest of his unit that got magically flown from East to West front in hours, to face the US Army. So what does Steiner do? He parades his men in broad daylight in the town square because, he deduced, the Americans will shell only the other part of town at this hour. Of course, the Americans would never have spotters who'd spot his men out in the open and correct fire. While parallel to that scene are the new US colonel of that regiment, along with the general who commands his division, played by Robert Mitchum and Rod Steiger respectively, view Steiner's men in the open yet neither of them bothers to get on their radios to correct their artillery fire to decimate the enemy troops. After that point, Steiner's general, Hofmann, tells Steiner about the German General's bomb plot on Hitler and how Steiner has to make contact with the US Army to work out ceasefire after they do away with Hitler. Such security..
I mentally pictured the rest of the movie, and along with modern tanks standing in for WW 2 brothers, said good bye to this stupid sequel
I watched 30 minutes of this one before shutting it down because of one stupid scene after another. First off, Steiner and his squad have to blow up a railway tunnel to stop the Red Army from advancing through it during one of the innumerable East Front retreats. Where in western USSR, flat swampy country, tunnels may be?? So all they had to do was just block it off and maybe take out a Red tank or two. But as they are setting up demolition charges, a number of men in his squad run into the tunnel towards the advancing tanks armed only with small arms. WHY?? They get shot down by the tanks for no good reason, and because there are some of Steiner's men still in the tunnel, where they never should have ventured into to begin with, they don't blow the tunnel. This is akin to a cheap horror film where the trapped protagonists/victims all separate in a creepy house to find dark isolated rooms to be attacked in alone by the nemesis.
Then Sargent Steiner gets 2 weeks leave, and the next day he ends up in Paris, France. Mind you, he would have had to used the over-worked, constantly under attack by air and partisans railway network to travel a 1000 miles, which in Summer of 1944 would have taken all of his 2 weeks to get to Paris.
Then he gets assigned, after the D-Day landings which happened the next day, along with the rest of his unit that got magically flown from East to West front in hours, to face the US Army. So what does Steiner do? He parades his men in broad daylight in the town square because, he deduced, the Americans will shell only the other part of town at this hour. Of course, the Americans would never have spotters who'd spot his men out in the open and correct fire. While parallel to that scene are the new US colonel of that regiment, along with the general who commands his division, played by Robert Mitchum and Rod Steiger respectively, view Steiner's men in the open yet neither of them bothers to get on their radios to correct their artillery fire to decimate the enemy troops. After that point, Steiner's general, Hofmann, tells Steiner about the German General's bomb plot on Hitler and how Steiner has to make contact with the US Army to work out ceasefire after they do away with Hitler. Such security..
I mentally pictured the rest of the movie, and along with modern tanks standing in for WW 2 brothers, said good bye to this stupid sequel