In 1962, I can understand why Hell is for Heroes would be a successful film. You have Steve McQueen just getting hot after his success with The Magnificent Seven, and then you have a cast with Bobby Darin, James Coburn, and Bob Newhart making his big screen debut, not to mention that war films were still pretty popular at the time; and then you had director Don Siegel at the helm. Some films are simply a product of their time, and they simply don’t age well; then there are films that are classics and are simply timeless. Hell is for Heroes ends up somewhere in the middle for me. It’s not a bad film; actually I think it is pretty good, but I think its legacy is more about how it manages to have so much talent together before these actors and filmmakers really hit their stride or were in their prime.
When the film opens up, we’re in 1944 France, and we’re with a group of GI’s who seem to be waiting for their last orders before they get the go-ahead to go home. These guys have seen their share of bloodshed, and they are just eager to get home. They’re writing to their loved ones with the good news, and their spirits couldn’t be higher. This is also where we get to meet the soldiers. Reese (McQueen) has recently been reassigned; he’ a cold and bitter man who seems to have accepted he may not escape this war alive, but he’s going to take as many Nazi soldiers down with him as he can. The film has a slow start, and I mean it is at least a good thirty minutes till we see Reese and his squad get reassigned and told they are marching up to the Siegfried Line to hold off the Nazi advance. Once this first act is over, though, this film is pretty entertaining to the very end.
The meat of this story is about a small platoon that is forced to hold this line of “defense” from the Nazis while the platoon waits for reinforcements to arrive. To bolster their small line, it means the platoon has to pull off some slick gimmicks to make it appear that their platoon is much larger than it really is. Some of these gimmicks are done for humor, but it’s done in a way where we do understand all their lives are at stake if things don’t go as planned. To raise the stakes even more, they even discover that the Nazis have placed a microphone in one of their bunkers. In one of the more humorous moments of the film, Pvt. Driscoll (Bob Newhart) is assigned the duty of talking to the microphone as a way to throw off the enemy.
I’m a sucker for films where we see a small group of people with their backs against the wall have to take on a horde of enemies. Rio Bravo and Assault on Precinct 13 are a couple that come to mind. While Hell is for Heroes doesn’t quite deliver on its third act like I would have hoped, it is still a pretty action-heavy film that delivers, especially for the time it was made.
The film was shot in B&W, and that actually worked to the film’s benefit. Apparently the shooting conditions during the day were pretty miserable with temps reaching well above 100 degrees, so they elected to shoot many of the sequences at night. This was a great decision in my eyes, because those night sequences definitely have an elevated tension. My major complaint comes with how the film ends. In the older monster films, the movie pretty much abruptly ends when the big monster dies. The idea is you simply end things on a high note. Well, this film has an abrupt ending, but it is quite the opposite of a high note. If anything it seems to be anticlimactic and a bit cynical, but it does go along with the anti-war message the filmmakers seemed to want to share.
If you are a Steve McQueen fan or enjoy Don Siegel as a director or just simply love war films, then this is certainly worth checking out. I have to be honest, I expected a little more out of this film, and considering it is a very lean 90 minutes long, I still feel the opening could lose at least 10 minutes. At the end of the day the film is still entertaining with solid performances all around from its cast. It’s crazy to think only a year later McQueen would have The Great Escape, and, well, that stands as one of the best films ever made, period. I wouldn’t say this is memorable, but entertaining is good enough for me.
