Cinema: The Long Day’s Dying

This day in the life and death of three British paratroopers and their German prisoner is full of grime, gore, suspense and pretension. John (David Hemmings), Tom (Tom Bell) and Cliff (Tony Beckley) are holed up in a war-scarred country house in a European battle zone, waiting for their sergeant. They kid and bicker, establishing basic character traits (educated John, taciturn Tom, sadistic Cliff). They set out some booby traps, kill some Germans and capture one called Helmut (Alan Dobie). With Helmut in tow, they try to make their way back to their own lines, killing and being killed along the way.

Death in this movie has a definite Grand Guignol quality. People don’t just fall down and lie there with a stain on the uniform and maybe a twitch or two. They writhe and roll, gurgling and spouting the red stuff in enough quantities to make even a paratrooper throw up—which John does with emetic realism. There is also a double helping of portentous stream of consciousness on the sound track, plus some heavy-handed message mongering that is both otiose and silly. “Just you and me,” observes one of the characters, lying near death in an inferno of exploding mortars and chattering machine guns. “Skill to live,” the other says. “Skill to exist,” the first corrects him.

But the soldiers are convincingly unactorish, and the camera watches them well, making dramatic use of focus shifts (the credits list a focus technician as well as a cameraman and a photography director). At 28, British Director Peter Collinson (The Penthouse and Up the Junction), who doubled as co-producer of The Long Day’s Dying, has the technical skills of moviemaking well in hand. Time now to concentrate on the intangibles. Like taste.