Aldrich and Burt Lancaster had a long and rewarding partnership starting from two key films of the 1950s: first Apache, then Vera Cruz, films that presaged both Leone and Peckinpah; it continued with one more extraordinary western Ulzana’s Raid, in its indirect way as much involved with the Vietnam tragedy that Twilight’s Last Gleaming shows more directly (added poignancy coming from its nearness to the Watergate scandal). The original text, Walter Wager’s novel, presents money as the sole motivation for nuclear terrorists; Lancaster was instrumental in correcting and rereading the scenario: it became more political. The setting – four years after the film, 1981 – could be the eve of a Third World War. General Dell (Lancaster) is full of revenge, after five years as a prisoner of war: he just wants the truth out, and he gives the President an ultimatum: “We have invaded Silo 3. We are prepared to launch nine nuclear missiles. We demand ten million dollars, Air Force One… and you, Mr President”. No chance for dialogue after that. Dell happens to know that the President of the early 1960s understood very well that Vietnam was already lost – the fatal war will escalate just to impress the Soviets. If Dell has a basis for his actions, we can be less sure about his associates: the most deranged of them is ready to kill meaninglessly.

It would be out of the question anyway, if we look at the power elite – for once the faces match our imagined image of the arrogance of power. It’s almost a family reunion of familiar faces from rotten backgrounds, reflections of loss, and memories of violent solutions, whether they fought on the side of ‘the law’ or ‘crime’: Widmark, Charles McGraw, Leif Erickson, Melvyn Douglas. The film is equally sharp about schizophrenia and plain madness at the top levels of power, with clichés of democracy run amok. And it is factual enough to be chilling: the undercurrents and secrets of the Vietnam war, the intrigues and fake oaths, the whole Nixon era – as if it had never ended – In the aftermath of Watergate, signifying a culture of lies and total subordination to the hawks of the armament industry. The title is a quote from the National Anthem, and the film starts with a jazzed-up version of it, as if in homage to Jim Hendrix’s famous interpretation. The point of view is not entirely anarchic – in the nerve center there is an idealist (and thus doomed) President and Aldrich’s respectful portrait of him.

Peter von Bagh