#303: Hornets’ Nest
Even trash can surprise you
This review was originally posted to Twitter on August 16, 2020.
Initial release: September 9, 1970
Director: Phil Karlson
Movies can surprise you. Even the trashiest movies can hit you emotionally when you least expect it. Phil Karlson’s macaroni war flick Hornet’s Nest shouldn’t be good, and it isn’t. But despite its many flaws, it somehow manages to redeem itself in some small ways.
Italy, 1944. The SS have just slaughtered an entire village in reprisal for partisan activity. An entire village, that is, except for the children, who go into hiding in a nearby cave. Meanwhile, a single American soldier is the only survivor when his unit is ambushed. The kids, led by tough-talking Aldo, kidnap a German doctor who nurses the soldier back to health, but she protests when the soldier enlists the kids’ help in getting his unit’s equipment back from the Nazis, and then using said equipment to blow up a dam.
The soldier (played by Rock Hudson, and who goes unnamed for most of the film) is given orders to proceed with the mission despite his entire unit being destroyed, and has to recruit the kids to help. Aldo keeps pushing for revenge against the Nazis, and he and the soldier are often at loggerheads. In the end, the mission is a success, but at what cost?
This is not a good film by any means. Aside from things like some of the kids wearing late 1960s-era sneakers, Rock Hudson’s mop-top haircut and that mustache of his, there’s also tonal issues, as well as threatened, then later implied sexual assault on the poor German doctor lady. There’s also plenty of technical issues, such as the film being one of the worst cases of “Hollywood darkness” I have ever seen — the actual dam mission is supposed to be at night, but it’s shot in broad daylight, with some scenes not even having a blue filter. Making matters worse is that scenes atop the dam proper are shot at night — which raises the question of why not shoot the other scenes at night too? But this weird indecision is emblematic of a film that doesn’t really know what it wants to be. Is this a campy warsploitation romp? Or a tough look at the consequences of teaching children how to wage war? It’s an uneven mess.
But I’ve always said good acting can save even bad films, and that’s no less true here. Rock Hudson’s tough-skinned, almost uncaring soldier would be a caricature if not for how well he plays off the kids, most notably Mark Colleano’s Aldo. A key scene is when he realizes they’ll prevent him from performing his mission unless he helps them get revenge. It’s here that Ennio Morricone once again improves a movie that might not have been improvable with a score that’s unrelentingly sad. These kids have lost their homes and their families, and the soldier is the only father figure they have left, and he knows it.
Aldo is one of the most interesting characters in the film, as the film is largely about his slow deterioration into madness. His hatred for the Nazis is so great that he starts to become unhinged, straight up murdering one of his own fellow kids because they were in his way of shooting Nazis. Colleano brings a manic energy to the role, with a frighteningly big smile that seems to get bigger and bigger the more he talks about killing Nazis. But that little bit of unraveling we see in the early part of the film reaches its head in a surprisingly emotional finale. The sheer rage of this kid whose life was destroyed before we even see him, aimed at the one man who was in a position to even do anything to help him, is some of the best acting I’ve seen from a kid in a movie where he’s easily the best actor.
I have mixed feelings about this movie. It’s trashy, it’s exploitative, it’s mean-spirited. It’s a technical mess and full of Italian actors attempting bad German accents. But at the same time I have a hard time condemning it. If the script, production values, direction and editing had been better, this could’ve been an incredibly dark war flick about what happens to children when you teach them how to kill. That it still manages to stick the landing in spite of its problems is a miracle.
