Fascination with the Deviate

France, 1944. Hysterically, a German soldier tries to break the American sergeant's stranglehold. But there is no escape; the grip grows tighter until the soldier chokes to death. The sergeant releases his victim --and his own breath returns in a series of orgasmic spasms.

France, 1952. The country has changed, but the sergeant is the same: a psychotic homosexual who hides his desires from the world--and from himself--beneath a barrage of bluster. In the title role of The Sergeant, Rod Steiger continues his obvious fascination with the deviate character. Where he was the screaming, mincing Mr. Joyboy in The Loved One, and a coronation of closet queens in No Way to Treat a Lady, he is here appropriately disciplined as the doomed Sergeant Callan.

His beer belly may advance before his trousers, but Callan's shoulders threaten the seams of his Ike jacket. When he bellows an order, even officers jump. No one would dare to cast doubt upon his masculinity--no one but Callan himself. Irresistibly attracted to a young private named Swanson (John Phillip Law), Callan follows him around town, grows jealous of Swanson's girl friend (Ludmila Mikael), and eventually reveals himself with what may become the screen's new cliche: a mouth-to-mouth, homosexual kiss. The breakdown follows as inevitably as taps follows lights-out.

Law, acting Swanson as if he were a stricken deer, is literally driven off-screen by Steiger's agonies. Twitching his mouth into a tortured smile, roaring with a rage and a fondness he cannot separate, Steiger makes the sergeant's internal struggle so fascinating that all other personalities seem superfluous.

Like many of Steiger's minor films, The Sergeant could easily have degenerated into a one-man show. Instead, it is a two-man performance. The second man is Director John Flynn, who, faced with a prodigious actor and an undeveloped scenario, has fleshed out his film with nuances. The barracks life of monotony and loneliness is depressingly acute; the local pay sans, whose faces are maps of rural France, give an extraordinary sense of locality to a story that badly needed roots. Unfortunately for the film, neither Flynn nor Steiger bears the antidote for the sting of predictability.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.