Pillagers and Villagers

By S. K.

Max Beerbohm once concocted a curtain line for which there was no play: "I'm leaving for the Thirty Years' War!" Poor Max. He did not live to see his conceit turned to good use. His line could --and should--be attached to The Last Valley like a tin can tied to a jalopy.

Written, produced and directed by James Clavell, The Last Valley confuses that pestilential epoch (1618-1648) with insights circa 1970. Though the war is principally religious, the soldier known only as Captain (Michael Caine) is an existential atheist. God is a legend, he announces, ergo, "I am what I am ... a killer beast."

Not quite. For behind his Brillo beard is not only a weak chin but a vague ethic. The killer beast refuses to let his mercenaries enjoy any of the village sports: rape, pillaging, torture. Instead, he insists on discipline and mollifies a local priest (Per Oscarsson), all because of the influence of a wandering intellectual (Omar Sharif). As for the atrocities of the period, they are conveyed in formal compositions that amount to decorations, not disasters. Plague-ridden corpses are artistically strewn on smooth fields; soldiers flash evil grins in cartoon style--one even ecstatically licks the blood off his knife. Clavell has doubtless been studying Pieter Bruegel the Elder: as the soldiers descend into the only unspoiled valley in Europe, the peasants disport themselves with picturesque energy. But always there is the obtrusive sense of the camera, always the feeling that every improvisatory step has been choreographed to death.

In attempting to articulate fatuities, the cast pulls out all the glottal stops. Caine shuttles between Anglo-Saxon, German and Cockney. Oscarsson, a Swede, is absurdly fanatic, with energy and witches to burn. Sharif, the first Near Eastern Westphalian, has, as ever, the wettest eyes in Christendom. Yet it is Clavell who bears prime responsibility for this drive-in Mother Courage. His battle scenes are stagy and confused; even his anachronistic editorials ("War is all I have") ring false. Clavell misunderstands the nature of historic evil, of political hysteria, and of war itself --Thirty Years' or any time, anywhere.

S.K.

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