Twilight's Last Gleaming - UK Blu-ray

[John Johnson]

High among idiosyncratic auteur Robert Aldrich's most powerful and intense dramas, Twilight's Last Gleaming is a thunderous political thriller and race-against-time doomsday classic.

Burt Lancaster stars as the Air Force general Lawrence Dell who seizes control of a stockpile of nuclear missiles to force the US President (Charles Durning) to tell the truth about the Vietnam war. As negotiations get ever more desperate, General MacKenzie (Richard Widmark) leads an elite fighting team into the complex to disable Dell and his team directly.

Special Features and Technical Specs:
High-definition digital restoration
Uncompressed PCM audio on the Blu-ray
English subtitles for the deaf and hearing-impaired
"Aldrich Over Munich - The Making of Twilight's Last Gleaming" documentary
PLUS: A booklet featuring new writing and archival images
STREET DATE: OCTOBER 17.

http://www.blu-ray.com/news/?id=19561

[AndyDursin]

Hated the ending of this movie.

[Eric Paddon]

It was more than just the ending that I hated! Every Oval Office scene, every Lancaster soapbox speech......

[AndyDursin]

Lol yes those too!

I can't remember much else about it. Thankfully!

[Eric Paddon]

The pity is if they had stuck to the original novel which had no political soapbox it could have been a suspenseful movie.

[John Johnson]

Any thoughts about the score? One of my UK contacts has informed me they have a copy.

[Paul MacLean]

Any thoughts about the score? One of my UK contacts has informed me they have a copy.

I I used to own the CD which was released by the Goldsmith Society -- I didn't care for it though, and listened to it maybe two or three times.

It didn't have much standalone appeal, it was mostly pensive, moody stuff. One track, called "Reflective Interlude" was ok, and there was some pretty good militaristic brass writing in one cue towards the climax, but to me, there just wasn't an album in the the score. Goldsmith didn't write a main or end title either (a song was used for the title sequences).

[Eric Paddon]

The credits song as I recall was a soulful rendition of "My Country 'Tis Of Thee".

[Monterey Jack]

The only good thing about the CD was the absolutely hilarious cover art and illustration...

"Music by Colonel Sanders."

[Eric Paddon]

I actually if you can believe it forced myself to sit through this film because I have become a *little* more charitable to these films from the 70s in that I can develop a stronger constitution to their anti-American subtexts (or in this case overtness) and because it had been so long I wanted to answer a question as to whether or not it worked as a film if you took out the stupid political undertone or was there a deeper problem on that front?

The answer is yes, there are *serious* problems with the film that have nothing to do with the politics. Except to the degree that Aldrich was so obsessed with them he literally caused the pacing and narrative of the film to go straight into the toilet.

Up to the point when Lancaster starts his attempt to launch the missiles in response to a planned raid, the film's pacing is actually quite good. And then after that, everything goes downhill.

1-Charles Durning is so bad you wonder how the hell his character got elected President. He dithers and dawdles during the tense moment when Lancaster is threatening to launch and Richard Widmark is screaming that he can still take him out if he gives the order, and yet he's not doing anything. Then after that, when there should be some intense conversation going on about the next option, we're getting all the requisite outrage over the "document" which is then followed by Durning being scared to death of being killed and needing a kick in the rear from Gerald S. O'Loughlin (exactly what his role is is never clear. He's an Air Force brigadier general but he's serving the duties of a White House Chief of Staff. Presumably, Aldrich was thinking of Al Haig who was Chief of Staff to Nixon when he was still a General, but when holding that job, he would never wear a uniform. And how he was a crony of the President is never clear).

2-I ask you.......why the hell didn't they just have the President wear a bullet proof vest at the climax?

3-And then the biggest narrative gap you can drive a truck through. Aldrich and everyone else forgot all about Richard Jaeckel! Of course Jaeckel's character was ridiculously contrived to begin with in that he and his partner are on duty when Lancaster and his team seize the silo and are taken hostage, and gee, Jaeckel JUST HAPPENS to be an old buddy of Lancaster's who went through the *same* experience in Vietnam but who unlike Lancaster chose not to fight the System after he got back and so that makes him the cliched "old friend telling our hero idealist what he's up against", but after Jaeckel served that purpose so he could be tied up and tortured (so his partner could then conveniently crack and give away the codes to open the safe with the launch key. Another howler of a bad moment not in the original book) and then later stage an aborted attempt to retake command, he gets tied up and put away in the next room again and except for one isolated reference is never referred to again for the rest of the film! When the President arrives he doesn't ask about what happened to Jaeckel and his dead partner, and so I guess at film's end no one seems to realize there's a trussed up Colonel down in the silo with a serious stab wound in the shoulder. (I guess bringing that point up would tarnish the phony halo Aldrich wants to put around Lancaster and his motives)

In watching this again, I've realized I've spent too many years railing at this film over its politics when it would have been a lot simpler to rail at Aldrich and the scriptwriter for not doing the book right even in terms of its pacing as a suspense story.

Goldsmith's score for the takeover is effective but the rest of it especially after that shark-jumping turn at the halfway point isn't memorable. Too bad he didn't get to do a Main Title because that silly Billy Preston recording of "My Country Tis Of Thee" is just inappropriate.