Attack

Often described as hysterical, this is in fact a brilliant predecessor to Kubrick's Paths of Glory using a fictional slant on World War II's Battle of the Bulge - the cowardice of a CO (Albert), resulting in heavy casualties, is studiously ignored by superiors with an eye to his father's political pull - to express a virulent disgust not so much with war itself as with the systems of privilege and self-interest which perpetuate its disasters. Where Kubrick analyses, Aldrich attacks; and his images have precisely the same hallucinatingly twisted quality as the war-torn landscapes in which they take shape.