The McKenzie Break (1970)

          For a movie that comprises almost nothing but plot, treating characterization as an afterthought at best, it’s peculiar that the biggest shortcoming of the World War II adventure The McKenzie Break is a weak storyline. Plenty of things happen onscreen, but the filmmakers fail to select either a distinct protagonist or a specific point of view. Ostensibly a mano-a-mano contest between a German POW and the British officer assigned to keep the German from leading a mass escape, the picture can’t quite decide whether it’s an offbeat story presenting Nazis as underdogs or a traditional potboiler about keeping Third Reich soldiers from participating in Germany’s war effort. Compounding these problems is a pair of cold leading performances. Helmut Griem is methodical and ruthless as the POW, while Brian Keith is mostly indifferent as the British officer. Despite all of these fundamental problems, The McKenzie Break has several exciting sequences, and the final standoff between the opponents generates real tension. Therefore, even if it’s virtually impossible to connect with the movie on an emotional level, The McKenzie Break has flashes of manly-man spectacle.

          Set in Scotland, the movie begins when imprisoned U-boat commander Will Schlüter (Griem) leads a violent rebellion of fellow POWs against British jailers. This sequence sets the mood well because cinematographer Michael Reed’s imagery is suffused with shadows. The rebellion proves that by-the-book camp commander Major Perry (Ian Hendry) isn’t up to the task of corralling resourceful prisoners, so higher-ups assign a new man to run the camp. Enter Captain Jack Connor (Keith), an Irishman with a record of delivering results even as he regularly faces disciplinary action for insubordination. The middle of the movie, during which Connor and Schlüter test each other’s skills, gets awfully turgid, though the subplot of Schlüter persecuting a fellow German officer for being gay is surprising. Eventually, the movie coalesces into a straightforward thriller about the Germans building a tunnel and planning a brazen exodus.

          Seeing as how the movie’s title includes the word “break,” it’s giving nothing away to say that the last (and best) third of the picture comprises Connor’s attempts to recapture his prisoners. There’s something to be said for a movie that improves as it goes along. Still, Keith makes some peculiar acting choices along the way. Although his Irish accent seems credible, Keith mumbles most of his dialogue, which saps energy from the movie, and he doesn’t run as far with his character’s mordant sense of humor as he should. More of the snarky energy that infuses the picture’s amusing final line would have helped.

The McKenzie Break: FUNKY

Breakthrough (1979)

          Watching Richard Burton’s physical decline had been a spectator sport since the mid-’60s, when the ravages of his alcoholism really started to become evident, so by the late ’70s it was mostly just depressing to watch the once-virile actor sleepwalk through lame movies looking like the ghost of his former self. In the World War II thriller Breakthrough, Burton looks especially desiccated, an effect only worsened by the enervated feel of the whole project. A quasi-sequel to the Sam Peckinpah war story Cross of Iron (1977), this picture eschews the moral ambiguity of Peckinpah’s picture for old-fashioned melodrama about a good German trying to help the Americans win the war.

          In 1944, after the Nazis have suffered insurmountable losses in Russia, a German general (Curt Jurgens) joins a cabal of officers planning to kill Hitler and then negotiate peace, so he asks freethinking soldier Rolf Steiner (Burton) to convey information about the plan to Allied officers. Steiner connects with a sympathetic American colonel (Robert Mitchum), who then involves his superior officer (Rod Steiger). However fate intervenes, as does an odious Nazi (Helmut Griem) unwilling to acknowledge that the war is already lost.

          Everyone in this movie looks bored and disconnected, so each actor gives an isolated performance that director Andrew V. McLaglen doesn’t even bother to unify with the other performances. Burton spits out lines quickly, like he can’t wait to walk off camera and drink; Mitchum delivers dialogue flatly, as if he’s simply repeating words that were fed to him before the camera rolled; and Steiger bludgeons his scenes with characteristic bulging-vein intensity. The only moments that have flair are the buddy-movie exchanges between the lead characters and their second-in-command guys (Burton has Klaus Lowitsch and Mitchum has Michael Parks).

          To say that Breakthrough gets off to a slow start is an understatement: The first half-hour of the movie is borderline unwatchable because nothing happens. Steiner doesn’t even get hip to the big plan until the picture is well underway, and then, when things are supposed to get exciting, somnambulistic acting and rote combat scenes add up to tedium.

          It’s amazing that just a year before shooting this turkey, Burton and McLaglen collaborated on the robust action picture The Wild Geese (1978), but apparently their efforts shouldn’t be judged entirely on the evidence of the existing version of Breakthrough. After being released in Europe in 1979, the picture went through several edits (and titles) before limping onto a few American screens in 1982. The currently available version runs a scant 95 minutes (the original was closer to two hours), and the only thing more ghastly than the print quality is the amateurish music score. Given the lifeless performances, however, it’s hard to imagine than any amount of post-production sweetening could have turned this misbegotten flick into something special.

Breakthrough: LAME

Cabaret (1972)

          Cabaret is the quintessential musical for people who don’t like musicals, myself included. Not only does it tell a hard-hitting, provocative story instead of just delivering cheerful fluff, it’s a real movie that happens to have music instead of a contrived framework for musical numbers. Tunes arise naturally during moments in which characters believably break into song, such as performances in the titular nightclub, so the numbers become tools that wizardly director Bob Fosse employs, alongside brazen editing and meticulous camerawork, to guide viewers into the psyches of the characters.

          Adapted from a pair of musicals that were in turn based on autobiographical stories by the English writer Christopher Isherwood, who lived in Germany during the Third Reich’s rise to power, Jay Presson Allen’s Oscar-nominated script weaves the myriad threads of source material into a seamless whole, telling the story of how sexually confused Englishman Brian Roberts (Michael York) learns life lessons with, and from, crass but vulnerable American songstress Sally Bowles (Liza Minelli) during their eventful idyll in pre-World War II Berlin. Sally sings at the debauched Kit Kat Klub, and Brian is a new neighbor at her boarding house. After her overpowering personality draws Brian into Sally’s life, the two become enmeshed with three Germans: poor striver Fritz (Fritz Wepper), rich Nazi apologist Maximilian (Helmut Griem), and sheltered Jewish heiress Natalia (Marisa Berenson). The audience’s sense of what the future holds for these people lends a sense of pervasive dread to the narrative.

          Tying the film together are surrealistic scenes featuring the Kit Kat Klub’s unnamed Master of Ceremonies (Joel Grey), who functions as a perverse Greek Chorus complete with grotesque makeup and an immaculate tux.
          Fosse’s storytelling is astonishing from the first scene to the last because he jumps from incisive subtlety to shocking directness at regular intervals, often in the same scene, and his legendary choreography infuses the film with propulsive physicality. Whether he’s staging a comical number such as “Two Ladies” or a tender one (especially the moving “Maybe This Time”), Fosse adeptly weaves the themes of the musical interludes into the flow of the story, so Cabaret never feels like it’s stopping for big numbers. Yet while the dancing is sensuous and spectacular, Fosse’s handling of quiet dramatic scenes is just as confident. Minelli and York have never been better than they are here, with Minelli blending soft colors into her brash persona, and York expertly depicting his character’s complicated mix of moral outrage and sexual angst. Grey is equally great, turning “Emcee” into one of the most enigmatically creepy characterizations of the early ’70s.

Cabaret: OUTTA SIGHT