Too Late The Hero

Robert Aldrich’s career is a manifest of contradictions. One of the first living directors to be lauded as an auteur, he conscientiously worked his way up from the bottom of the studio system, despite being born into great wealth and power. He always chafed against studio interference, but his four cherished independent film productions failed commercially, returning him to work-for-hire status. His bleak and violent visions painted mankind as a hopelessly corrupt species, yet they beat the drum for his belief in the redeemability of the individual. In Too Late the Hero (1970), the last of Aldrich’s informal war trilogy, these themes collide and cross-cancel, leaving the viewer lost and bloody in a nihilistic no-man’s-land much like the setting that opens and closes the film… read more >