Attack! (United Artists) pictures a blood-and-mud Bill Mauldin war without the saving grace of Mauldin's humor. A beat-up infantry company attached to a National Guard division is fighting its way across Belgium and taking heavy losses because of the cowardice of its captain (Eddie Albert). After one disastrous assault, Lieuts. Jack Palance and William Smithers turn mutinous, but are pacified when Battalion Commander Lee Marvin (who is protecting Eddie Albert to advance his own postwar political career back in the States) assures them that the company is being withdrawn from the front.
He is wrong, of course. The German breakthrough in the Ardennes requires that the company be flung into the breach. Captain Albert once more fails. The film ends in a woolly Walpurgisnacht in which Palance, after slaughtering quantities of Nazis, is ground into the mud by an enemy tank while Albert alternately cowers in bed and runs berserk with a submachine gun until finally shot dead in a cellar by Smithers, who then nobly surrenders to the MPs.
Based on Norman Brooks's unsuccessful 1954 Broadway play, Fragile Fox, the film has raised the hackles of the Defense Department, which considers it "derogatory to Army leadership during combat." A more serious charge is that the picture spends more time making melodrama than making sense. Even in its fighting, the dice are curiously loaded: the G.I.s are shown as tattered scarecrows on the edge of exhaustion in contrast to the spit-and-polish Nazis, who wear uniforms more appropriate to the parade ground than to combat. A similar imbalance flaws the plot. Smithers, though he has the courage to murder his captain, is earlier depicted as a man too irresolute to take command even when Eddie Albert is totally incapacitated by fear. The acting has the same black-and-white simplicity as the theme; it will be a long time, fortunately, before any movie displays such abject terror as that of Eddie Albert or such preposterous heroics as those of Jack Palance.
War and Peace (Paramount) probably has more right with it, and more wrong, than any film of recent years. As a super-colossal spectacle, costing $6,000,000, running 3^ hours, and employing a dozen topflight stars and some 8,000 extras, it rivals Gone With the Wind. But as a reflection of Tolstoy's absorbed peeling back of the contradictory layers of human nature, it is nearly valueless. In his tremendous novel, Tolstoy's characters are so alive that they seem more like family and friends than fictional creations. On the VistaVision screen, these same people are only too clearly actors more accustomed to sports shirts and pedal pushers than to the finery of igth century courts and camps.