Hornet's Nest (1970)

Big budget World War Two movies, more often than not on an epic scale, became a staple of sixties cinema, kick started, apparently, by the success of The Longest Day (1962).  But as the decade closed, returns on such films went into decline, with titles like The Battle of Britain (1969) disappointing at the box office.  So it shouldn't have been surprising to the makers of Hornet's Nest (1970) that the film would turn out to be a box-office flop.  That said, they did their best to try and tailor the film to the era's changing tastes and audiences: with its supporting cast of juveniles it was clearly aimed at a younger demographic.  Moreover, with its story of naive youth being led into violent conflict by an American soldier it was doubtless intended as some kind of commentary on the situation in Vietnam at the time.  Perhaps the producers had hoped that the film might tap into anti-Vietnam war sentiment amongst youth audiences.  At the same time, the levels of violence on display seemed to be inspired by contemporary Spaghetti Westerns and war movies.  Whatever the makers' intent, it apparently failed as Hornet's Nest failed to find an audience at the time of its release (and remains rarely seen today).  Condemned at the time for its depictions of violence employed both by and against children, it comes over as a cynical exercise - clearly attempting to elicit sympathy from the audience when some of the juvenile partisans are killed by the Germans, yet still expecting that same audience to cheer the kids on when they ruthlessly mow down Germans by the dozen.

Indeed, the film's biggest problem lies in its failure to provide the viewer with any particularly sympathetic characters to identify with.  Rock Hudson is surprisingly uncharismatic as the sole survivor of a US commando unit parachuted behind enemy lines in Italy to blow up a dam, while the child partisans he then uses as substitutes for his soldiers are characterised as practically feral - bloodthirsty and looking for excuses for violence even before Hudson sets them on their mission.  While the film tries to provide some justification for their violent nature - the witnessed their parents executed by the SS - it never convinces.  The female German doctor (Sylvia Koscina) forced into assisting the injured Hudson by the children is also poorly characterised, never seeming to know which side she is really on, her supposed concern for the welfare of the children and objections to Hudson's militarisation of them ringing hollow in view of the regime that she loyally serves.  Likewise, the main German military character (played by Sergio Fantoni) is someone we are clearly supposed to view as a 'good German' - after all, he is regular army rather than SS and even shoots an over zealous SS officer - is still guilty of a fair share of mowings down of unarmed civilians.  Further alienating the audience from the main characters is that the doctor finds herself subjected to sexual assault twice, once by the older boys, later by Hudson.  While these blurrings of the moral lines that are supposed to separate the 'good' guys from the 'bad' guys is doubtless intentional - part of the film's commentary on war - they ultimately serve to weaken the film's impact: after all, why should we care when any of the boys are killed when they are a bunch of rapists?

Hornet's Nest was a US/Italian co-production which results in another big problem: it was made at a time when the Italian film industry was busily trying to whitewash Italy's war record and disassociate the country from its wartime fascist leadership and alliance with Nazi Germany.  This was seen in many indigenously produced Italian war movies of the sixties and seventies, which rarely featured Italian soldiers as protagonists, instead casting their Italian leads as British or American soldiers and presenting the Germans as dyed in the wool villains.  While most of these films seemed to focus on the war in North Africa, the absence of Italian forces, (despite Italy's heavy involvement in the earlier stages of the desert conflict), doesn't seem too incongruous.  Hornet's Nest, however, goes a stage further, pretty much presenting Italy as an occupied country, under the heel of their brutal German overlords.  While it is true that by 1944, (when the film is set), large parts of Italy had surrendered to the allies, much of the north of the country remained under fascist control (and the fact that the allies haven't liberated the area depicted in the film implies that it must lie in the north), with Italian military units loyal to Mussolini actively supporting German forces.  But if we are to believe Hornet's Nest, there were never any indigenous fascists in any part of Italy and nobody ever supported those German units.  (A similar whitewashing occurs in another US/Italian World War Two epic, Anzio (1968), which fails to depict the Italian SS units that opposed the allied forces after the Anzio landings - once again, only the German army is present).

In hindsight, of course, the casting of Rock Hudson in the lead, gives another perspective to the film.  A closeted homosexual at the time, Hudson seemed to specialise in playing extremely masculine heroes in action films.  Sporting a moustache and frequently wearing a sleeveless vest to emphasise his many physique, his performance in Hornet's Nest now seems like a parody of such macho characters.   Perhaps the film's producers were aware of this at the time - his character's rape of the German doctor seems to be there mainly to emphasis his 'masculine' credentials, the scene otherwise feeling somewhat jarring and out of left field.  Most likely, though, Hudson's characterisation was meant as a parody - a parody of the sort of macho heroes usually featured in these sorts of films, whose ultra-masculinity always threatens to teeter on the edge of psychopathy and sadism.  The fact that Hudson was, in private, gay was purely coincidental.  Nonetheless, the film has become the target of the usual sort of homophobic commentary that highlights the sight of a gay man leading a bunch of young boys in a violent endeavour.  More interesting, of course, is the fact that all of the supposed 'masculine' traits such commentators seem to think define a 'real' man can be successfully simulated in film after film by a gay man. 

Hornet's Nest is, all of its problems aside, a very good-looking movie, directed with a sure hand by Phil Karlson and featuring excellent location work and cinematography, it at least moves at a decent pace.  The action scenes are also well staged and competently executed, no matter that some of them are pretty ludicrous.  But the slickness of the film's production simply serves to emphasise the cynicism of its subject matter, as it puts a cast of unlikeable characters through a series of increasingly unbelievable set pieces in service of some very confused messaging.  War is Hell, especially for children who end up damaged by the experience, it seems to be saying.  Except that we didn't really need to see them variously killed, injured and themselves committing multiple killings, not to mention a sexual assault, in order to know this.  The whole presentation comes over as exploitative rather than as genuinely wanting to make any kind of profound statements about the effects of war on children.