WAR fixation continues with Tora! Tora! Tora! (World, 9.35pm) and The Devil's Brigade (Pearl, 9.30pm).
Both channels have a number of these shaky old dramas cluttering up their vaults and are wont to show them at the slightest provocation.
If you are waiting for me to make a choice between the two you will need the patience of a stone. Tora! Tora! Tora! sticks close to the facts, but is calcified; The Devil's Brigade stars William Holden (Love Is A Many Splendored Thing ) and is a flagrant rip-off of The Dirty Dozen, supposedly about the formation of the elite group of soldiers which would later become the Green Berets.
The Devil's Brigade was made in 1968, when Hollywood was beginning to suffer combat fatigue after three decades of war films. The plot concerns a soft-spoken, allegedly intellectual US officer (Holden) who is asked to mould a platoon of thugs and misfits into a band of crack commandos. This he does, and is then asked to lead them into a decisive battle to capture the supposedly impregnable Mount La Difensa in Italy.
As a film The Devil's Brigade is not distinguished. As an entertainment, it consists of the usual training, scenes, combat scenes and conflagrations. Among the co-stars are Cliff Robertson, Vince Edwards and Michael Rennie.
And so to the other one, Tora! Tora! Tora! which includes a dramatic recreation of the attack on Pearl Harbour, but too much ponderous scene-setting in the build-up. Its problem is that much of the action is studio-bound and in danger of coagulating long before anything happens. The film has much fidelity to fact, but in trying to be sympathetic to both Japanese and Americans it ends up with no heroes, no villains, no drama and no suspense.
