I cannot in good faith review Phil Karlson’s HORNET’S NEST (1970) because I haven’t seen it in over 40 years. No, I don’t stand up here today to tender opinion, or to talk about how this particular film connects to Karlson’s larger body of work or how it represents yet another 45 degree diversion off of star Rock Hudson’s career trajectory but rather reflect on how seriously scarred this movie left my 8 year-old psyche.
Let’s put this into perspective. By the late 1960s, the matinee experience was becoming a whole new ballgame. A decade earlier, there was very little to distinguish mature movie fare from that fobbed off on the kiddies earlier in the day. A John Wayne picture such as RIO BRAVO (1959) or HATARI! (1962) played just as well at noon as it did at 7pm and the only discouraging factor for movie exhibitors was avoiding booking something in the daytime that might bore the children — there were likely not too many Saturday morning screenings of EXECUTIVE SUITE (1954) or WRITTEN ON THE WIND (1956). Many of you reading this will recall (though perhaps with fuzzy details) Roger Ebert’s famous piece about having caught George Romero’s NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD (1968) when it was slotted into a kiddie matinee by some Chicago exhibitor working solely on caffeine and auto-pilot; Ebert wasn’t panning or condemning NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD (which is how the story was misremembered moving forward) but taking to task the programmer who was selling the equivalent of whole grain alcohol out of a Yoo-hoo bottle. But as one who was there in those days, fully cognizant and in fact in charge of getting myself to the movies (walking the quarter mile distance from our house to town), it was merely the shape of things to come. Over the course of the next five or six years, children attending kiddie matinees in America were run through the ringer, exposed to incredible gouts of violence, bottomless pessimism, and the full body stripping away of all childhood certainty.
I didn’t see NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD until I was 19 (I had read John Russo’s novelization some five years earlier, so I knew who the players were and how the game ended) but I’d gotten all I needed of hell from CHUKA (1967), which I’m pretty sure I caught in re-release in 1970 or 1971. Produced by and starring Rod Taylor (from that kid favorite, THE TIME MACHINE), this Paramount release looked from its posters like a bog standard western, a cowboys (well, US Cavalry) versus Indians shoot-em-up boasting a familiar cast of Hollywood faces (Ernest Borgnine, James Whitemore, even THE MOD SQUAD‘s Michael Cole), as comforting as a rootbeer float on a hot summer’s day. But, boy oh boy, does CHUKA play out quite a bit differently before its final fade-out. I’ve written about the connection before on this site but CHUKA plays like a dry run for NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD: it’s a siege scenario, with whites huddled behind the walls of a Wild West outpost/fort as starving (therefore, cannibalistic) Indians gather without, ultimately storming the gates to swarm the palefaces, whose defenses have been obliterated by arguing and enmity. There are plenty of parallels shared by the two films and both end with the [SPOILER WARNING... but you just can't stop yourself, can you?] death of the protagonist.
If you went to the movies in the late 60s and early 70s, you learned not to get too attached to your heroes. Seeing in close proximity to one another such vintage downers as OPERATION CROSSBOW (1965), EASY RIDER (1969), VANISHING POINT (1971), THE OMEGA MAN (1971), and BENEATH THE PLANET OF THE APES (1970, above) it was clear that nothing was for sure. Of course, back of this were such news of the day items as the Tet Offensive, the My Lai Massacre, the assassinations of Martin Luther King and Robert Kennedy, the Manson and Zodiac murders, the Kent State killings, and so on and so on — real life tragedies and outrages from which we naturally fled to the movies, only to find out that someone had gotten in ahead of us and blown the bridge on the boulevard of dreams. Nine times out of ten back then you walked out of the cinema feeling dejected and ruined. But anyway. Enter HORNET’S NEST…
Paramount tried to sell the US-Italian co-production as a mash-up of THE PRIVATE WAR OF MAJOR BENSON (1955) and FATHER GOOSE (1964): “Meet Captain Turner’s Baby Brigade!” invited the publicity materials, while studio stills (such as the one at right) depicted Rock crooking an Italian bambino in one hand and a Maschinepistole 40 in the other. Surely at some point someone in some room must have said something like “It’s THE DIRTY DOZEN… with kids!” and the fact that children were part of the narrative led exhibitors to believe the film was suitable for children. Well, it isn’t! In short, HORNET’S NEST is the story of a wayward GI whose men all die before he can initiate his secret mission to blow up a strategically-situated dam, leaving him to turn to local partisans as a make-shift strike force. Trouble is, all of the partisans have been rounded up by the Reich and machine gunned, leaving only their grieving (and understandably angry) children. Seeing as how most if not all of these Italian orphans already know how to smoke cigarettes, Rock reasons they should be a suitable replacement and Plan C (for Children) commences with Rock training them on how to spray a column of Nazis without accidentally killing one another. Once the Yank sees the kids over the expected (and occasionally unexpected) humps of basic training, it’s off to blow the dam and win the war. If only it were that easy.
Not surprisingly for a Phil Karlson joint, HORNET’S NEST is bursting with exploitation setpieces crafted to torque the emotions and Indian burn the sympathies of its viewers. From the early scene in which Italian peasants are lined up and summarily executed against a wall by Nazi soldiers to the inevitable answer scene in which orphan leader Aldo (Mark Colleano — who really did lose his father at an early age) turns a fully loaded MG42 on his goose-stepping tormentors and including a sidebar in which hero Rock rapes German doctor Sylva Koscina (an act that turns her from a somewhat recalcitrant collaborator to a full-blown resistance fighter), HORNET’S NEST guarantees troubled sleep and many of the film’s tentpole moments have haunted me lo these many decades, making me at once eager and reluctant to revisit it. In retrospect, however, it’s interesting to see how influential the film was, inspiring moments (it could be argued — and I am) in such future films as…
… Narciso Ibanez Serrador’s deeply disturbing QUIEN PUEDE MATAR A UN NINO? (WHO CAN KILL A CHILD?, 1976), Harold Becker’s TAPS (1981), and John Milius’s RED DAWN (1984). By the time of RED DAWN, released half a generation after HORNET’S NEST, extremes of violence were fully integrated into the American movie-going experience. Kiddie matinees were long gone, relics of the past, and replaced by earlier general admission screenings. (A not so happy memory from the fall of 1983, near the end of Bob Fosse’s STAR 80, as Eric Roberts is sodomizing, posthumously, a now lifeless and faceless Mariel Hamingway, somebody’s heretofore unnoticed young child asked his parent aloud “Why is he hurting her?” Well, if that kid had come of age a decade earlier he or she needn’t have asked.) All this to say that, as much as I cherish the movies, I cherish (sometimes even more dearly) the memory of movies and how they affected me, for good or ill. I mean to revisit HORNET’S NEST again, one of these days, to see how it stacks up at the distance of four decades. And I’ll get to that, I will. But maybe when I’m a little more grown up.