Review by David Paul Hellings
@HellingsOnFilm
“High among idiosyncratic auteur Robert Aldrich’s most powerful and intense dramas, Twilight’s Last Gleaming is a thunderous political thriller and race-against-time doomsday classic.
Burt Lancaster stars as the Air Force general Lawrence Dell who seizes control of a stockpile of nuclear missiles to force the US President (Charles Durning) to tell the truth about the Vietnam war. As negotiations get ever more desperate, General MacKenzie ( Richard Widmark) leads an elite fighting team into the complex to disable Dell and his team directly.
One of the most overlooked nail biters of the 1970s, Twilight’s Last Gleaming is presented here on UK home video for the first time in a new Dual-Format edition”.
Via Eureka Cinema
Review:
After the brief hope following man landing on the Moon, through the Watergate era cynicism, filmmakers quickly moved to the end of the Sci-Fi spectrum and delivered the ‘Doomsday’ scenario in which it wasn’t aliens or robots that threatened us, it was radical man taking control of the products of the atomic age and space race era to reveal the nature of our creations.
If “The Forbin Project” had supercomputers allying to dominate mankind to save it from its own stupidity, Robert Aldrich’s cold, cynical piece “Twilight’s Last Gleaming” presents us with the infinitely more possible scenario in which we are presented with the fragility of the technology created in our supposed defense as an act of personal revenge and as a statement.
Aldritch’s film is from the pre-9/11 era in which security at bases clearly wasn’t as strong as today, but even so the simplicity of the act of getting in and taking control is a clear warning in itself. A madman with a nuclear arsenal presented the world with a sense of what could happen in 70s paranoia-filled America.
In a brief period of less than ten years, the hopes of the world were no longer the idealism and optimism of the moon landing watchers, but once more a Cold War, perhaps colder than ever before. Charlton Heston pushed the button to end the ape world he was trapped in; here it’s Burt Lancaster leading the misguided mission to panic. The doomsday scenario presented here by Aldritch perfectly fitted the mood of the 70s and it’s a welcome return in an excellent print. Aldritch wasn’t a fancy director, workmanlike or industrial at times in the look of the films, creating a basic reality and raw feel to his work. A warning from history that still resonated today. The weapons expected when the space race was first funded after World War Two, are still the ongoing threat today.
Classic Aldritch.
Special Features confirmed as:
High-definition digital restoration
Uncompressed PCM audio on the Blu-ray
English subtitles for the deaf and hearing impaired
Aldrich Over Munich Robert Fischer’s feature length documentary on the making of Twilight’s Last Gleaming
A 36-page booklet featuring a new essay by film scholar Neil Sinyard, an interview with Aldrich from the time of the film’s release, and archival imagery
