Twilight's Last Gleaming (1977)
Burt Lancaster stars as a renegade general escaped from a military prison who along with three other military convicts (Including Paul Winfiled and Burt Young) take over an underground nuclear missile silo in Montana and threatens to launch them starting WWIII unless the US President reveals top secret documents to the public regarding America's involvement in the Vietnam War.
One of those films i'd heard of but never seen until i bought the stunning looking blu-ray from Eureka. It's a powerful and tension filled drama which develops into a race against time and is cleverly directed by the great Robert Aldrich who uses split screen in a far more intense fashion than any other movie i've seen.
Even at two and a half hours the film flies by. Becoming genuinely nail biting stuff when Richard Widmark's General leads a team to retake the silo in order to prevent Armageddon.
The cast is excellent, Lancaster and Widmark always are, and when you add Charles Durning's President and Melvyn Douglas and Joseph Cotten as part of his scheming cabinet to proceedings you know it's going to be an acting tour-de-force.
Part political drama, part Cold War thriller, with a strong message at it's core that if you replaced Vietnam with Afghanistan and Iraq would remain as relevant today as it was back then.
An excellent film.
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