Media Monday: War Fever (1969)

Today I'm starting a new push towards regular blogging, and with that, a Monday post every week about some kind of media - film, television, comics, or artwork. Today, I am featuring a film I watched a little while ago on Amazon Prime video, where it is labeled "Salt in the Wound", but the film also has the titles "War Fever", "The Liberators", and its original title in Italian, "Il dito nella piaga", which, according to Google translate (for whatever that's worth) means "The Finger in the Wound".

The plot revolves around Corporal Haskins and Private Greyson, two US Army soldiers who have been accused of crimes (IIRC in both cases, they did commit those crimes), and are sentenced via court martial to death by firing squad. The firing squad detail is led by a shiny new second lieutenant named Sheppard. The two doomed men are driven out to an isolated spot to be executed, but Sheppard gets the directions wrong, and they wind up off the beaten trail. The detail is discovered by a German patrol, and everyone but Haskins, Greyson, and Sheppard is killed. The two convicted men and their executioner flee into the wilderness, armed but ill-equipped, and that's when the movie really begins to pick up.

The dynamic is clear from the beginning. Haskins is a corporal but he's significantly older and more war-weary than Sheppard, who has just come from State-side and has never been in combat before. Greyson is a black man in a white man's army and feels his own bitter resentment towards how he has been treated, and for the first half of the film, he's still in a state of shock, which unfortunately doesn't give the actor much to work with and does a bit of disservice to the character. But Haskins, played by the utterly fantastic Klaus Kinski, sneers and laughs and taunts Sheppard, all the while keeping a Thompson submachine gun pointing Sheppard's way. Haskins doesn't have it in him to kill Sheppard outright, even though he could, and doing so would essentially make him and Greyson free men since there would be no Allied soldier alive who'd know the two doomed men were still living.

When the trio stumble across a small Italian town, there is some rejoicing, as the locals think the Americans are just the lead element in a much larger force sent to "liberate" their town. There are hints of Kipling's "The Man Who Would be King" here, as Haskins soaks up all the glory and warm treatment he can get, playing up his fake role to the hilt, while Sheppard stumbles through the occasion, trying to keep the Italians' expectations realistic, while at the same time, trying to be diplomatic and polite. Greyson, an object of curiosity as the first black man many of the Italians have ever seen, is treated well enough, but it isn't until he befriends a young boy that his character begins to really open up and is given a chance to have significant dialogue and emotion. And of course, there is the extremely cringe-worthy "romance" between Haskins and a young Italiam woman that he relentlessly pursues, in a manner so aggressive that I honestly found myself physically recoiling from the screen at his advances. This is flat-out the worst part of the film.

Of course, inevitably the war comes to the small town, as the Germans have decided it is a good place to defend themselves against an advancing American front. They send an element to capture the town, and soon, Haskins, Greyson, and Sheppard find themselves having to defend the town from the attacking Germans. For a bottom-of -the-budget-barrel film, the combat scenes are actually quite well done, uncompromising in the violence, and while the editing is done in large part to hide the lack of a budget, you can easily follow the action. I won't give away the ending, but let us just say that all sides pay a steep price by the end of the film.

Looks like you can watch the full 97-minute cut of "Salt in the Wound" here at YouTube:

Overall, I enjoyed this a lot more than I expected. Despite its extremely small budget, including weapon props that are quite obviously non-guns in many scenes, I liked the story of a pair of soldier-criminals who are doing everything they can to avoid the war, but wind up finding themselves fighting for the lives of civilians they barely know. I also enjoyed the dynamic between Sheppard and Haskins, even though much of it was over the top, due in a large part to Kinski's sneering visage. Also, I believe that I read somewhere this film was the inspiration for the original The Inglorious Bastards made in 1978 (*not* the Tarantio movie of a similar name but different spelling), which involves a group of American soldiers who are criminals, being sent on a "suicide mission".