Castle Keep

An eccentric endgame allegory based on William Eastlake's novel, critically culted in France but a commercial disaster everywhere, Pollack's war movie contrasts two sets of civilised values (American/European) as Lancaster's platoon fights to hold a medieval castle and its treasures against the German advance, and finds both too retrogressively dogmatic in the face of the holocaust. An ill-omened attempt at likewise fusing an American action genre with Euro art-house 'ideas' ('I didn't intend for people to believe that the castle really existed.'), Pollack's folly remains an intriguing curio in spite of its pretensions. Shot in Yugoslavia by Henri Decaë, with similar sterling French support from art director Max Douy and composer Michel Legrand.