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Thursday, November 28, 2019

THE FOURTH WAR (1990)

Career lows for just about everyone on this Cold War battle between Colonels Roy Scheider (in his last mainstream lead*) and DAS BOOT’s Jürgen Prochnow, with a disinterested John Frankenheimer calling shots on the Czech Border. New at the base, Scheider’s a hard-nosed guy who, missing the old ‘hot’ Cold War, tries to start it up again all on his own after a border incident. Fighting pushback from Prochnow (tanks, guns, troops*), Scheider goes ‘rogue,’ singlehandedly running nighttime raids and sabotage missions on the Ruskie side of the fence, threatening a tenuous peace with his actions. Too bad no one read the news and saw that the Berlin Wall came down a year back in 1989! Presumably, the film was set up Pre-Thaw, and there might just be a movie in a pair of matched East/West Colonels missing the bad old days before Glasnost wrecked their world views. But this sloppy piece of work ain’t it. The film barely got released Stateside.

WATCH THIS, NOT THAT: *Later this year, Scheider got demoted to lead supporting role in John le Carré’s THE RUSSIA HOUSE which found a new kind of life for Cold War thrillers.

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID: *And if you think John Frankenheimer can resist that cliché shot of a tank rolling right over a camera in a pit, you’ve got another think coming.

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