Call it weird, call it wacky, Twilight's Last Gleaming is an engaging if not somewhat bizarre Cold War thriller starring Burt Lancaster as a disgraced, idealistic general who escapes from prison, hijacks a Titan II missile facility, and then proceeds to threaten destruction of the world if his three demands are not met. The demands involve some of the usual things--money and safe passage (by having the President volunteer himself as a hostage)--but the most interesting item is the public disclosure of a confidential document regarding the abuse of power in sending American troops to Vietnam. Sounds ridiculous, right? The film walks the line between conspiracy thriller and 70s political suspense film with a good cat-and-mouse game being played between Dell (Lancaster) and the US military. The supporting cast is fantastic including Paul Winfield, Melvyn Douglas, Joseph Cotten, and Richard Widmark among others. Charles Durning plays a sympathetic and somewhat wimpy president. Hardly believable, but his indecisive lip-biting and ranting is very entertaining. One element of the film that doesn't quite work is Aldrich's reliance on split-screen techniques to depict simultaneous events--I felt the tempo and synchronization of these shots never quite gelled as well as they should have, and it was more of a distraction than an asset. Regardless, it's a minor nuisance that hardly detracts from how fun the film is. A silly, lighthearted thriller at first, but keep watching and you'll see just how dark and overtly political the filmmakers were willing to go.
7/10
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