This was a weird, surreal place, a jungle designed by Salvador Dali. As you inched your way upward, you were suddenly amid a maze of boughs and trunks and branches and runners so mangled and twisted that it seemed some drunken God had been trying to weave a crazy basket from it all. You squeezed your way in, twisting and dodging and clambering around timbers so smashed and splintered that it was more like an untidy woodheap than a jungle. All the angles were berserk, and everything moved, you realised that half of these trees weren’t attached to anything, but instead uprooted and interlaced with those that still managed to cling to the earth. For about fifty yards, you scrambled your way over and under and around this rubbish, fighting off tangles that wanted to embrace you like a million octopi, so tightly  matted that it was impossible to see where you were going. Ahead, the rest of the section was so close you could hear them grunting as they struggled to follow Sniffer’s path. There was no need to worry about navigation, the way was up, but it soon began to be so confusing that even up and down were uncertain. Then, suddenly, open ground.

Based on a play called Fragile Fox, Attack! Is one of the more telling American war movies, and more realistic. Tough sergeant Jack Palance loses men because of the craven cowardice of his commanding officer, Eddie Albert. Albert even admits it, but he is kept in place due to army politics, largely in the form of Colonel Lee Marvin whose own ambitions rely on Albert getting his act together and certainly won’t be well served by his dismissal. In the end, Albert has to be shot when he tries to surrender his men unnecessarily, but only after he has gunned Palance down. This reality was all too harsh for audiences and condemned by the military, but in reality, such an officer would have been fragged in the first reel.