Das vergessene Tal (1971)

Das vergessene Tal: Directed by James Clavell. With Michael Caine, Omar Sharif, Florinda Bolkan, Nigel Davenport. During the Thirty Years’ War of 1600s, a band of Protestant mercenaries peacefully coexist with German Catholic villagers in a hidden idyllic mountain valley untouched by war.

“This is a movie made during a time when writers, novelists, like Clavell and Crichton, were allowed to make their own films. What you have are literate, probing plots and stories, sometimes failed by low budgets oru003cbr/u003eu003cbr/u003elack of experience. With LAST VALLEY, thereu0026#39;s an otherworldly quality to Clavellu0026#39;s work, steepled in strict historical fact; Clavell postulates a fantasy valley where humans live hidden from the brutality and horror of war; they are genetic angels, of a sort, but those in control are wise to the ways of a world ruled by knife. A band of soldiers, lacking a country oru003cbr/u003eu003cbr/u003ehome to call their home, caught in the hurricane of this war, stumble into a seeming Elysian Fields and begin to infect it with pragmatic survival and certain doom. The ways of human beings as a mass descend on the slight-populated community.u003cbr/u003eu003cbr/u003ePeople criticize the film as dark, equating realism. Fact is, Clavell shows a contrast between the world Michael Caine, as the Captain, knows and is scarred by, and the hidden land in which beautiful women and children are protected, fed and safe. Caineu0026#39;s Captain has been a wanton butcher in the war, the murderer of women and children. Yet he only understands the quality of this paradise after he has nearly destroyed it.u003cbr/u003eu003cbr/u003eThe most telling sequences are those in which these men from outside the hidden land, knowing the damage they are causing to this one place where beautiful women can live unraped and men as equals, are forced to leave. The women in love with them wish to accompany them into the horror the men know. Caine, in particular, leaves his lover under a false sense of security, believing she will be safe. His heart-breaking understanding of this womanu0026#39;s loyalty to him, bred in her by a hidden land where love can be expressed devoid of force and tragedy, comes only in the end; his last touch with this lover is with a glove made of armor, outfitted for the killing he will do once he leaves the valley and rejoins the war.u003cbr/u003eu003cbr/u003eThere is probably the great performance of Caineu0026#39;s career up on screen in this film. Outside of GET CARTER, youu0026#39;ll never see Caine inhabit a role more fully. Even if the scope of the story gets away from Clavell at the end, and could have benefitted from the expanded format of SHOGUN say, this is a big-time view of a great actor in Caine and a literate script from Clavell that will, without doubt, remain fixed in the mind.”