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It's funny watching the elements come together in this complicated scam. On one hand, the set-up isn't quite as complex as it seems, but there's an easy sense of fun in every exchange.

It's hard to see any effort in the film. There's no comedy to speak of, no real drama and, worst of all.

It's entirely possible that sending the audience out feeling lousy was intentional

After playing with our expectations, this turns out to be a very different sort of film.

In the bloodiest days of the second world war, half of Lieutenant Costa's platoon is wiped out during an attack on a German pillbox because the cowardly Captain Cooney failed to reinforce them. Cooney only holds such an important rank due to the fact that his superior officer-Lieutenant Colonel Bartlett-owes a favour to Cooney's father who is a prominent judge stateside. All of the men in the platoon, especially Costa, are disgusted by Cooney's spiritless incompetence. However the Colonel is more than willing to turn a blind eye because of his political aspirations after the war. When Costa and his outfit are trapped by enemy fire in a small town, Cooney once again refuses to reinforce them and more lives are lost needlessly. With the battle of the Bulge now raging around them, tensions between Cooney and Costa boil over, causing the irate Lieutenant to crack. In the midst of an overwhelming German counterattack and consumed by murderous anger, Costa makes a dangerous resolve...At first glance Attack! looks like a typically generic flag waver, but as the synopsis indicated, it cuts much deeper than the jingoistic propaganda pop corn flicks of the era. Made at a time when such (pro) war movies were still very much in vogue, Attack! is one of Hollywood's earliest anti-war films. Robert Aldrich' anguishing character study alienated him from the Pentagon and is all the better for it. Attack! is one of the most sobering accounts of war ever lensed. Based on Norman Brooks' play "Fragile Fox", the script is cleverly cynical and the film itself deliciously baroque. Aldrich relishes deconstructing the effects of war on the soldiers, both physical and emotional, whilst tackling hot topics like cowardice and corruption in the ranks. Take Captain Cooney for example, an individual who would be much better off sitting behind a desk where he would be free to wallow harmlessly in self pity. Instead he has been installed into a position of power whereupon he is called to fight, thus said self pity becomes a destructive force in itself. Here we have a cancerous bureaucratic initiative coming into play as it is the manipulative Colonel Bartlett who deliberately sustains Cooney in such a position of prominence, just so he can keep a promise to Cooney's magistrate father who guarantees him an illustrious governmental position as soon as the war ends. Bartlett is a villainous snake who plays with the lives of his men as well as Cooney's vulnerable mental state in order to fulfil aforementioned warped political ambitions.The three leads deliver tour de-force performances. The electrifying Jack Palance is on brilliantly choleric form as the grizzled Lieutenant Costa. By the film's second half, his lust for retribution has initiated a spiralling descent into insanity and Robert Aldrich exploits the character's rage to a fantastic advantage. You'll love to hate Eddie Albert as Cooney. Near the end of the movie, his cowardice transforms him into a crazed sadist. Ironically, Eddie Albert was decorated for bravery during the war, but still plays the irresponsible coward with unparalleled professionalism. Lee Marvin is loving every second of his screen time as Colonel Bartlett and his rousing energy is infectious, his Southern drawl permeating an air of menace. In what I would call one of the most horrific but awesome sequences in the history of cinema, a frenzied bazooka-wielding Costa gets one of his arms brutally crushed when a tank grinds onto it!. His raucous agonised roaring combined with some savagely contorted facial expressions make the sequence all the more ferociously obscene. It's a truly shocking scene that was violent for the 1950s and is still trenchant today, but conveys spectacularly combat in all it's malignant ferocity!. I've always been obsessed with it's sheer abrasiveness and even if this sequence does look rather dated now it doesn't make it any less grotesque. The images of the helpless Costa trying to roar the pain away as he is viciously restrained by the tank is unlike anything I've ever seen in a war movie, it curdles my blood in the most scabrous of ways!. The final act is nearly just as amazing, when the ravaged zombie-like Costa miraculously stumbles into a cellar to do away with Cooney once and for all. Attack! has to be the greatest war movie of the 50s and a contender for the greatest war movie of all time. A rough masterwork!. 10/10

Considered by most to be one of Director Aldrich's best Films. It is certainly one of the best WWII Movies, joining Sam Fuller, Stanley Kubrick, and Oliver Stone in non-patronizing the glory of War. There are plenty of those that do such Patriot pushing so the other side is a welcome and needed relief.In this one it is Politics and incompetent Leaders who represent the Bad Guys here and at this late date is there any argument against that? Not that it is True across the board, but that it does exist and many People pay with their lives because of this ineptitude.With a cast of real War Vets and other good performers, the cold hard script is played out in a claustrophobic, relentlessly cynical atmosphere where it can be a tough watch as are most uncomfortable Truths. It is an uncompromising Story of bravery, cowardice, and incompetence. A yin to John Wayne's yang that cannot be ignored and is one of the great ones from the ultra-conservative Fifties.

If there ever was a one man army, Joe Costa is that man, that army. Costa, played by Jack Palance, is a lieutenant in a company with a bad commanding captain, one who is put there only for political reason and only wants to save his own life at the expense of others. But ranking officers won't remove the captain as the company probably won't see action again. But that was before the Germans made one desperate push and put the company on the line.But without leadership the company seems doomed, can Costa save them once again? Of course he can. But that's where the movie derails. Even if heroism is commendable and entertaining in a war movie, a one man army is too much, especially when he is fighting tanks.Despite that, it is disappointingly little action in this. Most of the time is spent in basements or other close quarters either arguing or looking for advancing enemies. Even if that puts depth and perspective to the fighting, it must balance out. Here it is just too much of it. Especially towards the end it gets drawn out way too much and quite tedious. The end is really a great anticlimax.Jack Palance went on to have a great career, but this will not be one of the more memorable moments of it. Lee Marvin does it better, even if his role is rather small.I had expected more of this, as it was it wasn't much of anything. Not enough action for a war movie, but not enough depth or thought to be a credible drama either.4/10

After having just watched "Tigerland" (2000), starring Colin Farrell, I was reminded of the very first anti-war film I'd ever seen (when I was about 10), namely "Attack!" (1956), starring Jack Palance, who owned the craggiest, ugliest face ever to not need make-up to be scary; his debut in "Shane" (1953), as the scary sinister hired gun Jack Wilson, was the opposite of comic relief, call it spinal-chill. In his role as 2:41:19 AM. Joe Costa, Palance was perfect, the scary guy you wanted to be on your side.As a 10-year-old, I didn't think about the deeper meanings that directors and writers were trying get across; yet, the mood, kinda like film noir meets WWII, at the masterful hand of Robert Aldrich, conveyed a stark vision of the vise-grip with which battlefield stress crushed polite society's facade of decency and civility. That came through even to my immature sensibilities. In doing so, "Attack!" did what great anti-war movies are supposed to do - it altered my view, that of a young boy who, like so many young boys, had been propagandized (by our polite society) to have a glorified view of war. You're never too young to learn wisdom.The horrors of war, especially the horrors of the politics of war, were delivered into the collective psyches of Americans during the Vietnam War with graphics we were rarely allowed to see before. Aldrich's version of "fragging", the term, newly minted from the Vietnam conflict, for lobbing a grenade at your own officers, is given an earlier cinematic debut in "Attack!" That scene pierced my childish glamorization of combat. Too bad it wasn't required viewing for more of us.