I'm really a fan of Michael Caine, I just think he's one of those actors that really is a true professional. Throw any role at him and he'll turn it into something unique. However I was a little disappointed with 1968's Play Dirty.

Continuing in the vein of "getting the criminals to do the dirty work" movies like The Dirty Dozen and the recently reviewed The Secret Invasion, Play Dirty takes a bit of a unique twist on it. This time, a British Colonel sends this band of misfits off to blow up a German fuel depot far behind enemy lines in North Africa, in an attempt to validate his techniques of employing the local talent. However the higher-ups have other plans, instead using this group as a 'scout' to flush out the enemy resistance in front of the real expedition. But really, a fuel depot in North Africa? We could have been a little more original. (Dirty Dozen meets Tobruk? Yeah.)

You might well call The Secret Invasion, "The Filthy Four." Why? It's sort of a similar picture to The Dirty Dozen, except instead of twelve convicted criminals hand-picked for a suicide mission, this time its four.

The mission? To rescue an imprisoned Italian General from the Nazi prison in the Balkans, and return him to his followers who, its hoped, will turn against the Germans.

British Major Mace (Stewart Granger) picks the four miscreants, Rocca (Raf Vallone), Scanlon (Mickey Rooney), Fell (Edd Byrnes), and Durrell (Henry Silva) each for their "unique" talents. And much like the Dirty Dozen, they waffle back and forth between attempting escape, and following through loyally with their mission.

"The men who fought. The women who waited. And the stolen moments they shared." Ick.

For those of you wanting the short-and-sweet version of this review, here it is: 1955's Battle Cry is short on Battle, and long on Cry. In it, we follow a squad of Marines from enlistment in 1942 all the way through Saipan in 1944. Or do we? I gotta say, I feel gipped!!

Instead of following the Marines in action, we mostly are treated to a few shorter stories involving the mens' involvement with various persons of the female persuasion. It looked like it could be an interesting picture, but the whole "soap opera" nature of the film left me throwing up my hands and going "WTF?! Where's the war, man!"

What a strange movie The Secret of Santa Vittoria is. Just, well, strange. That's the only word I can think to describe it.

When Mussolini is gone, the citizens of the small Italian wine-making village place the inept drunken coward, Italo Bombolini (Anthony Quinn) into the office of Mayor. When they discover that the German army is occupying villages, soon to be including theirs, they devise a scheme to protect their 1.3 million bottles of vino from the pillaging Nazis. Yes, that many!

As we learn in the film, in the Biblical parlance, the Valley of Elah is where the infamous battle between David and Goliath took place. I'm not exactly sure what the relevance of that to the movie, In The Valley of Elah is, except maybe in reference to the main character, Hank Deerfield (Tommy Lee Jones)

But maybe I'm getting ahead of myself here. Elah follows Deerfield as he searches for his son, Mike Deerfield, who has gone AWOL after returning from a tour in Iraq. The search turns into a murder mystery, as we discover his horribly mutilated remains in a field. Helping with the investigation is the mediocre rural detective Emily Sanders (Charlize Theron.)

Hitler: The Last Ten Days takes us into the depths of der Furher's Berlin bunker during his final days. Based on the book by Gerhard Boldt, it provides a bleak look at the goings-on within, and without.

The style of the film is a little interesting. You'll quickly notice that "above ground" things are all in black-and-white, while "below" everything is in color. This makes perfect sense, as we start the film in B/W with a horrific and brief look at Hitler's rise to power.

On his first day out on patrol in Vietnam, Corporal Eddie Keller (Richard Pryor) is taken prisoner by the North Vietnamese. From that point on, his luck only seems to get worse in 1982's Some Kind of Hero.

After a mind-numbing six years in prison, he's finally released once the war is over. But as his story, and that of so many others goes, he returns to find his world in shambles. His wife has moved on, his money is gone. Even the army seems poised to abandon him yet again as they learn of the "confession" he signed to save the life of his cell-mate back in 'Nam.