MOVIE REVIEW : ‘Fourth War’ Long on Action, Short on Logic

In John Frankenheimer’s “The Fourth War” (citywide), the ice and snow are like a palpable presence, cracking and swooshing underfoot. Set supposedly at the Czech-West German border, the movie feels cold, looks cold. It has the exhilarating iciness of a clear, windy day, with sunlight like a bright knife and breath curling out in frosty plumes.

The motif fits. This is a movie about the Cold War, set at the beginning of glasnost. It’s a fable about warriors who can never really rest. The world may thaw but these men never will: Roy Scheider and Jurgen Prochnow as Knowles and Valachev, opposing American and Soviet commandants, who make obsessive forays across the border to bedevil each other. Their wills forged in Vietnam and Afghanistan, they hate each other because neither can stand defeat. Like twin Rambos, they’re out to prove themselves on each other, mano a mano.

That’s the core and contradiction of “The Fourth War.” It’s an anti-war fable that tries to have it both ways: to excite the senses by showing these lone wolf battlers on their daring raids and also to morally undercut them as compulsive, and a little mad.

Many anti-war movies pivot on the same contradiction. But “The Fourth War” has a faulty balance: too much action, too little psychology. In the kind of script Frankenheimer directed in the ‘50s and ‘60s, action scenes would have punctuated the drama or brought it to crisis. Here, it’s almost the reverse; the antagonism is automatic, largely unexplored.

As in the usual ‘80s action movie, Knowles and Valachev fall into hate at first sight. The sequences that follow--the explosions, car-chases and wild melees--consummate their relationship, while the plot goes typically archetypal and daffy. It’s hard to figure out why two commanding officers have so much time on their hands, why they blow up each other’s jeeps and watch towers with such relative impunity, why their countries don’t make official protests about all this carnage.

Midway through, when Lara Harris shows up as Elena, a Czech freedom fighter and exile who’s supposedly trying to sneak back across the border for her abandoned daughter, the movie briefly seems to have gone bonkers.

“The Fourth War” doesn’t make much sense, but it’s powerfully acted and beautifully directed. There’s always been a contradiction in Frankenheimer’s best movies, from “The Manchurian Candidate” to “52 Pickup”; a mixture of wild spontaneity and a baroque, weirdly mechanical form that imprisons his characters in geometric traps. Here, the trap may be the whole modern form of the revenge thriller--the simplistic, childish morality, the rampaging sadism.

Frankenheimer squeezes the maximum out of this underdeveloped material. He’s got a subject that obviously appeals to him and the images he and cinematographer Gerry Fisher get are cleaner, more dynamic. The camera constantly prowls, the tight angles lock us into the tunnel vision of these two crazy combatants.

As Knowles, Scheider gives an intense performance that makes every eyebrow twitch or slight inflection resonate with menace.

Prochnow is almost equally effective--yet it’s Stanton who walks off with “The Fourth War” (MPAA rated R for language and violence). And it’s Frankenheimer who gives it pace, style and sweep, puts us out in the cold of machismo and international tension, brings us in again. Frankenheimer needs a good script to let his full dark power come out; here, at least, he has a good idea. But here, as elsewhere, gaudy action speaks louder than too-sparse words.