Trailer
Plot summary
Fox Company, a National Guard infantry unit whose call sign is Fragile Fox, holds a Belgian town near the front line in 1944. Captain Erskine Cooney is its commander, more at home with paperwork than with combat, and Lieutenant Joe Costa doubts he can lead. Costa believes Cooney owes his rank to connections made before the war. Lieutenant Harold Woodruff, the executive officer, tries to keep the peace and asks the battalion commander, Lieutenant Colonel Clyde Bartlett, to move Cooney to a desk job. Bartlett refuses, since Cooney's father, a judge, carries political weight that serves Bartlett's own ambitions. When the German offensive opens, Bartlett orders Cooney to take La Nelle. Cooney overrules Woodruff's two-pronged plan and sends Costa on a reconnaissance instead. Costa agrees only if Cooney and Woodruff promise reinforcements if his squads meet heavy resistance.
Cast
Did you know?!Facts and trivia about Attack (1956)
Can contain spoilers, watch the movie first.
- Eddie Albert, who played the cowardly Cooney, was in reality a decorated World War II hero: before the war he secretly photographed German U-boats in Mexico for US Army intelligence, and he earned a Bronze Star rescuing US Marines under heavy gunfire at the Battle of Tarawa in 1943, losing part of his hearing.
- Aldrich said the Army laid down a policy of no cooperation after reading the script, which meant he could not borrow troops and tanks or even look at Signal Corps combat footage; he finally had to buy a tank for $1,000 and rent another from 20th Century-Fox.
- Because the film cast some officers as cowards or Machiavellian manipulators, the US Defense Department refused to grant production assistance; critics attacked that stance, pointing to officers like Costa and Woodruff as more representative of the Army than the cowardly captain.
- Aldrich made the film without the big budget other war productions were getting: it was shot in 32 days on the back lot of RKO Studios, with two much-modified US M3 light tanks inadequately standing in for German tanks and German troops wearing WWI Stahlhelme.
- Director Aldrich came to this material only after failing to obtain the rights to Irwin Shaw's The Young Lions and Norman Mailer's The Naked and the Dead; he bought the rights to this story instead.
- According to Aldrich the film made money, but because the profits were "cross-collateralized" against The Big Knife, in his words, "nobody saw any of the money."
