Dumbo Goes to War

First in the week's pack of animals is a precocious pachyderm named Aida, who co-stars with Oliver Reed and Michael J. Pollard in Hannibal Brooks and wins all acting honors by default.

The script, in fact, seems tailored for her heavy tread. A British P.O.W. named Brooks (Oliver Reed) wangles a cushy work detail in a German zoo, where he spends his days caring for the prize elephant (Aida). He develops a platonic crush on the poor beast, so that when the Allies bomb the zoo Brooks resolves to lead his pal to safety across the Swiss border. With the help of the Yank leader of some highly irregular troops and the customary blundering and stupidity of the Nazis, Brooks makes it across the river into the trees and over the Alps (Hannibal--get it?) to freedom.

The thundering, trumpeting inanity of all this is more or less the responsibility of Producer-Director Michael Winner, who has made a lot of second-rate movies in his time (Girl-Getters, The Jokers, I'll Never Forget What's 'Isname) but none so consummately awful as this. He allows Reed to sway and scowl across the screen like an English Jack Palance, while Michael J. Pollard, as the benighted guerrilla chief, quickly exhausts his repertoire of puckish expressions. Since he attracted attention in Bonnie and Clyde, Pollard has turned into a mumbling buffoon whose limited talents are perfectly in harmony with the selfconscious, self-indulgent, elephantine whimsy of Hannibal Brooks.

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