Murphy's War (1971)

Peter O'Toole stares out at the Amazon, jaw set, eyes hollowed by grief and fury, and you believe every second of it. That's both the best and most frustrating thing about Murphy's War. When it works, it really works. When it doesn't, you're left watching a genuinely gifted actor carry a film that keeps tripping over its own feet.

The setup is one of those beautifully simple wartime premises. Murphy, an Irish merchant seaman, is the sole survivor after a German U-boat massacres his crew in the waters off Venezuela. Pulled ashore, patched up, and left with nothing but rage and a battered seaplane, he decides, against all reason and military logic, to wage his own private war. It's the kind of story that could have been a lean, punchy thriller, or it could have been a slow, aching meditation on obsession and the cost of vengeance. Murphy's War wants to be the latter, and you respect the ambition, even when the execution lets it down.

O'Toole is the reason to watch this. He brings a haunted, fraying intensity to Murphy that makes you believe in the character's descent. There's a wildness creeping into his eyes as the film progresses, a man not entirely sure where grief ends and madness begins, and O'Toole plays it with restraint where a lesser actor would have gone full theatrical. The performance is doing a lot of heavy lifting here, maybe too much.

The setting earns its keep. The jungle is lush and suffocating, shot with a real eye for the oppressive weight of the place. The river sequences have a grim, sticky tension to them, and the practical work with an actual submarine and vintage aircraft gives the film an authenticity that money can't fake. You feel the heat and the mud and the sheer impracticality of one man's grudge against an entire military vessel. There's something almost absurdist about it, and the film is at its most interesting when it leans into that.

But here's my honest problem with it: it's slow. Not contemplatively slow, not earn your patience slow. Just slow. The middle section sags badly, momentum bleeds away during long stretches where very little happens, and you find yourself clock-watching when you should be gripped. The film mistakes inertia for brooding atmosphere, and they're not the same thing. I've sat through genuinely demanding films, like my this river-set drama from the following year, where the pace demands something of you and rewards the patience. Here, the drag just feels like drift.

The climax, when it finally arrives, is more chaotic than cathartic. You've been waiting for the collision between Murphy and his obsession, and when it comes it lands with a thud rather than a bang. There's a moral bleakness to the ending that I actually appreciated, it's not trying to be triumphant, and that's the right call. But the road to get there is longer and bumpier than it needs to be.

It's clearly a film made with genuine seriousness of purpose. This isn't a cheap war picture chasing action beats. There's thematic weight here around guilt, grief, the futility of individual vengeance against the machinery of war. It just doesn't quite bind together into something that fully delivers on that promise. Good, in the way that a lot of early seventies war dramas are good. Ambitious, atmospheric, anchored by a great central performance. But never quite the film it could have been.

Three stars. Worth your time if you're an O'Toole admirer or have a soft spot for this particular corner of seventies British cinema. Just don't come in expecting thrills. This is a slow burn, emphasis on the slow.

Rating: ★★★  | Year: 1971  | Watched: 2025-09-18

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More from United Kingdom: Lessons of Darkness (1992) · Shinjuku Boys (1995) · The Curse of Frankenstein (1957) · Blue (1993)
More from the 1970s: Fantastic Planet (1973) · Here and Elsewhere (1976) · Italianamerican (1974) · Punishment Park (1971)
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More war: Lessons of Darkness (1992) · The General (1926) · Men Without Wings (1946) · Fires Were Started (1943)