This film is certainly off the beaten track, as one might expect from its source - a very bizarre novel by William Eastlake that hovers between fantasy and reality.

Burt Lancaster plays the one-eyed American major who billets his few remaining men at an Ardennes castle filled with priceless art treasures.

It is also in the direct line of the German advance.

The ensuing proceedings add up to a distinctive evening's entertainment and, in case you should be thinking this might be a war film without battles, there are skirmishes throughout and a really colossal holocaust at the end, when the Germans throw everything at the castle and its occupants.