Saturday | August 3, 2013 9:00 pm

Twilight’s Last Gleaming

Screening on Film

Directed by Robert Aldrich.
With Burt Lancaster, Richard Widmark, Charles Durning.
US, 1977, 35mm, color, 144 min.

Lancaster’s final film with Robert Aldrich is among the director's least known masterworks, a taut political thriller about nuclear missiles in the hands of a rogue general determined to make the White House pay for the disastrous folly of Vietnam. Lancaster channels Aldrich's blistering anti-institutional ire into a portrait of an aging and steely-eyed veteran who has carefully, and symbolically, chosen his last and most perilous mission. Misunderstood and abused by critics at its original release, Twilight’s Last Gleaming was for many years a stubbornly unavailable holy grail of ardent cinephiles until the recent unearthing of the revelatory director's cut screened here in its Cambridge/Boston premiere.