The Cavern

Maybe this isn't the first WTF movie, but it certainly is in the running, and certainly the epitome of a WTF (What the Flock!) movie.

This movie, on the surface, is about people of different nationalities and sides during a war, being trapped in a cavern together. The social plot is about the "class" warfare, as the "officer" class becomes the majority, and the one "enlisted" man becomes the leader.

This should have been a good movie. The very nature of it destined it to "cult classic" status, but the writing is perhaps the worst you could get for what could have been great.

We want to cheer for the lone enlisted man, John Saxon, whose everyday looks made him a natural for the "Everyman", but his character looks to be written by someone who has never been in the "enlisted" class.

We have one German surviving to reach the cavern, who becomes the solitary enemy figure, but not a nemesis. In fact, he is one of the more rational of the characters. The nemesis figure comes from a cliché of a rich jerk, played by Hagman. However, Saxon's character is so poorly written, that we have a hard time pulling for him against the cliché jerk.

This is a great example of a great idea gone sour by poor writing. Not surprising to those of us who have sat in bard meetings where decisions over writing are made. It's always best to let one writer submit and at most one other to edit, before the director makes his final "rewrite", which most directors do. Today, you even have prima donna actors doing "rewrites", which is why you have so much garbage on film.

Those of us from the "enlisted" class want to cheer for this movie, and maybe that is why I don't rate it "1" or "2", but it is laughably bad. A real WTF movie, made worse by the fact that it did the worst job with a great idea.

There's a distinct spatial austerity in The Cavern (Sette contro la morte, 1964), one that doesn't merely result from budgetary limitations but arises organically from its narrative premise. The war is not externalized through battles or front lines, but internalized in a subterranean chamber where a disparate group of individuals is trapped-physically by a collapsed mountain, but morally and emotionally by the erosion of social order. This naturally imposes a kind of theatricality upon the mise-en-scène, one that is not stylized but imposed, like the walls of the cave itself. The camera's options are restricted, but this restriction becomes expressive. Characters are blocked in tight compositions, arranged often in tableau, where movement is minimal and meaning derives from gesture, silence, and spatial relation. It's a theatricality born of necessity, reminiscent of stagecraft in its constraint, but grounded by the rawness of the setting.

This kind of enclosed war cinema invites a very specific kind of performance: not the expansive, action-oriented mode of battlefield narratives, but the slow-burning, tension-fed presence typical of ensemble drama. The cast in The Cavern is composed almost like the setup to a joke-an Italian, a German, an Englishman, an American, and a Canadian walk into a cave-but that comic premise is dismantled almost immediately by the weight of circumstance. What begins as a symbolic gathering of nations becomes a crucible where ideology, trauma, guilt, and cultural friction collapse onto one another.

The performances reflect this shift. They are restrained, but not minimalistic-delivered with the awareness that every spoken line echoes in stone, that every silence hangs in air too thick with shared dread. The psychological decay is not performed in explosive breakdowns but in accumulated micro-fissures. The space itself dictates the tone, compressing behavior and limiting expression. Dialogue becomes the primary mode of interaction, but even dialogue is taut and reluctant, as if language itself is wearing thin.

There's a long-standing tradition in WWII cinema of stories built around forced cohabitation under pressure-films that could, structurally, be transplanted to the stage with little loss of effect. The Cavern belongs firmly in this tradition. While the camera occasionally finds expressive angles or moments of compositional interest, the essence of the film is closer to chamber drama than traditional war epic. The setting transforms the characters into involuntary performers in a stripped-down moral theatre, where each must negotiate personal trauma, cultural prejudice, and the slow collapse of etiquette and decency under survival stress.

This sensibility is closely shared with Ninety Minutes (Noventa minutos, 1949), a Spanish film that confines a group of civilians to a basement in London during a bombing raid, after which they discover they may have only a short time to live. As in The Cavern, the suspense is not driven by enemy presence or external escalation, but by internal unraveling. Both films construct a moral topography out of confined space, revealing how proximity under duress transforms class difference, national prejudice, and personal guilt into combustible elements. The theatricality in Ninety Minutes is slightly more formalized-its origin in Spanish postwar stage tradition is evident-but the emotional mechanics are uncannily similar: war reduces people to their barest ethical choices when the world above collapses.

Equally relevant is Lifeboat (1944), a film that, despite being set adrift at sea, constructs a microcosmic war within a lifeboat. The connection with The Cavern lies in the dramaturgy of entrapment and the way both films strip away the operational war to expose the psychological. In both cases, disparate individuals from different backgrounds are forced into intimate proximity, where the enemy is no longer a uniformed other, but each other's history, ideology, weakness, or resolve. Stylistically, Lifeboat is more polished and consciously composed, but the moral geometry it explores-between survival, manipulation, sacrifice, and suspicion-runs parallel to what The Cavern develops in its earthbound, darker register.

Direction in The Cavern wisely refuses to embellish the scenario. There's no overt stylization, no visual flourish. The lighting is stark and functional, enhancing the grain of the rock, the sweat on foreheads, the dirt accumulating on skin and conscience. Rather than manipulating emotion, the film positions the viewer as yet another occupant of the cave-unable to intervene, forced to watch the slow erosion of civility. Editing serves this strategy: transitions are unobtrusive, rhythm is slow but steady, reinforcing the sense of time as both meaningless and oppressive.

One could argue that the film's true realism is not visual, but psychological. It doesn't concern itself with historical accuracy in uniforms or procedures, but it does capture with uncomfortable fidelity the feeling of being cut off-from the world, from purpose, from clarity. In that sense, it avoids the heroic and leans into the tragic-not as spectacle but as stagnation. There's no redemptive arc, no cathartic climax. The war is not happening outside; the war is happening here, in the cave, among these few bodies, in the disintegration of trust, the quiet births of hatred, the fevers of guilt.

This sensibility is consistent with the broader cultural mood of 1964, particularly in European cinema. The memory of the war was by then shifting: no longer a fresh trauma, but not yet a sanitized memory. A film like The Cavern emerges from that liminal space. Its message isn't patriotic nor accusatory, but existential. It belongs to that specific strain of WWII cinema which does not seek to reconstruct history, but to examine what history did to the human interior. The fact that the film was shot in stark black-and-white, despite being made well into the color era, is telling. It isn't an aesthetic nostalgia-it's a philosophical position.

What the film ultimately reveals is a paradox: that claustrophobia, when rendered with honesty, can paradoxically open a vast emotional and ethical landscape. By removing the usual tools of war cinema-movement, scale, spectacle-it forces attention onto the smallest details: a glance withheld, a ration shared, a silence after a confession. That is where this film finds its power-not in grand narratives of conflict, but in the granular truth of endurance.

i saw this 37 years ago on the bottom of a double (possibly a triple) bill in a theater on Delancy st. in New York City. it wasn't the one i went to see but since i see every film released i stayed for it. it was a very pleasant surprise. i have always been fascinated by caves and have toured through most U.S. caverns so the title and basic setting of the film was immediately of interest. the only star i remember was John Saxon who i liked so that was another plus. beyond all that however, the film was unusally gripping and interesting. the plot details have escaped me over the years but it had to do with a small group of people (men & women) forced to be in a cave together even though they don't particularly like each other. these conflicts are brought to the surface in the claustrophobic space to result in various acts of agression and violence. there were no monsters in the cave as might be expected with such films but the drama between the characters i found to be surprisingly involving. i even saw it a second time.

This one starts out like a sub B flick but gradually improves to a B- as Larry Hagman and Peter Marshall are the familiar faces in the cavern. I almost turned this one off 10 minutes in but hung in there and it turned out to be not a 1 1/2 hour time suck I thought it might be.

The Cavern is a poignant movie which is much more about character development and human interactions than it is about action/adventure. The setting is a diverse group being trapped in a cave along with a huge supply of food, munitions, and other supplies. I do not want to reveal any spoilers, but several of the scenes in this movie stayed with me for over forty years. A excellent movie. Hard to find it on any streaming services, which is a shame. I think it might be in the public domain, but I am not sure of that. If you can find it, or see it is playing, record it and make sure to give it a watch. Well worth the time.