With its mangy, anonymous sets, lower-class heroes who treat themselves as sages, and the primitivism (the lack of cutting, rawness with actors, whole violent episodes shot in one take), Steel Helmet antedates Godard's equally propagandist work. From the bald and bereft sets to the ponderous, quirky messages that are written on small bits of paper and mailed out of the film like little newspapers (Please help Baldy to grow some Hair), his mangy characters are stubborn cousins to the similarly blocky ones that fight a war near Godard's Santa Cruz. The countries involved are just as unknown , and below both careers is this obsession with renegades, people straddling two worlds, the sane and insane (Shock Corridor), the bourgeois and the revolutionary (La Chinoise).
Manny Farber, Farber on Film (pg. 670)
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