Really Good Movies! The one with the fakest fake tanks

 

 

Title: The Battle of the Bulge

What Year?: 1965

Classification: Prototype/ Anachronistic Outlier

Rating: Underrated (1/3)

 

As I write this, I have just finished a week off, which gave me time to think over things I want to do, new and old. As usual, that led to two colliding trains of thought. On one hand, I have once again been thinking of dusting off this particularly infrequent feature, dedicated to actual good movies. On the other, I have been doing a whole lot of research on World War 2. That led me to consider a few movies that I had grown up with, and that finally brought me to the one I saw trashed the most. Of course, that was enough to convince me it was worth a review, so I present The Battle of the Bulge, a war movie that really tried.

Our story begins after a very dramatic tank-themed credits roll with an introduction to the actual Nazis preparing for their last great offensive, against the American forces gathered at the borders of Belgium and France. (Too bad about Operation Bagration…) The dastardly Krauts have a two-fold plan. One is to send English-speaking troops in American uniforms to engage in sabotage and general mayhem behind Allied lines. The other is to crush the forces of democracy with their new King Tiger tanks, commanded by a morally complex Teutonic officer. (Guess which one actually worked…) We then meet a grizzled tanker, a young officer, a charming local damsel and an assortment of other colorful characters who must roll with the tide as German might throws the allies into disorder and retreat. But the looming final battle will be for a prominent oil depot, and the ubermenschen must triumph or run out of gas!

The Battle of the Bulge was a 1965 war drama by Warner Bros, based on the Ardennes Countoffensive of December 1944 and the related Operation Greif. The film was regarded as an answer to 1962 Fox film The Longest Day. Robert Shaw was cast as the German commander Col. Hessler, following his appearance as Grant in From Russia With Love. His character was considered a fictionalized version of accused war criminal Joachim Piper, the only role to closely correspond to an identifiable historical person. Others in the ensemble cast included Henry Fonda, Charles Bronson and Telly Savalas (see… Horror Express? And the Gobots movie???) as the tanker Guffy. The film was criticized at the time of release for historical inaccuracies by a number of participants in the battle, including Dwight Eisenhower. It later attracted controversy for its use of post-war armored vehicles, including American Pattons identified onscreen as German Tiger 2 tanks, and filming at locations in Spain that did not resemble the terrain or conditions of the battle. It was a possible commercial failure, earning a North American box office of $4.5 million against a $6.5M budget. It would benefit from frequent airings on television. As of April 2023, it is available for free streaming on Youtube.

For my experiences, this might well be the first major World War 2 movie I ever saw thanks to 1990s TV. Long after, still long ago, I had my rematch and definitely found it poorly aged. What really stood out in the research and ponderings that led to this review is how far it already was from the war. In the culminating irony, it’s still earlier than the biggest and possibly last “modern” wave of war films in the 1970s (see Cross Of Iron), which I now know accounts for most of the ones that I can remember encountering in the wild back when. That finally brought me very cautiously back to this one. I am now prepared to say, it held up a lot better than it is given credit for.

Moving forward, the obvious things to get out of the way are almost all things that were almost entirely beyond anyone’s control. In particular, there was simply no way to portray tanks in the numbers this film required without using the real thing. There was even less that could be done to film significant numbers of functioning armored vehicles effectively and safely, except under conditions far more ideal than those of a “real” battlefield. I must further emphasize that the vast majority of the movie’s scenes at least show snow and forests rather than the sunny plains (in Spain???) that everyone complains about. I will further admit, the wonky tanks definitely threw me off more than anything else the last time I came back to this one. Even then, what really bothered me was that I had no trouble envisioning solutions to a number of problems. The actual King Tiger in particular was already advanced enough that any number of later tanks could have substituted tolerably for it with no modification beyond a big enough mockup of the turret. Hell, if they had just called them Panzer IVs, a mockup of the gnarly late-war versions would already have so much extra plating we wouldn’t even see the wheels and suspension that give the most trouble.

That leaves the characters and story, which admittedly don’t hold up as well as they could have. The usual problem with ensemble casts is that the time for real character development has to be divided between them, and this suffers a little more than usual. In certain lights, Shaw’s character does as much harm as good. On the balance, he does at least deliver on his outsized screen time, actually pulling off the cold-blooded, hyper-analytical Prussian military man. The only thing really debatable is the effort to show his disapproval of the conduct of his men, which is uniquely framed in the same functional terms as his tactics. On the Allied side, we do get a relatable and genuinely entertaining everyman in Savalas, who might just as well have been elevated to the lead. The rest of the cast is either too undeveloped or cliches (both in the case of the doomed love interest). What again sets this apart is that the story actually works in many of the issues that truly decided the battle and the war. The chronic oil shortages of Nazi Germany are a recurring plot point that takes a brutal twist in the finale, while the vastly exaggerated effectiveness of the Greif masquerade indirectly highlights the extent to which it was founded in pulp adventures over sound tactics. (It’s worth further note that participants who survived to be brought to trial emphatically denied that they had fired on Allied troops while posing as same.) An extra highlight that came close to “one scene” status is the discovery by the baffled Nazis of a fresh chocolate cake, with all that it implies about the logistics that the US brought to bear.

Now for the “one scene”, I’m going with one that I realized I remembered from way back when, which I probably wouldn’t have placed in this movie without actually seeing it. Toward the end, Shaw/ Hessler is talking to his subordinate Conrad, portrayed by Christian Blech, who was not only German but an actual Wehrmacht veteran. When his commander reports that they have advanced further than any other unit, the subordinate exclaims, “We have won the war!” That draws a monologue from Hessler, who admits that conventional victory was already beyond the Nazis’ reach in 1941. Instead, he maintains that their war will simply go on indefinitely. When Conrad asks what will become of their families, the commandant says chillingly, “They will become German soldiers, and you will be proud of them.” It’s as warped a view of reality as Conrad’s laughable optimism, yet it captures both the outlook of the Nazis by the end of the war and the eventual realities of the Cold War. Given the fate of his real-life counterpart, it’s all the more unsettling to consider Shaw’s quite casual remark in the midst of this: “The world is not going to get rid of us after all…”

In closing, what I come to is an idea I initially developed earlier in this review, on what I consider the fundamental tiers of war films. The truly and fully “Historical” films are the ones that are or claim to be effectively documentaries or biographies, like The Longest Day, based entirely on “real” events and the experiences of those involved. At the other end are what I count as Allegories, especially in the “anti-war” subgenre, which openly use the events and setting as the backdrop for a broader message. (Separate rant, the latter category is where Enemy At The Gates should have been placed all along.) The actual “average” is the War Drama, a fictional narrative set within the historical setting. These films don’t have to be as meticulous as the first or as thematically ambitious as the second, just functional enough not to be at odds with reality beyond what narrative conventions and available technology already impose. In those terms, the present film is no more a “failure” than Saving Private Ryan. By my usual refrain, it did its duty. After all this time, that’s enough to earn my respect.