A two hours and forty five minutes long WW2 classic. Go and rent the DVD right away if you like these kind of movies and you still haven't seen it.
(WARNING: This review contains plot spoilers!)
“Battle of the Bulge" is the way they used to shoot those mega-epic WW2 good-against-evil and us-against-Nazis type films in which you had either Robert Ryan or Robert Mitchum starring because, besides their great acting talent, they had the best squint, pout and grimace in the business... until, that is, Clint showed up.
It comes complete with an INTERLUDE (2 minutes of rousing music while you watch a fixed graphic) and an INTERMISSION after the first 1:45 minutes...
MOVIE TRIVIA SIDE BAR: For those who are too young to remember, lets jog together down the memory lane... Once upon a time film copy was so expensive that film rolls were shared by multiple movie theaters. Or, sometimes the same guy happened to own a bunch of movie theaters within the same town.
All movies came in two reels – Reel 1 and Reel 2. After the Reel 1 was finished in one theater, while the good folks smoked their cigarettes (yes!) and enjoyed their cool beverages during the INTERMISSION, a courier rushed the Reel 1 to the other theater on a motorcycle, grabbed Reel 2 and zapped back to the first theater, just in time to catch the end of the INTERMISSION.
I remember sometimes just sitting there eating and drinking for over half an hour and waiting for the second half to begin because the poor courier would get stuck in traffic somewhere :-))
That was the function of the INTERMISSION back in those good-old bad-old days and you'd see an INTERMISSION in most of the long-winded movies shot (I'd say) before the '70s...
But I digressed. Back to the Battle of the Bulge.
In this blockbuster of a war saga Ryan is joined by Henry Fonda in the lead roles, playing Gen. Grey and Lt. Col. Daniel Kiley as the good guys.
On the “bad side" of the equation we have a platinum blond and dashing Robert Shaw , as tense as a Doberman, playing the German panzer brigade commander Col. Martin Hessler. (Trivia: Shaw was the only non-German playing a Nazi officer in the film.)
The film opens up in December 1944 when a smug Allied headquarters in Belgium assumes the war is almost won. But the hawk-eyed Lt. Col. Daniel Kiley (Fonda), a former cop turned military intelligence officer, begs to differ. He thinks Germans are getting ready for a surprise attack, especially when he himself took the aerial photo of Col. Hessler as he was driving in his chauffeured car through the mountains of Arden.
And who is Hessler? The most famous Panzer commander who won victories in France, Crimea and other places, event though his troops suffered great casualties. He is known as a no nonsense and reliable soldier to get the job done. And Hessler knows one “job" well – to attack and conquer.
However, Kiley's immediate superior Col. Pritchard ( Dana Andrews in a wooden performance) overrides him and implies that, as a former cop, perhaps he doesn't quite know how to read the tea leaves in a combat environment. Gen. Grey ( Robert Ryan at his cigar-chomping and swaggering Pattonesque best) prefers to keep his thoughts to himself and take notice of both views.
Hessler, the chief antagonist of the story, is taken to a secret underground command bunker and introduced new hi-tech weapons like the V1 and V2 rockets and the jet plane that the Germans are developing.
When ushered into the war theater within the following 18 months, these weapons are powerful enough to turn the tide of the war in Germany's favorm he is told. Hessler listens to all that with a grain of salt. He has seen and heard all that before. But what gets him going is the new Tiger tank, much faster and more powerful than any tank the Allies have, with a thicker armament and a devastating 90 mm cannon.
Despite his initial resistance, Hessler becomes a believer that they might indeed turn the tide and win the war by launching a surprise attack in the dead of the winter through the Arden forests and catching the Allies by a surprise. Since the weather reports suggest that it will be very cloudy and foggy for a few days days, Allied planes would not be a factor either.
When the assault begins, the advancement of the unstoppable Tiger tanks is rapid. All the front Allied posts fall like matchsticks, one by one. With the help of German paratroopers dressed like GIs and who talk perfect English due to their previous experience in the United States, the Germans cut the telephone and telegraph wires and launch a successful fifth column operation to confuse and misdirect the American troops.
Kiley, who was just about to be shipped back to the States due to his contrarian views, is vindicated and stays at the battle front since his heads-up observation skills keeps generating fresh intelligence and helps Gen. Grey in the most critical moments.
The rest of the movie is filled with great tank battle scenes shot both from the ground level and from the air, giving a sweeping bird's eye view of the battle ground. These are the sort of sequences that would be admired and enjoyed by all war movie fans.
Top notch authentic production values is not an accident since none of the tanks used were decoys and all were real vintage machines of destruction gathered from warehouses all across the Europe. But despite its complexity and grand scale of production, the whole movie was finished in just 8 months from the first "Action!" call to editing in post-production.
The figure of Sgt. Guffy (brought to life by the affable Telly “Kojak" Savalas ) provides comedy relief as we follow him and his sidekick running their own black market storefront by selling anything from pantyhoses and perfume to fresh eggs laid by live chickens kept in hotel rooms. While others are just trying to stay alive, Guffy makes it his mission to go back home with his pockets full of cash. And I believe we had those “St. Guffy" type operators in every war since then.
In the Third Act, Gen. Grey, with critical intelligence input from Kiley, at long last discover the Achilles' heel of Hessler's panzers – fuel! Soon Hessler's tanks would be running out of gas and then, since the weather has also started to clear up, they would be just sitting ducks.
The final confrontation takes place in front of the Allied fuel dump. Hessler's force is at long last beaten by a logistics nightmare that similarly devastated a much larger German invasion force at the outskirts of Moscow a short while earlier.
Battle of the Bulge is a good example to those films portraying a war in which the good and the evil were separated like oil and water, and there were no moral ambiguities to any of it. One almost – not quite but “almost" nevertheless – feels “nostalgic" for those days in which we knew exactly whom we were fighting and exactly when the war began and was over.
A booming 8 out of 10 as far as war movies go.
Ugur Akinci, Ph.D. is a copywriter, web content consultant, and an
award-winning technical communicator with 20 years of experience, the last 10 with Fortune 500 corporations.
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