Battle of the Bulge (1965)

I spent Memorial Day by having a marathon of epic war movies – Exodus, Saving Private Ryan, A Bridge Too Far, and Battle of the Bulge. I don’t want to spend an entire post untangling Exodus (because it would devolve into me having a political debate with myself) and there has already been so much written about Saving Private Ryan that there is nothing I can add to the conversation – though, both Exodus and Saving Private Ryan are effective propaganda. Battle of the Bulge and A Bridge Too Far are cut from the same cloth – they are both all-star war epics about a specific World War II battle. A Bridge Too Far is an effective movie with memorable set pieces and first-rate performances from its star-studded cast. It details with Operation Market Garden – a failed Allied operation that was intended to end the war by Christmas of 1944. It is one of the rare World War II movies that doesn’t depict the Allies in an entirely glowing light. It is definitely worth a watch and infinitely better than the subject of today’s review, Battle of the Bulge.

Where do I even begin with this movie? It is a movie that plays so loosely with the facts that it was denounced by Dwight D. Eisenhower (former US president and the Supreme Allied Commander in Europe during WWII). The movie feels like it was rushed into production, which would explain the bad continuity, clumsy rear screen projection, and shoddy special effects. It is amazing that this movie was released by a major studio. The movie was clearly inspired by the success of the 1962 war epic, The Longest Day – which commemorated the D-Day invasion. The Longest Day started the trend of star-studded war epics – big named actors would show up on screen, say a couple of lines, and then disappear, or they would come to an untimely end.  However, despite some controversial casting (like the then 54-year-old John Wayne being cast as Lt. Col. Benjamin Vandervoort, who was 27 when the invasion took place), The Longest Day stuck close to the facts. It also provided a balanced look at the Normandy Invasion – it is shown from the American, British, French, and German perspective.  Like A Bridge Too Far, it was based on a novel by Cornelius Ryan and is an ensemble piece. The closest we get to a main character is Richard Beymer as the beleaguered Private Dutch Schultz, but even he is offscreen for a good chunk of the movie.

While Battle of the Bulge took a few of its cues from The Longest Day – most notably, the producers hired Ken Annakin, one of the directors on The Longest Day, to helm the project – it goes with a different narrative route. In Battle of the Bulge there are two distinct main characters – Lt. Col. Daniel Kiley (Henry Fonda), an Allied military intelligence officer, and Col. Hessler (Robert Shaw), A German tank commander. Henry Fonda was a great actor, but this role was clearly done for the paycheck as he sleepwalks his way through the scenery. Sadly, this would typify Fonda’s career throughout the late 1960s and 70s. Robert Shaw, as the cold-hearted Hessler, fares better despite the cartoonish script.

The glaring problem with the script is that Kiley, a military intelligence officer, is always in the middle of the action and even makes strategic decisions. Now, I will admit I am not that knowledgeable about the military, but it seems unlikely that an intelligence officer (especially a middle aged one) would be allowed on the front lines Yet, Kiley, by sheer coincidence, finds himself in the middle of the movie’s climatic battle and even saves the day by ordering soldiers to burn up the fuel depot so the Germans can’t get their hands on it.

Col. Hessler is a villain straight out of G.I. Joe – with his thick German accent, cold demeanor, and obsession with continuing the war, one could easily imagine him violently shaking his fist at the Joes after they once again thwarted his world domination plot.  It is also evident that Robert Shaw desperately wants to do something interesting with the character, but is hampered by the juvenile script – when Hessler learns that captured US soldiers were massacred at Malmedy, he is visibly appalled by this, but that it is the closest thing we get to a character arc – by then end of the movie, he reverts to being a war monger – he excitedly tells his aide, Conrad, that he doesn’t care about victory, he just wants the war to continue for as long as possible. The character of Conrad was the filmmakers attempt at extending an olive branch to the anti-war members of the audience – he becomes disillusioned towards the war as the movie progresses and is visibly horrified when Hessler goes on his war mongering rant. The final straw for Conrad is when Hessler boasts about sending Conrad’s two sons to fight in the war. Battle of the Bulge was made during the early days of the Vietnam War, and the anti-war sentiment was already beginning to form in 1965, so this was a case of the filmmakers wanting their cake and eating it too. If they could appeal to the Hawks and Doves, then it would be a win-win scenario – war is bad but look at these badass tanks!  I also have a similar problem with Saving Private Ryan – it is a pro-war sermon disguised as anti-war narrative. 

Actresses Barbare Werle and Pier Angeli are given prominent billing in the cast, but they only appear in one scene, and the sole function of the characters is to contrast the Nazis with the Americans. Werle plays the prostitute Elena, who is sent by the higher up as a parting gift to Hessler, but he rejects her advances – which the filmmakers depict as being abnormal. Sure, he is married man, but how could he reject a woman who is offering herself up? Well, it’s because his evil ideology has made him cold and sterile, and drained him of all sexual urges. He is just a machine. 

Compare this to the scene between Sgt. Guffy (Telly Savalas) and the pretty Lousie (Pier Angeli) – the two of them run a black-market operation together, but Louise has strong feelings for Guffy. He returns her affection, but he doesn’t have time to make love, because there is a war going on. He regrets leaving her behind, but there is nothing he can do about it – duty comes first. Hessler is cold and impotent towards Elena, while Guffy is affectionate towards Louise. It’s just interesting to see 1940s propaganda pop in a movie made in the 1960s. 

I also suspect that Louise a nod to the character of Janine Boitard in The Longest Day, a desperate attempt to add sex appeal. Boitard was portrayed by Irina Demick, who gave a sexy performance as the French resistance fighter. The main difference is that Boitard serves a function in The Longest Day – she is used by the resistance to distract German soldiers. In the opening scene, she uses her sexual charms to distract German soldiers while resistance fighters sneak through a check point.  She even helps derail a Nazi train later in the movie. Werle and Angeli are given little to do, and their roles could have easily been deleted from the finished film.

The movie is notorious for its historical inaccuracies and errors. It isn’t surprising that a movie would take liberties with history – in fact, it is often necessary – the filmmakers have to take a historical event and condense it down to a reasonable running, which means certain historical figures will be combined or omitted entirely.  The problem with Battle of the Bulge is that it rarely resembles the battle it’s supposed to be depicting. The real-life battle lasted over a month (from December 16, 1944 to January 25, 1945).  It was fought in the Ardennes Forest in heavy snowy conditions and dense fog (which made it impossible for the Allies to provide air support for their troops on the ground). In the movie, the battle takes place over the course of a few days – Hessler is given a fifty-hour window to complete his mission. The weather occasionally resembles the actual battle, especially in the first half of the movie – there is the occasionally snowy landscape and dense fog, but all attempts at accuracy are thrown out the window during the film’s climatic assault – instead of heavily forested area, the battle takes place on an arid landscape with no snow insight. The movie also suffers from bad continuity, the weather changes frequently throughout the movie and often in the same scene – in one shot it is sunny outside and then it is cloudy. There is a scene where an officer talks about how the dense fog will make it impossible for air support only to be followed by an exterior shot of a sunny sky without a cloud insight. When the plot needs it to be foggy outside, the filmmakers’ resort to filming in the studio where they can make their own fog.  

The movie version of The Battle. 

The real-life Battle of the Bulge. 

The movie occasionally touches on a few interesting aspects of the battle – in an act of desperation, the German High Command dropped English speaking paratroopers, many of whom lived the United States, behind American lines and had them impersonate American MPs to disrupt the Allies. In the movie, Lt. Schumacher and his crew are giving the assignment of confusing the Allies – he reroutes them by shifting the road signs, so they point in the wrong direction. This could have made for a potentially interesting subplot – these are men who are torn between to loyalties, their fatherland and the country that adopted them, but the movie depicts them as total baddies, and we are supposed to cheer when the devious Lt. Schumacher gets his comeuppance. 

The Battle of the Bulge is really bad, but there is some entertainment to be found if you check your brains at the door and ignored the whole “based on the true story” aspect. At least the tanks look cool.

Credits: 
Cast: Robert Shaw (Col. Martin Hessler), Henry Fonda (Lt. Col. Daniel Kiley), Dana Andrews (Col. Pritchard), Robert Ryan (Maj. Gen. Grey), Charles Bronson (Maj. Wolenski), Telly Savalas (Sgt. Guffy), Ty Hardin (Lt. Schumacher), James MacArthur (Lt. Weaver), Hans Christian Blech (Conrad), George Montgomery (Sgt. Duquesnce), Pier Angeli (Louise), Barbare Werle (Elena), Werner Peters (Gen. Kohler), Karl-Otto Alberty (Maj. Von Diepel), Steven Rowland (Courtland). Narrated by William Conrad.

Director: Ken Annakin
Writers: Philip Yordan, Milton Sperling, John Melson, Bernard Gordon (uncredited)
Running Time: 170 min.