Battleground

The Battered Bastards Of Bastogne.

Dedicated to the battered bastards of Bastogne, this major player in the war film genre is directed by William Wellman & tells the story of a U.S. Army division involved in what became known as the Battle of the Bulge. The terrific cast features George Murphy, John Hodiak, Ricardo Montalban, Van Johnson and James Whitmore. The film was nominated for four Academy Awards and won two - one for Robert Pirosh's bold and fluctuating screenplay and one for Paul Vogel's realism inducing black-and-white cinematography.

Battleground is an important war film in many ways. Coming as it did at the tail end of the 40s, it was not required to be a flag waving morale booster for a country at war. Free of this burden, Wellman & Pirosh (an actual veteran of the Bastogne engagement), crafted a grunts eye view of the war. Forcing us the viewers to spend the whole of the movie with one army squad (the 101st Airborne Division), we get to know them, their fears & peccadilloes etc. Pirosh cleverly telling it as it was, scared men doing their duty. It's that we have been with them as their persona's have been laid bare, that makes the battle sequences even more potent. The jokes have stopped, the camaraderie and harmless rivalries replaced by men crying for their mothers or in some mud hole fighting for their lives. This snow covered and fog shrouded part of Belgium a bleak canvas for the harshness of war (amazingly shot on the lot). It's a stunningly structured film, one that doesn't resort to type, it subverts the many war film plot developments that are rife in genre pieces that both preceded and came post its release.

The cast are uniformly strong, and all get get ample time to impact on the narrative. Something that isn't always the case with ensemble pieces. Somebody else was strong too, Producer Dore Schary, who had to fight an unconvinced Louis B. Mayer (MGM head man) to get the film made. Schary's faith in the piece was rewarded as the film became a critical darling and a box office winner. It's not hard to see why for this is a realistic and gritty look at the hardships of war and those that fought in it. Influencing many that followed it by entertaining without gusto histrionics, Battleground is still very much a template war film. 8.5/10

Based on the true life activities of an American division shortly after the D-Day landings in the winter of 1944, this offers one of the most authentic interpretations of the wartime experiences of a dozen or so ordinary soldiers far from home, cold, hungry and fearful. They are led by “Holley” (Van Johnson) but rank means precious little really as the squad try to navigate the foggy countryside around Bastogne with little ammunition or food. Meantime, the Nazis are plotting their own major counter-offensive and with a constant barrage of sniper fire, leaflet dropping and radio broadcasts spelling doom and gloom for them, these squaddies find themselves living on their nerves more and more. What stands out with this drama is that it avoids the more rabble-rousing and jingoistic aspects of warfare cinema and concentrates more on just how tough their situation proved on even the most robust of these men. Men, it should be said, who were not professional soldiers nor were they remotely prepared - physically or psychologically - for the attritional aspects of this evolving, taut, scenario. Each man has their own way of dealing with this, and in many cases these ways are neither reliable nor consistent. They can vacillate between despair and hysteria, terror and optimism and a really effective cast deliver with authenticity. George Murphy’s “Slazak” probably does best for me, but there are plenty of others treading on these eggshells including one of his more natural contributions from Ricardo Montalban, as well as John Hodiak - but it’s really the ensemble approach to the storytelling that demonstrates just how vital teamwork and inter-reliance were for survival, for sanity and for motivation. William Wellman keeps that tension going potently with only a modicum of pyrotechnics and gunfire, but with plenty of conversation - rational, irrational and downright bizarre, as we head to no particular conclusion for these men but a piece of a jigsaw puzzle about which they didn’t really know their own part much less the bigger picture. It’s a film about the ordinary folk who fought in WWII and for two hours presents us with quite a compelling and emotional character study.