THE BATTLE OF THE BULGE
In sunny Burbank, California, where Pass Avenue intersects Warner Boulevard and Olive Avenue, there is a grass-covered traffic island on which stands a large billboard.
The legend on the billboard reads as follows:
THE HOME OF WARNER BROS. PICTURES
"Combining Good Citizenship With Good Picture Making!"—N.Y. Times
A screenwriter of my acquaintance, who had worked at Warners early in the Forties, when that sign was already long a landmark, several years ago (on a return to the lot) happened to mention to Jack L. Warner that the slogan really no longer applied, in that Warners was making "safe" films. Warner's reported reply was, "Let the young ones take the risks; we've got the quote."
The sign is a paint-peeling relic, twenty and more years outdated, a bit of memorabilia that suggests Jack L. Warner has a tendency to live in the past; to let the times pass him by. But for those out there in The Great American Heartland who may never get to that intersection of Burbank thoroughfares, Mr. Warner has seen fit to release an all-talking, all-singing, all-dancing epic of modern filmmaking so tuned to the whispers of the dead years, that any who wish may draw their own conclusions as to his harkening-back to the good old days.
So hear ye! Hear ye! Gather 'round and listen to the drum rolls, the rah-ta-tah, the tintinnabulation of patriotism, the gospel of war, according to Jack L.
And at a massed cost of $6,000,000, one might even vouchsafe that World War II was Mr. Warner's own private imbroglio. For surely no one man has made more bucks off our third most recent firefight than the vociferously vocal patriot who has caused The Battle of the Bulge to be made.
As the credits brochure handed out at the screening informs us, "Mr. Warner viewed the making of Battle of the Bulge as an exceptional opportunity to reconstruct one of World War II's most terrifying battlefield engagements, and at the same time he looked upon the picture as a vivid adventure for film audiences, as well as a resounding tribute to the Allied Forces which participated in those fiery days and nights combating the German invaders in the Ardennes."
What the brochure does not bother to tell us is that this is yet another example of Warner's view of Men At War, through glasses which may not be rose-colored, but certainly use a prescription that is thirty years outdated.
There is no need our dwelling at length in these columns on the dishonesty of the picture in terms of historical verisimilitude. The Department of the Army has already made its feelings public, and the shriek of the eagle may be heard abroad in the land. Nor any need to belabor the point that the film was obviously made not because it was "an exceptional opportunity to reconstruct one of World War II's blah blah blah," but because it filled a large hole in the Cinerama production schedule. Make one fantasy, they said, so The Wonderful World of the Brothers Grimm was made. Make one comedy, they said, so It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World was made. Make one western, they said, so How the West Was Won was made. Make one war picture, they said, so The Battle of the Bulge was made.
It is unfortunate no one has said, "Make a good film; forget the Cinerama tricks; forget the roller coasters and the onrushing tanks and the plunging trains and the flung spears; just make a helluva good picture, about people."
There is no need to hammer these points, for they are self-evident in the production. The Battle of the Bulge is no more than a 1940s-style soap-opera shoot-'em-up of the type Warners released during the war years. It is bigger, brassier, louder, more colorful, but in the final analysis, it is easily dismissed because it proffers a brand of thinking that is only rational these days for Birchers and dogfaces who look back on WWII as a pleasant experience.
This is not the face of war. The unifying facet of humanity is missing. There are great clots of armored Furies rolling across Belgian terrain, there are the usual stock cliché characters mouthing the usual stock cliché lines (not to be believed: General Grey to Lt. Col. Kiley as Hessler's panzers overrun them, "Looks like he's succeeded this time." Kiley: "He made one mistake." Grey: "What was that?" Kiley, with steely glare: "He got me mad."), and the attempt to convey a sense of order to an engagement that stretched down 85 miles of front and was fought in such a riot of disorder and counterthrust that even today Army historians are still finding missing pieces of the combat picture that explain why we won.
But worse than the Philip Yordan–Milton Sperling–John Melson screenplay that gives us a ludicrous answer to why we were not ground beneath the treads of those elite tanks, is the ancient and creaking philosophy of "propaganda" that suffuses the film, the swindle of hackneyed ideas wrenched whole and corrupt from films made to engender a fighting spirit in a nation at war.
It is a script filled with sound and fury, and like most of its ilk before it, this too is a tale told by an idiot. For Warners has eliminated the people in the war, and concentrated on the dubious joys of the spectacle of combat. It is the glorification of madness, without even the saving grace of being able to relate to the motivations of the men involved. Robert Shaw, as the German panzer leader, is wasted in a faceless color-me-rabid portrayal essentially as deep as a dish of tapioca pudding. Fonda, Ryan, Dana Andrews, the incredible Telly Savalas . . . all! Stick men! You drew them with wide, vapid smiles or beetled brows in your high school notebook. Comic book representations of flesh-and-blood men who lived and feared and came out the other side of the war with character in their faces. Character: something this film lacks in its totality.
A totality that mirrors the Warner slant on war and its fascination for the common man. Every film that spurred us to more and better bombsights, flying forts, M-1 rifles and the firm belief that God was on our side . . . all the films that said Democracy, Mom's Apple Pie and The American Way Of Life were the answer. The films that lied to us, but served (I suppose) a necessary purpose in their time. But their time is past. Like the aging gunslinger in a settled frontier town, the citizenry does not want to hear how noble it is to die in combat. Or if they don't want to hear, they should be forced to hear. To hear the messages of Paths of Glory—that men are cannon fodder—to hear the shriek of Dr. Strangelove—that total war is total insanity—to hear that if we must make war, let us make it quickly and as humanely as possible . . . perhaps the arteriosclerotic leaders of the major powers out there in the arena, equipped with arbalest and mace, banging each other into senseless surrender. They must be told that we are a poor, puny race not one-millionth as old as the great lizards who died out with each other's fangs in their throats.
They must be told the truth, not the candy-whip fantasies of the Jack Warners, who served their countries in good faith, but must now learn that the time of the gunslingers is past.
Or, to sum it up emblematically: in a cutaway scene in The Battle of the Bulge, we are told that Bastogne was an important facet of the battle, and we see a bomb-blasted wall with a sign on it. The sign says THE BATTERED BASHERS OF BASTOGNE. No, Jack L. Warner, with your happy thoughts of bold strong men in combat, they were not called the battered bashers. They were called THE BLOODY BASTARDS OF BASTOGNE and that, that is where it's at.
Truth is the only weapon that will save us. This film is a lie, and, as such, is a disgrace to the men who died, and the men who made their story.
Cinema / March 1966