One Intelligence officer, Daniel Kiley (Henry Fonda), has his suspicions that the Germans are up to something, but is dismissed by his superiors.
The Germans launch their attack, with the spearhead commanded by ruthless Panzer commander Hessler (Robert Shaw).
With only 50 hours worth of gasoline, Hessler is determined to break the Allies’ lines and capture their fuel.
Will Kiley be able to stop him?
One of the lesser-known war epics, Battle of the Bulge makes for an interesting complement to The Bridge at Remagen.
The only thing I knew about it going in was how historically inaccurate it is - released 20 years after the campaign it received criticism from the real-life people involved in it.
Watching the movie 60-ish years later, Battle of the Bulge comes across as a tad simplistic.
As a story, the film splits between Henry Fonda’s intel specialist and Robert Shaw’s Hessler, a Panzer division commander, with a few subplots of various American soldiers of various ranks to provide a sense of context.
It is bad history - the film was shot in Francoist Spain, and aside from a few scenes featuring snow, it looks more like the plains of Spain than the Ardennes.
But as a war film, it is a bit hollow - it feels like a summary with stick figure characters moving through story points.
Going off the films I had been watching - which were more fictional action-based stories - Battle of the Bulge is passable as an action epic.
We are introduced to a couple of characters, and they are all brought together for a final showdown; the green lieutenant becomes a leader; Henry Fonda foils Hessler and proves his detractors wrong; Hessler is destroyed by his own hubris.
It is not a great movie, and reading it in the context of its release, it feels like an extended justification for what was being unleashed in southeast Asia.
The cast are all in fairly stock roles - the stars (Fonda, Robert Ryan and Dana Andrews) are solid depositors of exposition; the supporting players (including Charles Bronson and Telly Savalas) are simple archetypes.
The big disappointment is Robert Shaw - as the villain, Shaw delivers a robotic performance, with a German accent that - while not ridiculous - feels like the epitome of a UK actor putting on a German accent.
Combined with the lack of characterisation, all the widescreen shots of tanks make the film feels a bit like a wikipedia entry half-remembered by a pleb who was only half-reading to begin with.
That being said, the best element of the movie is its sense of scale, particularly the columns of real tanks charging at each other across the (Spanish) plains.
Director Ken Annakin had previous form in this arena - he directed the English and French sequences in the 1962 D-Day epic The Longest Day - and there is a solid grasp of geography to the setpieces which keeps the movie watchable. There is some good use of moving camera (using vehicles and aerial units) that make the action more impressive and dynamic.
Battle of the Bulge may not be the best war epic of its time, but in its own clumsy way, it might be the most illustrative of the genre.
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