Product Description

Van Johnson, Ricardo Montalban and George Murphy star in this remarkable war film, nominated for six Oscars(R) (including Best Picture) about courageous American G.I.s caught up in the battle at Bastogne. Year: 1949

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #2279 in DVD
• Brand: Warner Brothers
• Released on: 2005-05-03
• Rating: NR (Not Rated)
• Aspect ratio: 1.33:1
• Formats: Black & White, Closed-captioned, Subtitled, NTSC
• Original language: English, French, German
• Subtitled in: English, French, Spanish
• Number of discs: 1
• Dimensions: 1.00 pounds
• Running time: 118 minutes

Amazon.com
Director William Wellman (The Big Heat) offered up this 1949 treatment of the Battle of the Bulge, which won Oscars for best screenplay and best cinematography. The film concentrates on the camaraderie and the divisions between the troops as they ready for the big offensive. Told in a taut narrative, the men of the 101st, led by Van Johnson, wait out the winter in the Ardennes forest to confront the German army in what would be the last major offensive of World War II. The men are demoralized and trapped, with no hope of support from the Allies as they are forced to band together and defend their position. A classically assembled war drama that nevertheless manages to be both engrossing and entertaining, Battleground is a mainstay of the genre. --Robert Lane

Customer Reviews

The Original Band of Brothers
Of the dozen or so films that use the Battle of the Bulge as a backdrop, BATTLEGROUND stands out as one of the best. Starring Van Johnson and John Hodiac, look for other young and upcoming stars of screen and television tube such as Marshall Thompson, Ricardo Montalban, James Arness and Richard Jaeckel.

The date is December 1944. The place is Bastogne, Belgium. The Germans have just unleashed their last major offensive in the west and the US 101st Airborne is rushed in to stem the tide. The film focuses on one platoon of airborne troopers and their actions outside of Bastogne.

If you thought the Bastogne sets for HBO'S BAND OF BROTHER'S were fantastic, get a glimpse of the equally fantastic sets for BATTLEGROUND. The story is presented from the GI point of view, so there are few opportunities to see the German soldiers up close.

In terms of historical accuracy, BATTLEGROUND was so well researched that even the weather conditions are matched with historical fact -- specifically that it did not start snowing until the 21st of December.

This film was a bit of gamble by MGM in 1949. In the post World War II and pre Korean War years, audiences were generally tired of war films. Additionally, BATTLEGROUND was not a showcase for clean-shaven football hero-type soldiers. The characters in this story are a collection of brave, tired, freezing cold, grimy and hungry soldiers just trying to survive. Apparently the formula worked because the film was nominated for six Oscars and won two (Best Screenplay and Best Cinematography). Captured on black and white film stock, the picture is occasionally intercut with real combat footage.

Alongside films like THE LONGEST DAY, this film is one of the best about GIs during World War Two. There are some old "colorized" versions floating around out there. Try to avoid those in preference for the original high-contrast black and white version.

A Classic War Film!
I remember seeing this movie in classic black and white when I was only seven or eight, and I was impressed by its accurate and poignant portrayal of men in combat then. It wear well, after all these years, for this early star-studded take on the Battle of the Bulge seen through the prism of a platoon of young and inexperienced soldiers still inspires and moves the viewer with an authentic, sincere and gripping look at the reality of men in battle. Van Johnson leads the stellar cast of Hollywood notables trudging through the bleak and battle-torn landscape of wintry France as they dig in for the brutal exchanges with the Wehrmacht in Hitler's final bold gamble to turn the tide of war by counterattacking the Allies with a dozen divisions and 1,400 tanks in the dead of winter. In a battle that served to show the surprised world just how formidable and ferocious the American army could be, the soldiers beat back and defeat the vastly larger, better equipped, and more experienced German attackers.

This is not the typical gung-ho Hollywood take on battle, but is rather a thoughtfully scripted look at the range of emotions and experiences of a group of young men faced with the brutalizing and surreal situation of day-to-day life in combat. The range of emotions and degree of camaraderie shared by the men belies any attempt to oversimplify, and a few scenes in particular bring home to the viewer the stark truths of such an experience. Still, it is a rousing film, and one finds himself cheering quietly as most of the soldiers triumph and survive the experience of exposure to the elements as well as the enemy. The sets are not elaborate, but are appropriately (and accurately) bleak and dismal, and don't offer much in the way of distraction from the action and dialogue on the screen. The movie won several Oscars, and was a huge commercial success despite its grisly subject. This is a wonderful, thoughtful, and fairly accurate depiction of life on the ground during the time period of the Battle of the Bulge, and one I think you will enjoy seeing again and again. Enjoy!

Still the classic World War II movies about American G.I.s
The first twenty minutes of "Saving Private Ryan" raised the bar on the realism of war film in terms of the portrayal of the violent hell of combat. But in terms of showing us in a movie what it was like to be combat troops in World War II, the standard still remains the 1949 film "Battleground," directed by William Wellman (and I say this having loved "Band of Brothers"). The film won Oscars in 1950 for Robert Pirosh's script and Paul Vogel's black & white cinematography, and was nominated for Best Picture, Best Director, Best Supporting Actor (James Whitmore), and Best Editing (John D. Dunning).

The setting for "Battleground" is the besieged city of Bastogne during the Battle of the Bulge and focuses on I Company of the 101st Airborne. Pirosh had based the story on his own experiences during the battle, which including the details like Private Kippton (Douglas Fowley) always losing his false teeth and Private Rodriguez (Ricardo Montalban), who came from L.A. and had never seen snow before he got to Belgium. The situation was pretty simple: the Germans have Bastogne surrounded and the 101st is short on food and ammunition. Sgt. Kinnie (Whitmore) and the men of I Company have there sector to control, so they sit in the freezing cold, waiting for the Germans to attack and praying for the cloud cover to lift so they can get air support and supplies.

I am sure I am not the other kid from my generation who learned to do the cadence call of "Sound off," not knowing that it came from older kids who had seen this movie. This is a movie full of memorable scenes: Private Holley (Van Johnson) trying to make eggs, a checkpoint exchange that shows the importance of knowing baseball terminology like "Texas Leaguer," and a befuddled German officer trying to understand if General McAulliffe's infamous reply of "Nuts" to the demand for the 101st's surrender is a negative or an affirmative response.

For me the key moment in the film comes when I Company finally receives supplies dropped from C-47s. These guys have been freezing and pretty much starving for a week, and when they open up crates of SPAM and K-Rations, they are clearly disappointed. It is not until they find ammunition that they finally get excited. The montage of defeating the Germans is superfluous at that point, because the look in the eyes of these guys captures the moment even better.

In terms of realism I do have one slight knock on this film, in that I Company is atypical because they had winter coats (compare with the Bastogne episode of "Bad of Brothers"), but that is rather secondary to the point of this film, which is to celebrate the citizen soldier. As Holley explains to a major, "PFC" means "praying for civilian." Even when the Chaplain (Leon Ames) answers the big question, as to why these guys had to leave their families and jobs to fight in Europe, in has less to do with fascist ideology and more with the idea that the Germans were bullies throwing their weight around and killing a lot of people.

Still, "Battleground" comes down to the guys in I Company, Jarvess (John Hodiak), "Pop" (George Murphy), Layton (Marshall Thompson), Spudler (Jerome Courtland), Standiferd (Don Taylor), Hansan (Herbert Anderson), Bettis (Richard Jaeckel), Doc (Thomas E. Breen), and Sgt. Walowizc (Bruce Cowling). There is a tendency to make fun of the idea of the melting pot nature of these units, but we are talking diversity in terms of ethnicity more than racial lines and is certainly in keeping with everything I have read about the 101st. The humor in the trenches is a lot grimmer than you hear in most of these movies, an advantage of being made several years after the war ended (compare it with Wellman's 1945 film "Story of G.I. Joe").

This film is more about the psychology of war, putting up with the weather, the lack of supplies, the Germans trying to get them to surrender and showing up dressed in American uniforms, and keeping up morale than it is about actual fighting. That makes it rather unique in terms of movies about World War II in general or the Battle of the Bulge in particular. "Battleground" remains one of the classic films about grunts in the army.