Carl Foreman may have set out to make the antiwar film to end all antiwar films, but with a disjointed script, awful performances by most of the cast, and squabbles over the cutting between the director and the producers, what emerged was a sprawling, ugly mess that occasionally
succeeded in packing a punch. The film follows the exploits of one infantry squad from Sicily through the invasion of France, into Germany, and on to the occupation at WW II's end. Each scene stands alone, focusing on a different character and incident, while other characters take on lesser
importance, or perhaps disappear altogether without explanation. Between each vignette is a scene of homefront silliness culled from newsreels. One man sleeps with an Italian woman whose soldier husband is missing. Peppard falls in love with a beautiful woman who tries to get him to desert to help
in her black market operations. Hamilton falls in love with Schneider, who he later discovers is a prostitute. A race riot breaks out between white and black troops. Fonda adopts a dog that other soldiers later shoot for target practice. Sergeant Wallach is wounded and sent to the hospital, and
when Peppard comes to visit him, he finds that most of Wallach's face has been blown off. The men are sent to witness an execution on a snowy night (based on the Eddie Slovik execution) while the soundtrack has Frank Sinatra crooning "Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas." At film's end Hamilton
is living in Berlin with a young woman whose sister has become the mistress of a Russian officer. When his girl friend leaves him to take up with a Russian, Hamilton stumbles home drunk. He encounters a similarly drunken Russian (Finney) and the two begin shouting. Unable to understand each other,
they pull knives and kill each other.
The film tries to re-create the actual feel of the war, in which a soldier was never sure what had become of the guys around him. Men come and go, are wounded, killed, captured, vanish. The first 20 minutes of the film center on Edwards. But when the film returns after a newsreel segue, he is gone
and is never mentioned again. The film as cut by Foreman failed to find an audience, and the producers immediately pulled it out of circulation and recut it to emphasize the action elements. The cast is as mismatched a collection of actors as ever were assembled for a "serious" movie. Peppard and
Hamilton have never been noted for solid acting skills. The international stars who perform the women's roles are too glamorous to be the battle-scarred trollops they portray. Only Wallach comes out of this film favorably, and the scene where Peppard, not knowing the magnitude of the old sarge's
wounds, goes to visit him with a bottle of whiskey, only to find a grotesque remainder of a face shouting at him to get the hell out, is unforgettable. Other scenes, though, come off without impact and leave one appalled at the filmmakers for showing them to us: Mitchum shooting the dog as it
follows the truck; a small French boy who propositions the men for homosexual relations, telling them, "the Germans were brave, and they liked me"; the sheer bad taste of playing Christmas carols over a firing squad sequence. All of it becomes numbing over the film's nearly three-hour running
time. Still, it is memorable. Songs include: "March of the Victors," "Sweet Talk," "No Other Man" (Sol Kaplan, Freddy Douglass), "Theme from the Victors (My Special Dream)" (Kaplan, Douglass, Howard Greenfield), "Does Goodnight Have to Mean Goodbye?" (Jack Keller, Gerry Goffin, Greenfield), and
"Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas" (Ralph Blanc, Hugh Martin, sung by Frank Sinatra). leave a comment