Battleground (1949)

Wings is my favorite war silent this side of The General, so it was about time I saw another William Wellman war flick. This came more than 20 years later -- later than anything else I've seen from Wellman, in fact -- but it still seemed likely to work for me. Even if few people in '49 wanted to see more about WWII.

The titular ground is that of the Battle of the Bulge, specifically during the Siege of Bastogne in Belgium, which places it in December 1944. It actually takes a while for any violence to turn up, and a lot of that is aerial bombing, which doesn't leave much room for honest-to-goodness battle with the focal characters, the 101st Airborne Division of the 327th Glider Infantry Regiment. As war movies go, it has a low body count.

Thanks in part to these factors, I got more of a feel for the soldiers than usual. I won't describe them individually, but they all have their occasions for both bravery and expression of a desire not to be there, sometimes bordering on if not veering into cowardice. The names you're likely to know are Van Johnson, who plays arguably the main guy; Ricardo Montalbán, who surprised me by getting third billing as a Latino; an early James Arness; and Ian MacDonald, who briefly appears as General Anthony McAuliffe. The one character to annoy me, played by Douglas Fowler, keeps making a crackly noise with his new dentures; I kept wishing he'd either lose them for good and sound like Walter Brennan for the rest of the picture or end up among the dead. (Yeah, that's harsh, but it's a foregone conclusion that somebody in the company dies.)

I rather like the dialog. It gets colorful and even amusing, between the troops' penchant for biting irony and a few instances of naive confusion. For example, Germans don't know right away how to take McAuliffe's famous "Nuts."

And yes, I feel sorry for the bulk of the characters. Putting aside danger and homesickness, they're just plain tired and cold. They keep having to move camp before they find much comfort, which can make a lot of their work feel fruitless. Indeed, they often doubt their worth in this location compared with the U.S. Air Force pilots, tho the latter, despite the presence of German planes, won't come forth until the clouds clear up. The handful of civilians also get my sympathy; their resources are spread thin.

IMDb tells me that Battleground is pretty accurate. I can't claim to have learned much of interest from it, but if you're looking for something to watch on Memorial Day, this isn't a bad choice.