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BULGING WITH ERRORS
The
most damning publicity for Battle of the
Bulge came from Dwight Eisenhower, who
attacked the picture for its flagrant inaccuracies. Among his
objections: the movie’s narrator (William Conrad) states Montgomery
was in command of the British 8th Army at the time of the battle, when
in fact the 8th Army, under another general’s leadership, was in Italy, no
where near Ardennes, Belgium, the site of the 44 day-long clash; the
movie fabricates about a strategic U.S. fuel dump having played a part in
defeating the Germans; no German infiltrators actually ever managed
to do anything more than briefly worry the Allies; and the German Tiger
tanks depicted in the movie weren’t German but American tanks
previously used in the Korean War. Eisenhower also noted
the real battle took place in foresty environs
during one of the coldest European winters on record. The movie doesn’t implicate the real culprit—Hitler’s maniacal
war tactics—for the following losses: 120,00 Germans killed, wounded,
or labeled missing; over 600 tanks, 1600 planes and 6,000 other vehicles destroyed; on the American side, 8,000 killed or missing, 48,000 wounded, 21,000
captured, 733 tanks and tank destroyers lost. We might want to
blame director Ken Annakin for the messed up factoids, but someone else is more
likely responsible—screenwriter Philip Yordan, who career-wise never
considered factuality more persuasively dramatic than
concoction. (He’s aided and abetted by John Melson and Milton Sperling.)
Audiences know the movie is in trouble right away: Henry Fonda is taking what amounts to a joy ride
in a small plane passing over the moving vehicle of German commander Robert
Shaw. Insisting on taking a picture of him, Fonda demands the pilot repeatedly
fly over Shaw and when we get to see the photo’s perspective a little later,
we know it would have been impossible for Fonda to have taken it from the
air. And we sense the movie will be a cheat: many of the shots of Fonda and
Shaw are so obviously studio-processed we begin to laugh—a fatal
kind of laugh for an Ultra-Panavision 70 roadshow. (Making the exposure of
the shoddy worse is its projection via seamless
ROLLOVER IMAGE
Text COPYRIGHT © 2002 RALPH BENNER All Rights Reserved. |
.) Nothing about the action is convincing; everything about the acting is dishonorably discharged. With Robert Ryan, Dana Andrews, Ty Hardin, Pier Angeli, Charles Bronson, James MacArthur, Telly Savalas and George Montgomery. Jack Hildyard is listed as chief cinematographer, but there isn’t a single shot confirming it. Annakin’s 
