During the Battle of the Bulge—December 1944—the 101st Airborne Division is moved to Bastogne. We follow a number of soldiers (Van Johnson, James Whitmore, Douglas Fowley, George Murphy, Herbert Anderson, Ricardo Montalban, Don Taylor, John Hodiak, Marshall Thompson) as they fight, suffer, die, and try to survive in the days they are trapped, surrounded by Germans. Due to the fog, they cannot receive air support. They have no idea what the situation is, or even where they are, though they expect to win once the weather changes and the planes show up.
Battleground was both a critical success and a popular one, but time has not been kind to it. Its strength was its novelty. WWII films had been stylized and heroic, with larger than life figures taking bold actions. Battleground took a more realistic approach, telling the “story” of average GIs. They are flawed with no special skills or abilities. They are sometimes brave, sometimes cowardly, and mostly just do their jobs while being more concerned about getting a warm meal and escaping the snow. Battleground shows the audience only what the soldier see, so neither we nor they know what is going on. Germans show up from time to time but no one knows if this is part of a big push or a few stragglers. The soldier don’t know if they are winning or losing and death comes almost randomly. A lot more time is spent with the condition of the soldiers feet than with combat.
All this was a new experience to movie-goer in 1949. But since then we’ve had Black Hawk Down, Full Metal Jacket, Saving Private Ryan, and Band of Brothers, making walking with the soldiers old hat. Without that freshness, Battleground has to make it on its quality alone, and there it is a mixed bag. With competition for realism, the sanitized moments become glaring issues. These WWII soldiers don’t swear, have no interest in sex, and don’t bleed. It’s realism after the censor has had his way.
Ignoring the “reality,” the movie is…fine. Van Johnson was always a weak actor and he is a weak one here. He plays it a bit cartoonish. The rest of the cast is good enough, though no one is exciting, which is doubly true of the characters. They are stock war movie characters, most being defined by a single trait. One character chews tobacco. Another repeats, “That’s for sure; that’s for dang sure.” Yet another used to be a newspaper columnist. That’s all we know of them, and they never become more human.
The framing is too confining. There isn’t a wide shot to be found. This isn’t a matter of keeping the focus on the individual soldiers, but of having small sets (the exteriors were shot on a sound stage) and a tight budget. I kept expecting an actor to step off of a snow pile and come crashing down on a wood floor. It feels cheap and tiny. And that cheapness carries through to every aspect of the production.
That’s not to say Battleground is terrible or unpleasant, but without the selling point of being a rare “truthful gaze” into the life of soldiers, there’s not a lot of reason to watch.