Battleground

William Wellman made two of the more important World War II films of the 1940s. The Story of G.I. Joe, from 1945, is said by many to be his finest picture, but unfortunately it is not available on DVD. Battleground, from 1949, is, and I watched it yesterday. It's a quintessential example of the "platoon" picture.

The film details members of the 101st Airborne as they participate in the Battle of the Bulge in December 1944. What's striking about the film is how the soldiers are depicted as regular guys with lots of fears and complaints, sort of like the Willie and Joe cartoons by Bill Mauldin. The heroism shown by these grunts comes from pain and suffering--they are not plaster saints.

The guys are holding the town of Bastogne in Belgium. Though they are Airborne, they are socked in on the ground, with a persistent fog shrouding the area, preventing air support (and supplies). The sergeant, a tobacco-chomping cuss, is James Whitmore. The other main members of the ensemble are Van Johnson, who supplies some comedy with his frustrated attempts to cook eggs in his helmet or woo a French girl; John Hodiak as a newspaperman, and George Murphy as the older guy (inevitably nicknamed "Pop") who has been discharged due to a family emergency but the can't leave until it's official. There's also Ricardo Montalban as the Latino kid from L.A., the Southern guy named Abner, a sourpuss with false teeth who complains about everything, and the new guy.

A lot of this feels familiar today, the stuff of parody, and to be sure the script is full of cliches. But in 1949 that may have all seemed very fresh, what with the war only a few years over. If one rolls their eyes at some of the collegiate patter, which at times seems strained, one can also admire the fluency of how so many characters are ably juggled.

The best thing about this movie is the black and white photography by Paul Vogel, whom I'm glad to see won an Academy Award for it. For almost the entire running time the characters are in fog, and you can really feel it in his work.

A few interesting cast notes: in the opening scene is Scotty Beckett, who was one of the Our Gang kids, and as Hanson is Herbert Anderson (then billed as Guy Anderson) who is best known as Mr. Mitchell in the Dennis the Menace series.