Battleground (MGM) is a story about the Battle of the Bulge. Filmed with a sentimental, Mauldin-type humor and some standard war movie heroics, it concentrates on one squad of the 101st Airborne Division, which was enveloped near Bastogne by the surprise Nazi breakthrough of December 1944. The eight-day defense of Bastogne is gallantly manned by several of MGM's regulars (Van Johnson, John Hodiak, George Murphy, Ricardo Montalban), who were toughened up before the filming by two weeks' basic training, but who still look too full-faced for their battle-weary roles.
Though Scripter Robert Pirosh fought in the foxholes near Bastogne, his story is littered with humor, characters and incidents made familiar by every war story since What Price Glory. His soldiers, never silent, are always armed with dialogue that should keep movie audiences giggling and, in the acceptable Sergeant Flagg style, mordantly gripe and gibe at each other. That fixture of war movies, the rookie (Marshall Thompson) with the Mother's Boy face and a frightened desire to please the grownups, turns up in the first scene; not long after, enters the friendly, lushly curved peasant girl (Denise Darcel). And so the show goes its well-worn way until the last survivors, about to be chopped to bits by the enemy, see the sky blossom with Allied planes.
Despite its gummy spots, e.g., a trite pep talk by Chaplain Leon Ames explaining to a battle-hardened gang of veterans why they are fighting, Battleground is the sternest studio-made war film since The Story of GI Joe. On the debit side, each soldier is given a bit of colorful routine that is tiresomely underlined every time the soldier is seen: Private Douglas Fowley loses or clicks his store-bought teeth; ex-Editor John Hodiak mourns over the fact that his wife in Sedalia knows more about the battle than he does. But Director William Wellman threads his way through these overworked signposts of character and makes each of the "Screaming Eagles" a rounded, tough human being. Ruthlessly demanding authentic gesture and movement from his actors, Wellman even gets it from that professional of boyish overstatement, Van Johnson.
MGM's leading bid for Academy Award honors—and the first job at the studio to be signed by Producer Dore Schary—stacks up well against such recent combat films as Task Force and Command Decision; nonetheless such a wartime documentary as San Pietro makes it seem like a put-up job. Rarely catching the quick fury of infantry fighting, the camera shots are mostly the comfortable, carefully composed setups that are possible in a studio production, but in actual warfare would mean a quick death for the cameraman. Neatest trick: in most of the snowstorm scenes the snow sticks to everything but the G.I.s.