Il grande attacco

I'm not a fan of war films to say the least and if I'm going to sit down and watch one, there generally has to be a real good reason for doing so. Despite the fact that Battle Force is a largely unknown and inconsequential war film from the late seventies; I actually did have several good reasons for seeing it. Anything directed by Umberto Lenzi is automatically worth watching considering all the great cult films he has delivered; from some of the best Giallo's to the very best of the Polizi genre, and adding to that is absolutely mouth-watering cast. However, in spite of those things; this is still a highly disappointing and really rather rubbish movie. The plot is rather confusing and doesn't make much sense and mainly focuses on two families of different nationalities during World War Two. However, we also focus on the actual war itself and various battles that the characters are involved in and this all gets mingled in with the stories of the families...

The main problem with this film is that it tries to do too much and the one hundred minute running time is simply not long enough for it to do it all in (although I am thankful that the film didn't last for longer!). I don't really know how credible Umberto Lenzi was as a director in 1978 (probably more credible than he was in the eighties), but somehow he has managed to get his hands on a magnificent cast chequered with stars - and not just cult stars! Big names such as John Huston, Henry Fonda and Orson Welles have roles alongside cult stars such as Ray Lovelock, Samantha Eggar, Evelyn Stewart, Stacy Keach, Helmut Berger and Edwige Fenech (who really doesn't appear for long enough). This cast is all well and good but unfortunately it's wasted. The plot lacks any sort of direction and the film might actually have been better as an anthology style movie with a few different but focused stories. The war scenes look extremely cheap (the budget was probably spent on paying stars' wages) and that also brings the film down, although there is plenty of action. Overall, this did actually have the potential to be a masterpiece; but to say the least, it isn't! Recommended for its cult value only.

Not bad at all for an Italian war spaghetti film. Of course it is not BATTLE OF THE BULGE, BATTLE OF ENGLAND nor THE LONGEST DAY either but the international cast helps much. Not a bad story, not so far from historical accuracy, good convincing acting and poignant scenes too. Excellent battle sequences. I have seen far worse in terms of Italian spaghetti war films. Here, at least, the German army - Afrika Korps - is not shown as silly soldiers - which they certainly were not - and a difference is made between SS - Gestapo - and the Wehrmacht. I enjoyed it very much. I guess there are many more films like this, Italian movie industry from the late sixties and late seventies provided so many of them.

I don't understand how Luciano Martino and Mino Loy were able to raise the money to hire so many big-name actors of the time (such as Orson Welles, John Huston, Henry Fonda, and Samantha Eggar) but they still had to rely on plentiful stock footage from earlier war movies like THE BATTLE OF EL ALAMEIN and LEGION OF THE DAMNED. Pretty much all the substantial action scenes featured here consist of lifted shots from late 60's films, giving it an overall dated appearance.

Umberto Lenzi's directing is good as usual, with lots of emphasis placed on the well-edited action scenes. The budget for production design and extras casting appears minimal however, with a lot of the same actors dying over and over again, and a few really shoddy toy tanks exploding.

As for the cast, just about everybody that had anything to do with the Italian movie industry shows up somewhere in the movie, from familiar dubbing voice Robert Spafford as Patton to future director Michele Soavi as Fonda's dead son. The photography and music are all top notch, yet this movie has gotten ad reviews across the board. Why? My guess is that it's because it has little or no plot to speak of. There are so many characters and so much going on in the film that it has no focus or direction. Eggar's character has no point in the movie other than she makes it slightly longer, and Edwige Fenech gets one lousy scene as a French prostitute. Eventually, most of the actors end up in Africa fighting on one side or the other and (surprise!) the Germans lose and all the German characters die, the end. But who goes to watch a good old-fashioned war movie for the plot anyway? There's plenty to enjoy if you like watching German soldiers lying in the road pretending to be dead so they can shoot the American soldiers that run up to help them. It also contains a number of memorable scenes like when Stacy Keach gets lost in the desert and falls over after about 10 seconds of walking, and a very irritating case of bad communication when Ray Lovelock attempts to call up his father and the two barely manage to get through even a few words.

The ending really comes out of nowhere though, but it's made especially funny as John Huston seems to just get bored of the movie and walk off saying "seeya around" right into the camera! The extended European cut at least provides a little more closure and overall much less disjointed, though it's missing the Orson Welles narration which so desperately tries to tie everything together. Definitely not a movie to miss... for fans of the Italian war movie sub-genre and those curious to see a sort of dry run for the WINDS OF WAR miniseries.

For a low-budget movie set during World War II, it does have a rough and violent edge. Above all, BATTLE FORCE surrenders to a non-existent plot and storyline that's been duped hundreds of times repeatedly. Don't expect much here as there's no specific meaning. Explosions and body counts are nothing new! Adding to the troop casulty count is of Orson Welles' annoying and interrupting narration, making it feel like a made-for-television documentary. War movies are instant classics in the grade "A" Hollywood circuit, and SAVING PRIVATE RYAN triumphs realism today. Despite a fairly good replica of those WW2 days, BATTLE FORCE is another run-of-the-mill production without enough substance. Anyone who grew up watching Hollywood war dramas in their lifetimes probably avoided this one while history was made.

The Biggest Battle (1978)

* 1/2 (out of 4)

Incredibly disappointing drama starts off in Germany during the 1936 Olympics where an American general (Henry Fonda), a German major (Stacy Keach), a Jewish actress (Samantha Eggar) and a war correspondent (John Huston) are having dinner and agreeing that Hitler will not cause a war. Flash forward to 1942 and war is happening and all sides of this dinner are now in the middle.

THE BIGGEST BATTLE is an Italian and West German co-production that was meant to rival various American movies that took on the WWII subject. Of course something like MIDWAY was an obvious inspiration. The most interesting thing about this film is that it did have a bigger budget than you'd normally see in a film like this but the problem is that the budget wasn't big enough. It's clear that writer-director Umberto Lenzi wanted to make an epic war film and even got a terrific cast together but the film falls well short of that.

There's no question that the biggest problem with this film is its screenplay. I never found any of these characters to be interesting and especially the Keach character. I found the character to be extremely bland but so was another subplot that deals with Fonda and his two sons going off to fight in the war. The "proud father" aspect just doesn't work. There's really nothing story wise that connects with the viewer and this incldues the action. There are a lot of action scenes but they just feel cheap and never contain any tension.

With all of that being said, the most amazing thing about this picture is the fact that they got such a great cast. You've got Fonda, Keach, Huston and Eggar but there's also Helmut Berger, Edwige Fenech, Ray Lovelock and various other foreign actors. You've also got Orson Welles doing the narration in some versions but the version I watched didn't feature that. The story was confusing as it was so perhaps his narration was used to make more sense out of the film?

THE BIGGEST BATTLE is a pretty poor film but the worst thing is the fact that it's really disappointing considering the cast.