Area B2: attacco!

Plot In A Paragraph: During the battle of the bulge, a sergeant (Earl Holliman) in charge of a small band of men finds a woman (Tina Louise) with a gun shot wound lying in the snow. The take her to a local town with them where they are staying at an inn as they await further orders.

There are two parts to this movie, one that deals with the growing lack of respect that the group and in particular one soldier, a pollack named Skee (A young Burt Reynolds in only his second movie) have for the sergeant and the fact that the sergeant and Skee both have the hots for the injured woman. And one where (Howard Keel) tries to warn his superiors that his men are about to be attacked and over run any time soon.

The contrast between Holliman's and Reynolds characters could not be more different. Holliman is a love sick school boy towards to woman, where as Reynolds is the confident Alpha male who will have her, if she wants him to or not. This is the second movie in a row where Reynolds has raped a woman during his early career. Luckily he did not get typecast in such roles.

In a side note several sequences of action are repeated during the final battle scene.

Produced by someone who had practically no knowledge of combat realities in WW2. Forgive the tanks--though the jelly-mould appearance of American tanks on both sides does nothing for realism, giving no contrast with the angular shapes of actual German Mark 4's, sturmgeschutze, Tigers and Panthers.They have no Panzerfaust and only one Panzerschreck that I saw.

The Americans have no bazookas, and no anti-tank guns. The ubiquitous German 88mm, the best anti-tank gun of the war does not appear. The Americans oppose heavy German tanks with light machine guns--a recipe for suicide. The historical point is that the balance between tanks and infantry was swinging to the infantry at just this time as hand-held shaped-charge weapons appeared on both sides.

Bad history and an unconvincing story.

What was supposed to be a tense, suspenseful war drama turned out to be rather confusing and boring. Sometimes these spy flicks go over my head, so if that's your genre of choice, you might feel differently about this one. I ended up writing other reviews while the movie was running to distract me from the boredom.

Tina Louise plays a German spy, but because she's an attractive and vulnerable woman, the soldiers who rescued her after her injury don't suspect a thing. They're too busy fighting over her to notice she's sneaking out secrets to the enemy. Howard Keel, Earl Holliman, Burt Reynolds, Carleton Young, Warner Anderson, Clem Harvey, Marty Ingels, and James Dobson are the men in the film, but with hardly any fight scenes, Armored Command doesn't really feel like a war movie. It's a little slow, and even though I just finished watching it a couple of days ago, I can't even remember what happens in the end.

This film definitely has a handful of issues that are a tad bothersome but on the whole I enjoyed it.

It's not the kind of film you're going to recommend to friends and family but if you're a fan of the genre or a WWII buff, it's worth watching.

I was annoyed that both sides were using the same tanks but there have been better films and more famous films to commit that sin. I also shook my head that the "German" tanks didn't even have the right cross painted on them but that's not something everyone will notice.

There are a couple of shots that are repeated during the final battle segment, one in particular of a tank leading 3 rows of troops through a space between two buildings, along a narrow road must be shown 3 or 4 times.

It is an oversimplified telling of actual events but there is a payoff at the end. Had this film been even 10 or 15 minutes longer, I would have rated it lower and not recommended it for even die hard fans. But they didn't make that mistake thankfully!

This feels a little older than it is for an American movie. Still, it does manage to make it interesting with the way they shot a lot of the war sequences and the pure chaos that also shows the result, but in the end, it started to repeat a lot of shots. Besides those few scenes, most of the movie is indoors. The acting was also really good. But the plot confused me about what they intended. This is probably the first time that, when watching a WW2 movie, I feel like siding with the Germans even when they are shown as the villains. The Americans are portrayed as either lazy, compassionless, spineless, or straight up evil, and from what I can understand, they didn't exactly want those characters to be like that; they wanted them to be complicated, but ended up like this. This may not be the worst in this case, especially for that time, but the way sexual assault is used so lightly and the whole point is surrounding the men to the point that even the victim is shown to be sad for her man more than herself in that situation is crazy.