L'espionne des Ardennes

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.

I have to say that this film has a little spot of nostalgia for me as it was a favorite when I was a kid. On a winter afternoon in the days of three or four channels of TV per market, it made the grade and also led to playing army out in the snow. Many of these actors were on the tube at the time including Tina Louise, Burt Reynolds, and Earl Holliman and we all liked Howard Keels performance.

This is an average war film based on a real battle that seemed meant to showcase a lot of young talent rather than anything else. I think one would have seen this at the Bijou as the second feature. It is better than a lot of the imports that were beginning to saturate the market at the time.

The casting is good and the cast is competent. Howard Keel, Warner Anderson, and Carlton Young anchor this exciting young cast. Tina Louise is the femme fatal and gives you a peak at her pre "Ginger" acting on "Gilligan's Island!" because she is an authoritative bitch when she commands her fellow spy's! Good or bad, Earl Holliman and Burt Reynolds give performances not unlike what they given throughout their entire careers.

Everyone gave this the college try in no doubt thanks to Byron Haskin's workmanlike direction. The producer of the film also wrote it which might explain the "Battleground" and other war movie clichés but this makes the film an encyclopedia of clichés and you have to be a war movie nut to notice them. Marty Feldman reminds me of the kind of role that they would have had George Tobias do. I do not know the name of the guy playing the Frenchman but he is cool right down to his beret.

In staging the battle, the budget soon starts to strain but just a bit. It is ambitious to do any film about the Battle of the Bulge and the money people had to surrender to reality very early. Still, compared to the phony Tiger tanks in "Attack" the M 60's (?) used are more than OK and the action footage creates drama. It almost looks like they used the West German Army while it was out on maneuvers. You wonder what they could have done with a fraction of the budget for "Battle of the Bulge", the Cinerama fantasy war film with super NAZI Robert Shaw that would be released a few years later or the "Longest Day" which was released just before this.

PS: The German's are at their best "Combat" acting style! I like the atmosphere of this film. I have it on in the background as I enter this. It is winter outside here and we are in the middle of a snow storm. I wonder if someone like Tina Louise is lying out there somewhere?

Nah!

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 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.

Armored Command finds Tina Louise playing a German spy plunked down in the middle of a neglected front during the Battle Of The Bulge counteroffensive with the Germans still trying to pull something out. Tina's even given a shoulder wound courtesy of the Wehrmacht to make her story convincing.

For those of you who are used to seeing Tina Louise as the vapid movie star on Gilligan's Island this will be a revelation. She's quite the cool and ruthless character.

She's left out on the front lines for a passing American patrol to find and one headed by Sergeant Earl Holliman does. She's taken back to their billet and of course everyone starts thinking with their hormones. Especially Holliman and Burt Reynolds who was in his second big screen film in Armored Command.

In the meantime the commander of the area, Colonel Howard Keel is convinced an offensive will come through there, but he's having trouble convincing the higher ups of his notion. It seems to Holliman's squad to get the job of digging up the evidence to prove Keel's theories and they've got a spy in their midst.

Armored Command was shot on location in Germany near Munich and Howard Keel relates in his memoirs he was given the job of directing some of the second unit battle scenes which he enjoyed. He did not enjoy however when one of his extras which were some US Army troops stationed in Germany nearly got killed.

Keel gets on to Louise early, but then she gets on to him getting on to her. They have an interesting battle of wits as neither of them are stupid.

The film was done by Allied Artists and maybe a bigger studio with better production values could have gotten a higher rating for it. As it is it's not a bad war film and those into that genre will probably like it.