Les vainqueurs

I saw The Victors on the big screen in 1964 and its impact has never left me. I saw a cut version on TV a few years ago, and while forty years of film watching and life experience made the movie seem a little heavy-handed and sentimental to me, it still packed a punch. It is not a perfect film - there is the occasional bad moment, and some techniques that were startling in 1963, particularly the newsreels and the hand-held camera used in the opening scene, are now familiar.

Nevertheless, The Victors should serve as a needed lesson to "kids today" that WWII was not fun, not easy, and not "an adventure." Beating the Nazis was a grinding, miserable task that was paid for in suffering and loss. (As for concentration camps, a previous reviewer missed the scene in which one is indeed liberated.) Unusually, the film shows the effect of war on women and children, as well as on the fighting men. It's also remarkable that the movie was released years before the "disillusionment" of the Vietnam War. Had more Americans seen The Victors they might have had a better idea of what the nation was getting itself into. Watch The Longest Day or Patton, then watch The Victors and then decide which seems the most "true to life." If you don't know what "symbolism" means, the final episode, filmed at the height of the Cold War, and its epigraph by World War I poet Wilfred Owen, will show you.

The opening credits suggest the historical relationship between World war II and World War I. They also should remind everyone that there were plenty of Black GIs in WWII, and that Uncle Sam didn't win the war all by himself.

There are moments of real humanity here. The Vince Edwards episode was considered "controversial" in 1963, and in today's film culture may actually seem banal, but it's about understanding as well as loneliness. The memorable sequence involving George Peppard and the English family is wonderfully understated.

Somebody should explain why this occasionally flawed but excellent and provocative film has never been released to home video.

It's gratifying to read so many other appreciative reviews of this too-little-seen film.

I was 12 years old when Life magazine ran a spread on "The Victors" late in 1963, shortly before its release, and I recall the article was a bit negative in describing the film, as though the reviewer couldn't accept a film that depicted World War II so bleakly. Few films about Americans in that war had ever portrayed them so unheroically. (The only one I can think of is Robert Aldrich's "Attack!") The movie's Christmas season release in a country still reeling from the JFK assassination knocked this grim film out of theaters in a matter of three or four weeks. It was shown several times on the old CBS late movie series in the late '60s (where I first got to see it), but I've only seen it once on a premium cable presentation, in the mid-'90s. Several years ago I was able to obtain a 16mm print from the only rental house that offered it, but it was a scan-and-pan version from which some scenes had been cut.

One of these scenes, quickly trimmed from the initial release version, depicted a young European boy trying to sell a sexual service to American GIs; I think the other scene that was cut involved one of the female stars in the film. Even for the early 1960s, "The Victors" was a sexually frank film (without being in any way pornographic), which certainly must have offended some early viewers and exhibitors. Indeed, despite the American characters, the film really is more European in flavor and moral atmosphere. (Foreman, blacklisted by Hollywood in 1953, had been living in England for several years when he made the film, and his directorial style seems to owe much to the Italian neo-realists.)

(It's also interesting to contemplate that Foreman's previous film outing had been as writer and producer of "The Guns of Navarone." One is tempted to think that the gala heroics and spectacular action of that popular film may have prompted Foreman to make a more realistic war movie.)

The episodic format of "The Victors" also makes it a difficult viewing experience for people used to more continuity in their films. Foreman based the film rather faithfully on Alexander Baron's novel, "The Human Kind," itself essentially a collection of short sketches involving the same wartime characters (in the novel, they're British soldiers, but Foreman retained their names for the American film characters). Still, for a repeat viewer, it is possible to see the characters change through the episodes. Some of the characters disappear with no explanation, others are suddenly promoted, new characters appear unheralded. Life, and war, are like that sometimes. And there is some shrewd foreshadowing: Early in the film, Trower (George Hamilton) remarks that he hopes to meet a Russian soldier; and be sure to take careful note of Grogan (Jim Mitchum) in his first few scenes.

"The Victors" is not without humor or compassion, but Foreman's purpose was to eliminate the heroics and the excitement of combat and to demonstrate that, as much as we try to rationalize it, war is a degrading experience for all concerned. The corrupting of a lovely young musician (Romy Schneider) by an American soldier (Michael Callan), the fleeting affair between Baker (Vince Edwards)and a young Italian mother (Rosanna Schiaffino), the encounter between Sgt. Craig (Eli Wallach) and a shell-shocked French woman (Jeanne Moreau) -- all remain vivid in the memory.

Another interesting feature of "The Victors," which was not in the novel, is Foreman's use of wartime newsreels as counterpoint to the fictional scenes. Sometimes it's a little too cute, but mostly it works.

Foreman knew that most people who saw "The Victors" would have an idea of what war action was like, if only from earlier war movies. What he wanted to show, what few earlier war films ever showed, was the moral wear-and-tear of combat on solder and civilian alike, in victory or defeat. To a large extent he succeeds. This is a film well-deserving of DVD release (in its complete widescreen version). And if you like this film, go the TCM website and demand that they show it!

I saw this movie many years ago, and still remember it. I'd like to see it on video. The movie has a surreal feel to it.... but, I imagine that anyone actually involved in the madness of fighting a modern war feels the surrealness of the movie a very faint immitation of the surrealness of war. The typical movie presents a view of an event, and one has the feeling that all that is significant about the event has been recorded and presented in the movie, but in "The Victors" it is clear that what is being presented is just a peek at reality .. the whole story is unknown, unknowable.... Just as in life we usually feel as if we understand what's going on around us and are acting in a perfectly rational manner, when in fact we are each very small players on a stage and we are being blown about like leaves by forces we don't even know exist.

What ever happened to this wonderful movie? When I was at the University of Oregon in the late 60s and early 70s it was shown on local t.v. in Eugene several times. I have not seen it since but it has lingered in my memory. What a great film.

One scene that has stayed with me all these years is the one with the dog. A new recruit shows up and joins a group of tired and war-weary vets. The new recruit has a young puppy and wants to bring it along. The puppy is cute and because I had watched a ton of American war films I thought that everyone would embrace the dog, make it their mascot and have a merry time as they wasted Krauts in the Hurtgen Forrest but the vets will not allow the dog to join them. What the vets know and the new guy doesn't is that they are headed for a place where only those with a hard heart survive. The Hurtgun is no place for pups or children. Only a certain type of individual could possibly survive there. You can see it in the vets that they would like to indulge the new guy and his dog, but they know better. They make the recruit leave the dog as they board the truck headed for the front. The puppy starts following the truck as it pulls away and the innocent new guy gets all excited and calls to him as it trails the truck. A vet pulls out his M-1 and shots the dog dead. Another vet turns to the new guy who is stunned in disbelief and says "it took a soldier to do that".

This movie, this scene and this line have stayed in my mind and its been over 30 years since last I've seen it.

Predating APOCALYPSE NOW by fifteen years, this is the most powerful, sad, ironic and hard-hitting anti-war film I have seen and I rank it nearly on a par with KING RAT, my personal favourite. A group of ill-assorted soldiers make their way through the grim battlefields of France and Germany and Italy as much oppressed by their own corrupt fellow soldiers and officers as the enemy. There are so many memorable scenes in the movie of suffering, loneliness and the tragedy of war that I cannot recommend it highly enough. The script is literate, uncompromising, surprising and resolutely objective about both the enemy and the liberators that fight them. The cast is an amazing ensemble of talent and there is a sense of really brutal authenticity in the film which seldom is to be found in the cinema today. A final grim twist at the end, reflecting the height of the Cold War when the film was made, is one of the simplest and most articulate statements on the continuing madness of human conflict we are still gripped by. Coppola, Stone and every other great film-maker dealing with war in its various incarnations is indebted to this unique movie.