BEFORE: Well, since I was sidelined for most of No-Movie November, I kind of missed Veterans Day, so I guess I'll be making up for that today and tomorrow with a couple of World War II movies, now that December is here. I was late with Black History month this year, too, but I think I've been on time for every other holiday, more or less.
This four-day weekend went by WAY too fast, I hate to see it end. After our Thanksgiving Day buffet feast we took a pass on Black Friday, as always and instead tried to put the rooms that were disrupted by the electric outage back together. This meant moving the bed back into place, along with some dressers, but also taking the opportunity to clean out what was behind the dressers, throw away about a dozen pairs of sneakers from under the bed, and also vacuum a little. I got some laundry done and binge-watched "Agatha All Along", I know I'm late but at least I got it done. Then on Saturday I got out in the backyard for the second half of the fight against the Evil Vine, which had gotten so far with a new outcropping that it was growing grapes again! Not on my watch - I cut down everything rising above the concrete, and rooted out some vines that were crawling across the yard seeking more soil somewhere. I haven't packed up all the vegetation, it's just in a pile, but at least it's all been cut down and won't grow any more. Then today was just for relaxing and watching a "Chopped" tournament to relax, because the next two weeks are going to be brutal.
Dwight Yoakam carries over again from "Cry Macho". It may be two or three days before I watch the next film, I've got that kind of time.
THE PLOT: A private in the latter days of WWII on the German front struggles between his will to survive and what his superiors perceive as a battlefield instinct.
AFTER: Oddly, or perhaps appropriately, my linking has placed this film in December, and the subject matter is the World War II battle that took place in Hürtgen Forest, from September to December of 1944. So that would be just about 80 years ago, it apparently lasted until December 16. It's doubtful that any of that battle's participants are still alive, even if they were 18 at the time, they'd be 98 now. At that time Paris had been recaptured by the Allied Forces, and Germans had been relegated back to within Germany. The fall of 1944 was all about the battles leading up to the final push of World War II, but it's clear that the Germans didn't make anything easy. (The follow-up to the Hürtgen Offensive was called the Battle of the Bulge, which is the setting for my next film, oddly enough, or perhaps appropriately.)
The Allied Forces were trying to target a dam on the Rur River, and the easiest (?) way to get to that was through the Hürtgen Forest. With control of the dam, the Germans could released stored water and flood any forces attacking from downstream - that was the theory, anyway, or perhaps the excuse, because modern military historians now consider the Battle of the Hürtgen Forest as poorly planned and pointless, a battle that should have been avoided, especially considering it lead to about 12,000 soldiers dead on each side and another 21,000 Allied soldiers wounded. The Allies tried again and again to capture the territory leading to the dam, but the Germans held the territory until their last-ditch offensive into the Ardennes, from mid-December 1944 to January 1945. But again, more about that next time.
The consensus now is that the Allied Command had underestimated the determination of the remaining German soldiers at this point, the belief that the Normandy invasion and then the recapture of Paris had basically demoralized the German soldiers, and the Allied forces on the ground in Hürtgen clearly saw something different, because the Germans were still fighting back. Having fallen back behind the Rur dam and the Kall Bridge, it was easy enough for the Germans to keep launching mortars from a higher position while they waited for tanks to arrive for support. Meanwhile the German defenders had prepared the forest with minefields and booby-traps, making any attack via the forest a very bad idea, no matter how many times the Allied Command forced it to be carried out.
All of this is portrayed in "When Trumpets Fade" in a very different sort of WWII movie - most films made about that war in the 1950's and 1960's depicted strong American forces who were sure of their cause and their convictions, and all they had to do to win was to believe in democracy and have a desire to fight fascism. But war movies changed after Vietnam, obviously, and "Apocalypse Now" and "Platoon" and "Full Metal Jacket" represented a change in thinking about war. So what does a World War II film made AFTER those movies look like? Well, I suppose that's how you end up with "When Trumpets Fade", a film where the goals of the battle are not very clear, the commanding officers don't seem to be giving good orders, and when something doesn't work, the only response is to try again with different soldiers, because the last group didn't survive.
The film opens with Private David Manning trying to carry a wounded soldier back to safety, only the distance is too great and the wounded man is in too much pain to be carried, forcing Manning to face a difficult decision, does he keep carrying the wounded man, or does he abandon him on the battlefield, or if neither of those is a good option, what else can he do?
Private Manning is the only survivor from the 28th Infantry's Division attempt to take the forest, and when he gets back to HQ he admits he's DONE things in the forest, meaning he might have killed his own wounded men to prevent them from being captured, when they couldn't be moved within distance of a field hospital. Nevertheless, he survived, so he gets promoted to sergeant. Manning points out that he's not worthy of a promotion, because he's not right in the head, and he wants a Section 8 discharge, however his commander won't give it to him, because of his now significant combat experience. As someone who knows how to survive in the forest, he's needed to lead the next unit being sent in. Manning agrees but only because the Captain promises him that mentally unfit discharge when he returns again.
Manning leads a squad of green privates into the forest on patrol, and one moves too quickly and nearly encounters the enemy. Soon their whole company is ordered to make another push to take the Kall Bridge, but Manning's squad is sent with flamethrowers to go around the bridge to try to burn out the soldiers who are facing the bridge and launching mortar attacks on the U.S. forces. One of Manning's untrained men panics and starts to flee, so Manning is forced to shoot him. Another one goes wild but somehow manages to kill the Germans with his flamethrower, so the U.S. soldiers are able to take the bridge, however then the German tanks arrive and the company is forced to retreat, losing the bridge, also one of Manning's men is killed and another is captured. Worse, when Manning gets back to HQ he learns that Captain Pritchett, who offered him the Section 8 discharge, is no longer in command - and naturally there's no record of the promise, only a glowing review of Manning and his ability to survive.
After a lieutenant snaps and assaults his C.O. over the losses, he new commander has no choice but to promote Manning again, despite his insubordination, but damn if the guy doesn't manage to survive and keep failing upwards. Fearing another push through the forest, Manning and a squad leader and a medic concoct a plan to sneak away and destroy the German tanks before the next push, which would be a great idea if it also wasn't such a terrible idea. This time Manning is the one being carried away from the battle after being wounded, and there's really a terrible ironic symmetry to it all, if you consider this is kind of how the movie started.
In decades past, it would have been considered anti-patriotic to depict a World War II battle as pointless or to focus on the high casualty count for little strategic gain, but again, this is a post-1970's ("M*A*S*H", "Catch-22") and post-1980's ("Platoon", "Casualties of War") film, so in the late 1990's I suppose it was possible to start to look at World War II through the lens of other wars, and maybe see some parts of it in a different way.
Also starring Ron Eldard (last seen in "Freedomland"), Zak Orth (last seen in "Loser"), Frank Whaley (last seen in "An Accidental Studio"), Dylan Bruno (last seen in "The Rage: Carrie 2"), Devon Gummersall (last seen in "Dick"), Dan Futterman (last seen in "Hello I Must Be Going"), Steven Petrarca (last seen in "The Ring Two"), Martin Donovan (last seen in "The Reluctant Fundamentalist"), Timothy Olyphant (last seen in "Amsterdam"), Jeffrey Donovan (last seen in "R.I.P.D. 2: Rise of the Damned"), Bobby Cannavale (last seen in "Night Falls on Manhattan"), Frank-Michael Kobe (last seen in "The Pianist"), Matthew Rutson Cooney, Brian Hicks, John Miller, with archive footage of Gen. Omar Bradley (last seen in "A Bridge Too Far") and Bernard L. Montgomery (ditto).
RATING: 5 out of 10 "Dragons teeth"
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