The much earlier film BATTLEGROUND (1949) for my money was a MUCH better film about the Battle of the Bulge. This film differs in that it focuses less on the common soldier and features some bigger stars. BUT, as I learned a long time back, having many big stars in a film doesn't usually improve the picture. On top of that, the film looks like a 1960s war film with color photography (a minus I think--the cold soldiers in BATTLEGROUND just looked more realistic) and completely wrong equipment (while the Sherman tanks were accurate looking, the TIGERS and other German tanks were actually MUCH later tanks from the 1950s-60s). There are worse war pictures, but this uninspired film is ultimately forgettable.

After 20th Century Fox had put out The Longest Day to such critical and popular success, you might have thought that Warner Brothers would have learned and copied that formula. They even hired Ken Annakin who was one of the directors for The Longest Day.

But if you are looking for the names of Eisenhower, Bradley, Patton, Hodges, and Montgomery on the Allied side and Von Rundstedt and Model among the Germans you will be disappointed. All the names of the principals are changed. Folks like Henry Fonda, Robert Ryan, and Dana Andrews are playing fictionalized characters.

A couple of things are brought in mainly because they are part of the legend of the Bulge, the Malmedy Massacre and the famous reply of General McAuliffe to the German inquiry about surrendering the besieged town of Bastogne. In fact the latter is just dropped into the story without any of the principal players involved. I guess the producers had a thought that no film about the Bulge would be accepted without it, no matter how forced.

It would have been nice if a straight dramatic narrative approach had been used like The Longest Day. With of course the names of the real people. Part of the Bulge story was told in MGM's Battleground and in Patton.

In this film the best performances are that of Robert Shaw as the fanatical Nazi Panzer commander and his war weary aide Hans Christian Blech. Honorable mention should also go to George Montgomery as a tough American sergeant and his lieutenant James MacArthur who grows in stature thanks to Montgomery's example.

For a film that is more than two and a half hours in length, I'd have liked to have seen the real deal though.

BATTLE OF THE BULGE is one of the epic WW2 films of the 1960s, but given that all of the others are so good - from THE GUNS OF NAVARONE to THE LONGEST DAY - this one pales in comparison somewhat. It's not that this film is particularly poor, it's just that it could be better. It's overlong, for a start, and surprisingly simplistic given the nature of the actual battle itself. Robert Shaw plays a nasty Nazi in charge of a tank division attacking an assembled group of heroes, inevitably played by famous American old-timers: Henry Fonda, Robert Ryan, Dana Andrews et al. The scale is impressive throughout, although some of the back projection hasn't aged very well, but somehow this simply isn't as immersive as the true classics from the era.