Word: battleground
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...Battleground. The defense of Bastogne as seen by a squad of its defenders; with Van Johnson (TIME...
...Battleground. The defense of Bastogne as seen by a squad of its defenders; with Van Johnson, John Hodiak and George Murphy (TIME, Nov.14...
Both sides had accepted the campaign as a national battleground. President Truman had proclaimed Lehman his man. Democratic big guns, ranging from Vice President Alben Barkley to Representative Franklin D. Roosevelt Jr., raked the state with oratory. Labor worked as never before. New York's Governor Thomas E. Dewey, still smarting under criticism of his ''me, too" campaign in 1948, stumped the state almost as widely as his candidate. He called for a "holy crusade" to elect Dulles, lent Dulles a campaign staff...
...Battleground (MGM) is a story about the Battle of the Bulge. Filmed with a sentimental, Mauldin-type humor and some standard war movie heroics, it concentrates on one squad of the 101st Airborne Division, which was enveloped near Bastogne by the surprise Nazi breakthrough of December 1944. The eight-day defense of Bastogne is gallantly manned by several of MGM's regulars (Van Johnson, John Hodiak, George Murphy, Ricardo Montalban), who were toughened up before the filming by two weeks' basic training, but who still look too full-faced for their battle-weary roles...
Despite its gummy spots, e.g., a trite pep talk by Chaplain Leon Ames explaining to a battle-hardened gang of veterans why they are fighting, Battleground is the sternest studio-made war film since The Story of GI Joe. On the debit side, each soldier is given a bit of colorful routine that is tiresomely underlined every time the soldier is seen: Private Douglas Fowley loses or clicks his store-bought teeth; ex-Editor John Hodiak mourns over the fact that his wife in Sedalia knows more about the battle than he does. But Director William Wellman threads...