Next up, Battleground (1949).
This is one of those films I'd heard about for years but had never gotten around to watching.
I think this movie sometimes gets overshadowed by its reputation as a symbol of the forces of change affecting the Hollywood studios in the post-WWII years. Battleground was produced by up-and-coming studio producer Dore Schary who clashed with studio chief Louis B. Mayer (the "Mayer" in MGM). Schary was trying to make films with a more modern sensibility whereas Mayer stuck to his guns and backed films that were more similar to the studio's output in the 1930s-40s that had made the company so successful. There were a few years where the two executives fought it out but soon Mayer was forced into retirement. Schary held on and made more progressive movies but MGM eventually collapsed along with the rest of the Studio System.
All of that is certainly important and interesting but it was instructive to evaluate this movie on its own merits.
The film has what I would say one foot in the past and one in the present/future. The film was shot entirely on sound stages with contract players at MGM at the time. It really feels like they just plugged the casting needs in from whomever was available on the lot at the time.
On the other hand the film, shot in black/white, looks somewhat gritty and not like a movie that would have been made just a few years earlier about the war. The scenes look pretty convincing, even though they were depicting snowy wintertime scenes indoors (I guess they didn't want to move the production to an ice house to make it realistic like Orson Welles did). The characters are pretty well developed; the film takes time to allow us to know several of them and doesn't bog down with a lot of light diversions. No, this movie was, as much as a studio movie in 1949 could, trying to show the audience a more realistic, scary, and at times hopeless view of the war. There are some heroic scenes but it's no commando raid. The soldiers are really just trying to make it out alive.
The cast does well: Van Johnson rises to the occasion in a role I wouldn't normally associate him with and it's always great to see a new (to me at least) Ricardo Montalban performance.
It's a war genre classic and one that still deserves its reputation.
