Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #25910 in DVD
• Released on: 2007-05-22
• Rating: Unrated
• Aspect ratio: 1.66:1
• Format: NTSC
• Original language: English, German
• Running time: 167 minutes

From Amazon.com
The German offensive in December 1944 became the basis for this all-star Hollywood take on the Battle of the Bulge. Henry Fonda is an officer who predicts the assault, Robert Ryan and Dana Andrews are Army brass skeptical of his intuitions, and Robert Shaw (his hair dyed yellow and his eyes glinting with malice) is a German officer leading the tank attack. Shaw is certainly the most compelling thing about the film, especially in his philosophical debates with ambivalent underling Hans Christian Blech. Elsewhere, the movie jumps around to sidebar stories (cowardly James MacArthur becomes a leader, wheeler-dealer Telly Savalas falls in love) while messing around with the historical facts of the battle. There are interesting episodes, such as the Malmedy massacre of American POWs and the Germans' use of English-speaking spies, but overall Battle of the Bulge has the feeling of having been patched together from different scripts. On the physical level the movie comes up short, with the Spanish locations rarely suggesting the wintry misery of the battle, and the use of models and studio sets highly inadequate. A number of war films from this era are compelling on their own terms, but in the wake of Saving Private Ryan and Band of Brothers, this one looks antique. --Robert Horton

Review
German tanks pulverize everything in their path in this 1965 motion picture chronicling the Third Reich's counteroffensive against allied troops marching across Europe. Though the script is so-so, and the personal stories fictionalized, the battle scenes are spectacular. The star of the film is the panzer: a tank wrapped in a thick hide of heavy metal. It is the new Achilles, seemingly invulnerable, a battlefield terror that lays waste with surgical precision during a campaign in the Ardennes region of Belgium, Luxembourg, and France between December 15, 1944, and January 15, 1945. A German war room tracks the progress of the tank commander, Col. Martin Hessler Robert Shaw, a ruthless taskmaster who loves war. Arraying his tanks on a hilltop, he reduces an American-occupied town to cinders, smoke, and fear. Defending troops retreat, helping to create a backward "bulge" in the allied line, and in the process, ascribing a name to the battle. There is only one problem: Hessler's tanks are running out of gas. Shaw is fun to watch, and hate, as he fashions Hessler into a monomaniac willing to risk everything for the pleasure of the kill. His raw recruits, many mere boys, are ready to die for him, and they even break into a rousing song, the "Panzerlied," that whets his craving for blood. Henry Fonda portrays an American colonel who flies reconnaissance in heavy fog to find Hessler. He and other old warhorses (Robert Ryan, Dana Andrews, George Montgomery, Telly Savalas, and Charles Bronson) give adequate performances. Hans Christian Blech portrays the most interesting character in the film: Hessler's toady, Corporal Conrad. Realizing that Hessler is a madman, he dares to reproach the panzer commander, condemning his brutality. In doing so, he shows that a German soldier can think and feel the prick of conscience. Of course, he loses his stripes. But he marches back to Germany drawing his coat about him -- and his integrity. The musical score by Benjamin Frankel is brilliant. ~ Mike Cummings, All Movie Guide

On the DVD
New digital HD transfer from restored picture and audio elements
Audio commentary
2 vintage featurettes: The Filming of Battle of the Bulge, History Recreated
Soundtrack remastered in Dolby Digital 5.1
Theatrical trailer

Customer Reviews

dump your VHS version
I'm not going to waste your time telling you about the movie, and how great it is.
The only thing I have to say is someone did something right for a change. Whoever put this one together gave you the full version as it was first shown.
On the VHS and when showing on TV, the Fifth Column portions of the film, were usually cut out, but they are included in this version.
My advice if you know and love this movie, this is the one to buy, and dump your VHS.
This review does not apply to the Battle of the Bulge [HD DVD] released may 22, but the prior release.

P.S. if you have the DVD, don't bother buying the Blu-Ray

A battle that needs an accurate film - this is NOT it!
This abortion uses the excuse that it is a "synthesis" of events, but it is simply an abomination. Not only are the characters and events for the most part complete fiction, or completely fictional in the way they are portrayed, but just some of the lack of realism in what happens is ludicrous as well. A tank gets hit and ends up looking like a blow torch was used to remove the top half of the turret (probably closer to how it actually got that way), yet the tank commander, sitting higher up in the command hatch than his fellow crewmembers, miraculously escapes unharmed! In the real world, a tank round would make a small hole in the armor and spew hot shrapenel all over the interior of the vehicle, with fuel and ammo likely catching fire/exploding/cooking off. This is more a comic than a serious film. As far as the historical inaccuracies, there was no "Col. Hessler", and for those who think this is a pseudonym for Col. Joachim Peiper, think again; if you recall, "Hessler" is supposed to be a Wermacht officer, not an SS officer, although his "brigade" begins its attack in the Losheim Gap (i.e., where Peiper began his attack). Next, the Germans had very few Tiger tanks, and even fewer King Tiger tanks; the bulk of their tank strength at that point in the war would have been Panzer Mk IV's and Panthers, with the Tigers and King Tigers being attached "heavy tank battalions" that reinforced the Panzer divisions. In the movie you'd get the impression that the entire German army was equipped with King Tiger tanks exclusively. And it wasn't as if the Bulge was the first time the Americans/Allies had seen this tank, since some early examples were knocked out in Normandy. The Malmedy Massacre was portrayed as an organized execution, when in actuality it was not - rather it was spontaneous, started by a single SS tank officer with a pistol at point blank range after he stopped his assult gun at the Baugnez crossroads where the unfortunate prisoners had been assembled (south of the namesake town which was never entered by the German forces during the entire battle). The fuel depot incident is a topic of some controversy, as some historians have it as fact and others fiction, but in any event it was the Francorchamps fuel dump (deep in the Ambleve River valley), the biggest on the continent with over 1,500,000 gallons of gasoline, not a dump on the Meuse River. While we're on the subject, there is the completely ridiculous "calculation" of the German fuel situation by the (fictitiuos) American General, using the fuel consumption of a Tiger tank, the exact distance from the Zeigfried Line to the Meuse, and the estimated fuel reserves of the German Army. Like tanks are the only thing that uses gasoline, like they only had Tiger tanks, like they new what route should be used for the mileage, like even if that were the only information they needed they new exactly HOW MANY tanks, etc. Ludicrous! The Germans in point of fact had accumulated more than enough gasoline for the Ardennes Offensive, but had it on the EAST bank of the Rhine River (in keeping with the extreme secrecy of the operation and its cover plan as a "defensive" operation), and they quite often couldn't get it to the front lines where it was needed because of Allied bombing of bridges railways and road centers. Finally, it wasn't as if the Germans swept the Americans aside like insects and then advanced unnoticed through the fog and then ran out of fuel, nor was the battle a big "tank battle" ala Kursk (which is the way it was portrayed). Indeed, there were some Americans that "bugged out" providing little organized resistance, and some large scale surrenders (think the 106th Infantry Division, the green outfit surrounded on the Schnee Eifel), but there were also stiff resistance and heroic stands that either stopped crack Panzer divisions in their tracks or cost them critical delays and detours (think the 2nd/99th Infantry Divisions in the Elsenborn Ridge area and the Engineer Battalions in the Ambleve River Valley blowing bridges in Peiper's face). The one positive note about this film in terms of historical accuracy is that it wasn't focusing on Bastogne as the "key" to the whole offensive. The Battle of the Bulge was won and lost on the northern flank where the 6SS Panzer Army was stopped, bloodied, delayed and detoured by fierce resistance and swarms of reinforcements in rugged terrain. Bastogne was anticlmactic; though an important road junction, its importance arose more from the failure of the Germans to break through where they intended to rather than due to its location in the middle of the area that ended up being their deepest penetration. Their Panzer Divisions in the south made some half-hearted probes but basically surrounded and bypassed it, leaving its capture to following infantry. It was only later when it was clear the Meuse couldn't be crossed until the lines of communication were cleared up that the Germans made any serious effort to capture it, and by then it was no longer isolated and had been reinforced and fortified. In any event, I'm sure that one small element of realism was purely accidental, since this film could have been a cartoon for all its accuracy.

Now that we can bring back the real tanks and other equipment with the miracles of digital effects, it's time for someone to do an historically accurate epic about this battle or the most important parts of it (Peiper's breakout and his subsequent sacking in the Ambleve River valley if they must keep the scale confined).

Battle of the Bulge [Blu-ray]
OK but not a home run hitter. Lite on the realism side. Some extra footage then the televised version. Still entertaining but not compelling. Nothing like Saving Private Ryan or other more modern depictions of war. No real violence or swearing.