MACARONI COMBAT $5 - The Great Battla

 

               If you don’t want to watch “Winds of War” (all 883 minutes of it), you could substitute the Italian Macaroni War movie entitled “The Biggest Battle” (also known as “The Great Attack” or “Il Grande Attaco”).  It clocks in at 107 minutes.  You might think you are getting quality over quantity, but you would be wrong.  Speaking of quantity, it sure beats the vast majority of spaghetti war movies by having a large number of has-been American actors.  Four instead of the usual one!  And we’re not talking Guy Madison here.  In the first five minutes, a dinner party in Berlin in 1936 gives us Stacy Keach, John Huston, Henry Fonda, and Samantha Eggar.  Unfortunately, they seem to think they are appearing in a high school play. The plot will follow these four individuals and their families as they war hop.  Fonda plays American general Foster,  whose son is a disappointment to him.  John Foster enlists to prove himself to daddy.  German (not Nazi) Lt. Roland (Keach) is married to Annelise (Eggar) who happens to be a Jew.  She’s an actress, but she is not typecast as she appears to think she is in a comedy.  Huston plays a famous war correspondent.  He gets to chew scenery and follow what little action the movie has.  For the Italian audiences, the movie throws in a commando named Scott, played by spaghetti western stalwart Giuliano Gemma. He hooks up with John Foster to blow things up.  They end up facing off with Roland in a big tank battle in North Africa.

 

               If “The Biggest Battle” did not predate “Winds of War” you would think it was a knock-off.  It has the soap opera elements and takes a tour of war theaters.  And it has the all-star cast.  Unfortunately, it tries to pack in too much in the time allowed.  It hops around so much that the title card guy must have been exhausted.  Berlin, 1942 / Greece, 1942 / France, 1942 / England, 1943 / Normandy, 1943 / North Africa, 1943.  And that’s not all of the stops.  The movie also jumps around between characters, but we get just brief glimpses given the length of the movie.  In fact, the last twenty minutes is a rush to kill most of them off.  This is satisfying as the acting is so bad you don’t mind seeing them croak.  It is hard to care about any of them.  If the movie had been longer perhaps they could have squeezed more action into it.  What little there is is marred by inaccurate tanks and other vehicles, silly deaths, and lack of suspense.  And worst of all, some of the combat is bogus.  Having seen “Desert Battle” recently, some of the scenes appeared suspiciously similar.  In an act of great intellectual courage, I went back and rewatched parts of the earlier film and confirmed that this plagiarized!  Specifically, the climactic tank battle was the exact same footage as from “Desert Battle”.  I guess they figured “what are the chances anyone would see both of these movies?”  Only a person with no life.  Damn.

 

GRADE  =  D