Too late to edit.
One line that was a bit cleaned up for the movie, when he was on the back of the burning tank destroyer calling in artillery he was repeatedly asked how close the enemy was to his position. After walking in the artillery closer and closer and still being asked he finally says, “Just hold the phone and I’ll let you talk to one of the bastards.”
I have read the book, and you’re right, it is all that. It’s also one I would recommend to someone wanting to know what life as a GI was like.
You know who would have liked* Fury*? Sam Peckinpah.
Damn! I knew the final battle reminded me of something! The climax of The Wild Bunch! :smack:
The tank prowling through the village in Peckinpah’s “Cross of Iron” was as good as anything in “Fury”.
It was interesting in the first shot of the movie to see the various tank silhouettes. I was sitting there thinking, “OK, there’s a panther. There’s a PZ IV. There’s a Sherman…”
It would have been interesting to see some other US vehicles during the rest of the flick like a M10 or M36.
To me, it’s the way the film protrayed the ugliness of war that Sam would have appreciated.
Outside of static museums, do any USA tank destroyers still exist? 
I remember one running around a race track on Mail Call. But they wouldn’t have to be on the move to appear in the movie. Maybe sitting in formation at the base or some such. A set piece would have sufficed for that.
Something that just occured to me: They show that wardaddy has big ol’ burn scars on his back. Very extensive ones to my memory. I find it unlikely that someone who got burned that badly even as early as the start of the Africa campaign would be back in action in time for the crawl across France and Germany. In fact, I doubt that he wouldn’t have been discharged after a wound like that. But apparently he’s so tough that he stayed in action the whole time since he and the crew claim to have been together continously the whole time.
I’ve read accounts of guys who were seriously ill or wounded and basically “discharged themselves” from the hospital whether they were fit for duty or not; they then did whatever was necessary to rejoin their units on their own, especially in the hours before D-Day. They were that eager to get back to their buddies. Unless you were wounded to the point of being disabled (in which case you would probably go home, or to a hospital in the States), the alternative was being sent to a Replacement Depot (known as a “Repple-Depple”) and waiting until you were reassigned to serve alongside a bunch of total strangers. I gather this was something GIs feared more than anything else.
Saw an M18 and an M10 at the Americans in Wartime Museum open house last month in Virginia, both were in drivable condition, though I didn’t get to see them being demonstrated. A whole lot of other WW2 era tanks as well, including two Shermans.
Just finished watching this documentary on the Sherman in WWII. Quite good and contains a lot of stuff I didn’t know about:
Just saw it. A first rate war movie. Pulls no punches at all.
The North African campaign finished in May 1943. The NW Europe front opened in June 1944. That is more than enough time to have been wounded and returned to action, even with a serious, but not crippling injury. He did not fight in Italy did he?
I thought the “domestic” scene worked well. It showed how far degraded they had become and Pitt’s realisation of that. And it was a call back to the “fuck you for a bar of chocolate” joke earlier. And the fear and powerlessness the women feel and display, well that makes it very realistic. I wish they had not shown them getting killed though, better to have left it ambiguous.
As for the “rape” bit. It was not rape, but it was not really consensual either. The girl’s “honour” was being protected by Wardaddy, (Norman having no real power). You don’t know whether he is doing it out of the goodness of his heart or because he fully intends to fuck her and the older woman later.
From what I understand, quickies and one-night stands were quite common during the war, especially in combat zones; this would include any British and German cities that were bombed or shelled. (If you ever saw Danger: UXB, you’d remember the young woman who was incredibly turned on by air raids during the Blitz. This happened far more often than you might imagine.)
When you know you could conceivably die anytime in the next few minutes, I guess the urge to get it on and have one last fling can be pretty powerful!
Oh, undoubtedly. Wartime standards are different and cannot be seen with the eyes of peace. Thats what I took away from the movie.
I’ll go against audience and critic reviews on this one. I found it to be predictable. So much so, that I was noting down what scene would happen next (I watched in on VUDU), and I don’t think I missed once, up to and including the pull-away shot of the tank with all the dead Germans around it. The dialog was stilted and uninspired, including War Daddy’s words of ‘wisdom’ to Norman, which just fell flat. The film was dark, but the characters were unengaging and one dimensional. It wasn’t “Lucy” bad, but it wasn’t very good.
I didn’t know what was a flaw and what wasn’t, but I found it to be a very compelling story with solid performances.
As an experienced tanker they didn’t do a lot well at the collective tactical level. Crew level they got a lot right (although I cringed at the obvious hand wave to make the tank a pillbox for the last fight instead of doing any kind of battlefield damage assessment and repair to restore at least some mobility). The fight against the AT guns (hey diddle diddle straight up the middle of their engagement area :smack:) really took me out of it with respect to Wardaddy being a supposedly good armor leader.
It was better than most usage of tanks in movies. It was pretty awesome. They actual tank usage was heavily constrained by the story. For a serious movie about tanks they didn’t do as well as Kelly’s Heroes did in some scenes. They did have a real Tiger though!!!
I do wonder about the scene in the city when Fury took a close range hit from a 75 right on the glacis and shrugged it off. At that range surely they’d have been knocked out. Unless it was really a 50mm and they were using something other than AP shot.