The English title is The Saboteurs, and yes, it is very, very, very good!
This one is spoilt for me by my finding the premise of the climactic episode of the film – a complicated and cunning large-scale ruse on the part of railwaymen, to deceive the Germans – preposterously unlikely, in that the ruse succeeds. (The film has some basis in fact, but this part is fiction.)
I think the point here was to show how easily deception operations could be arranged. From what I’ve read, the Germans were real suckers for them.
There was in fact a paratrooper of the 101st who was sent home after the Normandy invasion under the Sole Surviving Son rule. The search for him was nowhere near as drawn-out and dramatic as depicted in the movie, however. This was covered in the book Band of Brothers, on which the HBO series was based.
I say, old bean, a jolly good show is Target for Tonight, filmed during the war with actual members of the RAF playing the same roles they performed in real life, with lots of such banter as “Looks like a peach of a target, sir!”
By the end of the movie, you’ll believe you really *can see in the dark if you just eat lots of carrots!
*Actual wartime British propaganda.
I know the general meme as here, “Jerry is thick”, and am sure of there being a fair amount of truth in it; but not even willing suspension of disbelief could do it for me re the stratagem in The Train. This could be put down to my being a railway enthusiast – we in that hobby are infamous nitpickers about the slightest inaccurate or implausible bit of railway detail, in any film !
The events in The Train sort of happened in a loose sense but as I understand it, the train was simply run in circles around Paris until the allies caught up without all the cunning plan. Don’t know why the German guards (if any) didn’t notice. Maybe it was dark.
Doesn’t keep it from being one of my favorite films ever. I mean, Nazis, railroads, and Burt Lancaster; what’s not to like. If I ever run a film appreciation class, this will be the one for the cinematography lecture. Walter Wottitz’s work is superb.
Paul Scofield is one of the best Nazis ever: “Bring me LaBiche!” :dubious:
They were too busy getting the hell out of Dodge (er, Paris) before LeClerc et al. showed up. :eek:
Stretching the OP a little bit, The Best Years of Our Lives is a drama about the process of readjustment to civilian life by returning American GIs and is well worth watching, imho.
I’d say that *Fury * is not a good choice for overall accuracy. At the point in the war when the movie took place, the Germans were essentially destroyed as an organized fighting force. There was little risk of an SS battalion getting loose in the US rear areas, unless by some extreme good luck, they were unnoticed in the extremely fast advance across Germany. Even at that, I suspect that we’d have just shelled and bombed them into oblivion without any need for a single tank to make a last stand at a crossroads to hold them off.
In addition, at that point in the war, the Army had finally got its logistical ducks in a row- they were able to sustain a constant advance in all sectors for nearly five straight months. There was no shortage of trained tank crews or tanks, or much of anything else either.
*Fury *would have been far more believable had it been set as part of the Battle of the Bulge or something like that where there were supply shortages, attacking Germans, and some sort of suicidal last stand might actually have been plausible.
What!?! Nobody mentioned Captain America: The First Avenger.
And yet it supposedly did happen.
The events in the movie were based on several true life accounts. The fight at the crossroads was taken from a book called Death Traps: The Survival of an American Armored Division in World War II. It describes a very similar story on the push to Koln during that time of the war.
Several things were compressed in the movie from real life. The movie made it seem like the 101st had one bridge to take and it blew up just as Eliot Gould got there. In reality the 101st had several bridges in their sector that they had to take and hold.
If you can find a copy, I recommend you read Chester Wilmot’s The Struggle for Europe (1952). He writes at length about the advantages and disadvantages of Eisenhower’s strategy of advancing along a wide front vs Montgomery’s of making a concentrated thrust through one sector of the German lines.
By late 1944–early '45, the Wehrmacht of course no longer had the resources to cover the entire front, and their defense of it was spotty. Where their forces were concentrated and organized, however, resistance was fierce.
And of course, the fiercest resistance came from the SS and the Hitler Youth.
An Academy Award winner and one of the best movies ever made. This time it was my dad who said “Once you’ve seen it, you’ll never forget it,” and he was right.
There was a lame made-for-TV remake of it in the '70s called Coming Home. Avoid this piece of dreck at all costs. :mad:
I’d say not so much “thick” as somewhat “rigid in thought.” 
Months earlier though; the fighting around Scherpenseel and Hastenrath (the story in the book) was sometime around or before early October 1944, and is near Aachen. Which is my point- the movie is set too late for that kind of thing to be likely.
Fury supposedly took place in April 1945, six months later and probably a couple of hundred of miles east.
I’m not saying that the actual combat scenes are unrealistic, but that the portrayal of April 1945 as some kind of time when the Army had to put untrained clerks in tanks, or fight off battalion sized counterattacks with 3 tanks is highly unrealistic. That’s just not the way it was at that point- while there was still heavy fighting going on in a few places, the US Army had overwhelming superiority in manpower and logistical support.
On a related note to the Sole Surviving Son rule, I feel like The SullivansAKA The Fighting Sullivans should be mentioned.
Oh ok I get you. Seems a little nitpicky but we are in the right place for that. I was more reacting to criticism I heard of the movie at the time about how unrealistic it was for a tank to be in that kind of battle. There are a few true stories of a single tank holding off a large number of troops. I don’t know if the story this was most closely based on was apocryphal but there are also the exploits of Ernest Kouma in Korea.
Let me tell you, that movie was a gut punch to me. Despite being a history and war movie buff I had never heard of the Sullivans or seen the movie until I was in my 20s at least. It was made for an audience that already knew the end. I didn’t. When Ward Bond says “All five” and you see their mother’s heart break it floored me. A great piece of acting by Selena Royle. Most of the movies made during the war were cheap propaganda. The Fighting Sullivans wasn’t exactly Shakespeare but it was a cut above most.
