The Victors (1963 film)
The Victors is a 1963 British-American black-and-white war film written, produced and directed by Carl Foreman. He called it a "personal statement" about the futility of war. Both victor and vanquished are losers.[2]
| The Victors | |
|---|---|
| Directed by | Carl Foreman |
| Written by | Carl Foreman |
| Based on | the novel The Human Kind by Alexander Baron |
| Produced by | Carl Foreman |
| Starring | Vincent Edwards Albert Finney George Hamilton Melina Mercouri Jeanne Moreau George Peppard Maurice Ronet Rosanna Schiaffino Romy Schneider Elke Sommer Eli Wallach and Michael Callan |
| Cinematography | Christopher Challis B.S.C. |
| Edited by | Alan Osbiston |
| Music by | Composed and conducted by Sol Kaplan |
Production companies | Open Road Films Highroad Productions |
| Distributed by | Columbia Pictures |
Release dates |
|
Running time | 175 minutes |
| Countries | United Kingdom United States |
| Language | English |
| Box office | $2,350,000 (US/ Canada)[1] |
It follows a group of U.S. soldiers through Europe during the Second World War, from Britain in 1942, through the fierce fighting in Italy and the invasion of Normandy, to the uneasy peace of occupied Berlin. It is adapted from a collection of short stories called The Human Kind by English author Alexander Baron, based upon his own wartime experiences. The British characters were changed to Americans in order to appeal to American audiences.
The Victors features an all-star cast, with fifteen American and European leading players, including six actresses whose photographs appear on the posters — Melina Mercouri from Greece, Jeanne Moreau from France, Rosanna Schiaffino from Italy, Romy Schneider and Senta Berger from Austria and Elke Sommer from West Germany.[3]
Plot
The story is told in a series of short vignettes, each having a beginning and an ending in itself, though all are connected to the others
A U.S. infantry squad is sent to Italy, including Sergeant Craig, and Corporals Trower and Chase, and GI Baker. The squad take possession of a small town in Sicily. Craig has to stop his men from looting. Baker strikes up a relationship with Maria, a young mother whose soldier husband is missing. They talk to a Sikh soldier who is lonely and misses his children. A group of white American soldiers find two black American soldiers in a bar and beat them until the MPs (Military Police) arrive; an Italian onlooker asks why Americans attack each other and gets no reply.
The squad are then sent to France. Craig spends the evening with a Frenchwoman who is terrified by bombing raids.
The men help liberate a concentration camp. In Ostend, Trower meets Regine, a violinist, and falls in love with her. However when he sees her later she is working for a pimp, Eldridge, who tells Trower that she rents by the hour.
One truckload of GIs is chosen out of a convoy to supply witnesses to the execution by firing squad of a GI deserter (inspired by the real-life 1945 execution of Private Eddie Slovik) in a huge, otherwise empty, snow-covered field near a chateau at Sainte-Marie-aux-Mines on Christmas Eve, accompanied by Frank Sinatra singing "Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas", and then a chorus of "Hark! The Herald Angels Sing" after the fatal shots are fired. The New York Times film review stated "it stands out in stark and sobering contrast to the other gaudier incidents in the film".[4] (This was an early example of "Soundtrack Dissonance", the juxtaposition of saccharine music with a frightful scene,[5] and was emulated the following year by Stanley Kubrick in Dr. Strangelove, which was also shot in black and white.)
Chase has a relationship with Magda, who suggests he desert and join her in the black market. He refuses just as he learns that his unit is marching out of town in the rain. Some of his friends hide his gear under their rain ponchos, and he slips into formation. Back at the front he is wounded in the leg.
A newcomer to the squad, a misfit named Weaver, adopts a dog even though another man in the unit tells him that it is against regulations ("They're dirty and they make dirt"), and they can't take dogs with them when they redeploy at the front. Weaver keeps feeding the dog anyway, even after the other men kick him and his dog out of the tent. When the unit moves out, one of the other men in the unit, Grogan, tells Weaver to call his dog. Weaver thinks that the others have changed their minds and are letting him bring his dog with them, but Grover shoots the dog as it runs after the truck.
When Chase gets out of hospital in England, he is stuck at a bus stop in the rain. A man, Dennis, invites him to have tea with his family. He has a pleasant time, but when he visits Craig in the hospital, he discovers that most of Craig's face has been blown off.
The war in Europe ends. In 1946 Trower is still in the Army and stationed in Berlin. He is in love with Helga, a young German woman who was raped by the Russians during and after the Battle of Berlin. Trower brings her parents imported goods from the PX (military Post Exchange) when he visits their apartment and has sex with Helga in their bedroom. Helga's sister has been sleeping with Russians; her current lover, a Russian officer, has given her an expensive fur coat that she flaunts in front of Helga, their parents, and Trower. Trower is returning to his base when he meets a drunken Russian soldier. He thinks of Russians raping Helga and a provokes a fight with the Russian. The two men pull knives and stab each other to death. As the camera pulls back to show seemingly endless ruins, we see that the position of the allies' bodies suggests the letter 'V' for Victory.
Cast
Starring in alphabetical order
- Vincent Edwards as Baker
- Albert Finney as Russian soldier
- George Hamilton as Trower
- Melina Mercouri as Magda
- Jeanne Moreau as Frenchwoman
- George Peppard as Chase
- Maurice Ronet as French lieutenant
- Rosanna Schiaffino as Maria
- Romy Schneider as Regine
- Elke Sommer as Helga Metzger
- Eli Wallach as Craig
- and Michael Callan as Eldridge
Co-Starring
- Peter Fonda as Weaver
- Jim Mitchum as Grogan
- Senta Berger as Trudi Metzger
With
- Albert Lieven as Metzger
- Mervyn Johns as Dennis
- Tutte Lemkow as Sikh soldier
- John Crawford as Captain
- Peter Vaughan as Policeman
- George Mikell as Russian sentry
- Alf Kjellin as Priest
- Russ Titus
- Alan Barnes as Tom
- John Rogers as British soldier
- Marianne Deeming as Frau Metzger
- Sean Kelly as Giggling Sergeant
- Patrick Jordan as Tank sergeant
- James Chase as Condemned soldier
- Mickey Knox
- Peter Arne
- Malya Nappi as Barmaid
- Veite Bethke
- Milo Sperber as Camp prisoner
- George Roubicek as Russian sentry
- Bee Duffell as Joan (Uncredited)
The Squad [Firing squad members]
- Riggs O'Hara
- Charles De Temple
- Al Waxman
- Tom Busby
- Robert Nichols
- Graydon Gould
- Larry Caringi
- Ian Hughes
- Anthony McBride
Songs listed in opening credits
- "March of the Victors" • "Sweet Talk" • "No Other Man" by Sol Kaplan • Freddy Douglass
- "My Special Dream" by Sol Kaplan • Freddy Douglass • Howard Greenfield
- "Does Goodnight Mean Goodby?" by Howard Greenfield • Jack Keller • Gerry Goffin
Original novel
The film was based on the book The Human Kind, which was published in 1953.[6] It was the third in a trilogy of autobiographical war works from Alexander Baron, the first two being From the City, From the Plough and There's No Home. The Human Kind was a series of autobiographical notes and sketches which covered the war from 1939 to 1945, with an epilogue in Korea.[7] The Independent called it "an ambitious collection of vignettes pitched between fiction and autobiography, short story and novel, which took pitiless stock of what the war had done to people and their sense of goodness or hope, political hope especially."[8]
Production
Development
Film rights were bought by Carl Foreman. In May 1957, he announced a slate of productions he wanted to produce under a deal with Columbia in England, including an adaptation of The Human Kind. The deal was for four films over three years, with a budget of $8–10 million. He called Human Kind a "series of vignettes of the early days of the blitz in England."[9]
In 1960, Foreman announced The Human Kind would follow his production of The Guns of Navarone. Foreman's intention was to "select several of the stories, adapt them to the screen and make one overall drama out of the kaleidoscopic collection." Foreman also said he intended to make his directorial debut with the movie.[10]
In August 1961, Foreman said the project would be titled The Victors as he felt the theme of the book was that in war the winners are also the losers.[11] In February 1962, Foreman arrived in Los Angeles to cast the movie.[12]
"It will be controversial and may well shock people, said Foreman in August 1962, just as filming began. "But it represents a deeply personal feeling I have about war and specifically heroism. People are very capable of coming up with heroism when it is necessary - but it's not a game anymore. What I resent is the need for heroism in warfare."[13]
Sophia Loren and Simone Signoret were originally cast, but dropped out and were replaced by Jeanne Moreau and Rosanna Schiaffino.[14]
Shooting
Filming began 7 August 1962, first in England, then Italy and France, then the unit returned to England.[15] Filming took place in Sweden, France, Italy and England.[16]
Mercouri admitted in her memoirs that "I gave Carl Foreman a hard time" during the shoot but said this was because she was physically unwell.[17]
Saul Bass created the opening montage and title sequence that covers European history from the First World War to the Battle of Britain in the Second World War. Bass's edit of historical footage in The Victors explicitly argues that the failures of World War I and its aftermath directly resulted in the rise of Fascism and World War II. Bass had previously gathered together much of the newsreel material for similar historical montages used in The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse (1962).[18]
Release
Censorship
The Victors was cut by about 20 minutes within a few weeks of opening. The version in circulation is 154 minutes (see Leonard Maltin's Film & Video Guide).
Among the sequences cut was one where an 11-year-old boy, Jean Pierre, propositions the American soldiers to exchange sex for food money. The Hollywood Production Code, also known as the Hays Code, insisted that several scenes be deleted. While the Code had been gradually liberalised in the 1950s-early 1960s, homosexuality was still something that could only be, vaguely, implied in order to get approval from the Hollywood Production Code and the Catholic Legion of Decency.[19]
American film executives encouraged Foreman to include a nude scene with Elke Sommer, already in the version released in Europe and Britain, when he submitted it for a Production Code seal. This was to be used as a bargaining chip in case of any other objections. Foreman submitted the more modest version of the scene that had been shot for the American market and the film was passed without incident.[20]
Box office
The film disappointed at the box office. George Hamilton argued it "was way too dark, foreshadowing the great paranoid movies of the later sixties, ahead of the bad times that seemed to begin with the Kennedy assassination."[21]
Awards
Peter Fonda was nominated for a Golden Globe for Most Promising Newcomer.
Paperback novelization
In November 1963, Dell Publishing issued a novelization of the screenplay by critic, author and war veteran Milton Shulman. The book's presentation is idiosyncratic, as it is both unabashedly a tie-in edition, yet seems to cautiously sidestep labeling itself an adaptation of the script per se (though within Shulman's sensitively internalized retelling, it is quite faithful to the film's dialogue and structure). Both the cover and title page proclaim "Carl Foreman's The Victors" under which the byline is "by Milton Shulman, based on The Human Kind by Alexander Baron." bypassing mention of the actual screenplay. It is unknown whether Dell bid for the publishing rights and commissioned the novelization, or if Foreman engineered its publication. The latter would seem the more likely, given Foreman's possessive over-the-title billing, and that the short story collection providing the source of the screenplay is itself an established work of fiction. What does seem clear is that Baron himself was approached to write the novelization, and that he declined—possibly because, with the Americanization of the characters, he felt the novel's authorship should have a genuinely American voice—but nonetheless wanted to select the author and supervise. That he did so can be extrapolated from the copyright registration: The copyright is assigned to Baron, with a notation that he engaged Shulman to write the book as a work for hire. The resultant novelization sold well enough to earn at least a second print run, indicated on that identical edition's copyright page, issued in January 1964.[citation needed]
References
- ^ "Big Rental Pictures of 1964", Variety, 6 January 1965 p 39. Please note this figure is rentals accruing to distributors not total gross.
- ^ , Time Magazine, 20 December 1963[dead link]
- ^ Greco, John. "Where Are They? The Victors (1963)" (Twenty Four Frames. Notes on Film by John Greco, 2009–15) Includes images of The Victors film posters
- ^ The Grim Message of War: Foreman's 'The Victors' at Two Theaters, by Bosley Crowther, New York Times, 20 December 1963
- ^ 'Soundtrack Dissonace' at TV Tropes; retrieved 30 August 2021
- ^ 'England's Chicago Tribune' Strout, Richard L. The Observer 4 March 1951: 5.
- ^ How Savage Man Can Be: The Human Kind. By Alexander Baron. 187 pp. New York: Ives Washburn. By John C. Neff. New York Times 28 June 1953: BR12.
- ^ BOOKS: [3 Edition 3] Williams, John. The Independent; London (UK) 11 June 1994.
- ^ Noted on the Local Screen Scene: Foreman's Full Agenda --On the Schulbergs' Slate--Addenda Anatomy of Fear By A.H. Weiler. The New York Times 17 March 1957: X5.
- ^ By Way of Report: Metro, French Company Team -- Other Items By A.H. Weiler. The New York Times 4 December 1960: X7.
- ^ Blowing Up of Guns Pet Foreman Effect: Minnelli's Is Sky Horsemen; Stage-Play Titles Real Gone Scheuer, Philip K. Los Angeles Times 14 August 1961: C9.
- ^ Film Roles Await Yankees in Florida Hedda Hopper's Hollywood: The Washington Post and Times-Herald 6 February 1962: B8.
- ^ Foreman Will Show Victors Are Losers: Producer-Director Indicts Wartime Heroism in Movie Scheuer, Philip K. Los Angeles Times 7 August 1962: C9.
- ^ 'Cleopatra' Movie Cast Coming Home This Week Hopper, Hedda. Chicago Daily Tribune 11 July 1962: a2.
- ^ Looking at Hollywood: Sports Writer to Do Williams' TV Script Hopper, Hedda. Chicago Daily Tribune 6 June 1962: b2.
- ^ 1963 Film The Victors, at Orato
- ^ Mercouri, Melina (1971). I was born Greek. Doubleday. p. 158.
- ^ Horak, Jan-Christopher (19 November 2014). Saul Bass : anatomy of film design. ISBN 978-0-8131-4718-5. OCLC 876686064.
- ^ Russo, Vito (1986). The Celluloid Closet: Homosexuality In The Movies. Harper & Row. p. 136. ISBN 978-0060961329.
- ^ Schumach, Murray (1964). The Face On The Cutting Room Floor:The Story Of Movie And Television Censorship. William Morrow. pp. 13–14. ISBN 978-0306800092.
- ^ George Hamilton & William Stadiem, Don't Mind If I Do, Simon & Schuster 2008 p 177
External links
- The Victors at AllMovie
- The Victors at the American Film Institute Catalog
- The Victors at IMDb
- The Victors at the TCM Movie Database