I've seen most of the epic World War II movies made in the 1950s and 60s, but until last night THE VICTORS (1963) had eluded me. The movie has never been officially released on DVD or Blu-ray in North America, and I don't remember any TV showings of it in my area during my younger days.
THE VICTORS was written, produced, and directed by Carl Foreman, a man who was primarily a screenwriter. Foreman wanted THE VICTORS to be different than the standard WWII picture--the film follows a squad of American GIs as they fight through Europe, but there's no main character, and there are no major battles or action sequences. There isn't even what one could technically define as a plot--the script is made up of several random incidents involving members of the squad that are strung together. They serve in England, Italy, Western Europe, and one of the group winds up in 1946 postwar Berlin.
The squad includes Sgt. Joe Craig (Eli Wallach), Cpl. Frank Chase (George Peppard), Cpl. Trower (George Hamilton), and smaller roles played by Vince Edwards, James Mitchum, Michael Callan, and Peter Fonda. Among their experiences are getting drunk whenever they can, encountering survivors from a concentration camp, witnessing a fellow soldier being executed for desertion, and dealing with a number of women along the way.
Carl Foreman went out of his way to avoid the heroic or exciting elements one typically finds in WWII movies featuring American soldiers. The squad in THE VICTORS are not Audie Murphy types, nor are they memorable personalities. They're just regular guys trying to get through the war the best way they can.
The gritty realism that Foreman was aiming for is negated by the sequences involving the women the squad encounters. The ladies are played by a half-dozen Euro babes--Melina Mercouri, Jeanne Moreau, Rosanna Schiaffino, Romy Schneider, Senta Berger, and Elke Sommer. All of the characters played by these women have been negatively affected by the war in various ways, yet they still all manage to look gorgeous (see photo below). The scenes with the ladies have a soap opera type of feel to them, and they make an already slow paced film even more sluggish.
The version I saw of THE VICTORS on Tubi ran a little bit over two and a half hours. Throughout the movie a number of newsreels of the period are inserted, as a way to let the audience know how time is progressing. If the newsreels had not been included, the film's pace might have improved. According to multiple sources the original running time of THE VICTORS was about three hours. One of the sequences that was cut in involved a young refugee boy who survives by being a prostitute, and there was also a nude scene for Elke Sommer.
If it's surprising that Foreman would try to put in elements involving child prostitution and nudity in a 1963 production, consider that the writer/director had a left-leaning attitude, which permeates THE VICTORS overall. This attitude is heavy-handed at times. At one point while members of the squad are relaxing at a cafe, some racist soldiers come in and attack a couple of black GIs, while the song "Remember Pearl Harbor" is being played. During the sequence showing the execution of the deserter, the incident is backed by Frank Sinatra's version of "Have Yourself A Merry Little Christmas". The ending has a confrontation between Cpl. Trower and a Russian soldier in 1946 Berlin, a meeting that Foreman presents as a warning of what could happen if the "victors" of WWII do not learn to get along with one another. (The Russian soldier is played by Albert Finney, who, despite getting second billing, has only a couple minutes on screen, and doesn't even get to speak any lines in English.)
THE VICTORS has elements of a true epic (it was filmed on location in England and Europe), but none of the characters reach out and grab you, and the multiple vignettes give the film a meandering, depressing tone. The six Euro babes generate some interest, but honestly their sequences could have been replaced by scenes that gave the squad more important things to do. THE VICTORS certainly is an unusual type of WWII movie, but it goes on too long and it never really comes together.
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