My survey of war movies brought me into 1965's Battle of the Bulge and it's a terrible film.
Setting aside the fact that the whole story is fictionalized, there's simply a point where so many technical details have been compromised, the movie loses any historical relevance or feeling.
I was pretty sure I saw it before, but re-watching it, the first thing that struck me was that it was filmed in Spain. The Germans are using Patton M-47 tanks and the Americans M-24 Chaffee light tanks.
So none of the equipment is accurate.
The terrain is also wrong – the Ardennes is heavily forested and the Battle of the Bulge took place in deep snow, but the climatic tank battle of this movie is resolved on a dusty, open plain.
In Spain.
Don't get me wrong, I'm really into Spain for some reason, and that's why the locations were like a giant red blinking light telling me that this movie was wrong wrong wrong.
The wrongness is just pervasive. The German HQ is like a Bond villain's lair, complete with doomsday clock.
Don't get me wrong, I know that sometimes period films (especially war movies) have to make do. For example, I went easy on Tora! Tora! Tora! precisely because so few Japanese aircraft survived World War II and likewise the available ships for live-action shooting are more modern.
But if one shot a Pearl Harbor movie with jets and set it in the desert, people might complain. And that's the big issue with Battle of the Bulge.
The acting is also really weak. In fact, the whole thing's weak. It's the kind of movie where if you don't know history and watch it hoping to learn something, you'll end up dumber than before you started. Even the voiceovers get stuff wrong.
Given that there were three people credited for the script, you'd think at least one of them would know that the British Eighth Army was in Italy, not France.
You'd think that, but you'd be wrong.
Chateau Lloyd 
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