The rest of the movie is filled with great tank battle scenes shot both from the ground level and from the air, giving a sweeping bird's eye view of the battle ground. These are the sort of sequences that would be admired and enjoyed by all war movie fans.
Top notch authentic production value is not an accident since none of the tanks used were decoys and all were real vintage machines of destruction gathered from warehouses all across the Europe. But despite its complexity and grand scale of production, the whole movie was finished in just 8 months from the first "Action!" call to editing in post-production.
The figure of Sgt. Guffy (brought to life by the affable Telly "Kojak" Savalas) provides comedy relief as we follow him and his sidekick running their own black market storefront by selling anything from pantyhoses and perfume to fresh eggs laid by live chickens kept in hotel rooms. While others are just trying to stay alive, Guffy makes it his mission to go back home with his pockets full of cash. And I believe we had those "St. Guffy" type operators in every war since then.
In the Third Act, Gen. Grey, with critical intelligence input from Kiley, at long last discover the Achilles' heel of Hessler's panzers - fuel! Soon Hessler's tanks would be running out of gas and then, since the weather has also started to clear up, they would be just sitting ducks.
The final confrontation takes place in front of the Allied fuel dump. Hessler's force is at long last beaten by a logistics nightmare that similarly devastated a much larger German invasion force at the outskirts of Moscow a short while earlier.
Battle of the Bulge is a good example to those films portraying a war in which the good and the evil were separated like oil and water, and there were no moral ambiguities to any of it. One almost - not quite but "almost," nevertheless - feels "nostalgic" for those days in which we knew exactly whom we were fighting and exactly when the war began and was over.
A booming 8 out of 10 as far as war movies go.
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