The Victors

An infantry squad moves from Sicily towards Germany in the last years of the war. The film does not tell a straight story; in a run of short episodes it shows the same men and the women, the towns and the decisions they meet along the way. Real newsreels of the period are cut in between, so the audience is looking at fact one moment and at fiction the next. This is the only film Carl Foreman directed, and it stands openly against what war pictures usually do. The word victory is in the title, but the film says nobody won. Its best known scene is the execution of a soldier by firing squad in a snow-covered field, with Sinatra singing a Christmas song over it. Drawn from the real case of Eddie Slovik, that passage is still hard to sit through. The cast runs from Eli Wallach to Jeanne Moreau.