Did you people see the same film I saw?

It's not great by any means, but it's a pretty good movie that didn't leave me filled with regret for investing time in it.

Not sure how, but this is easily one of the best movies all summer. Multiple levels of funny, never takes itself seriously, super colorful, and creative.

what a terribly boring film. I'm sorry but this is absolutely not deserving of best picture and will be forgotten quickly. Entertaining and engaging cinema? No. Nothing performances with flat faces and mistaking silence for subtlety.

Il grande attacco, also known in various versions under the English titles Battle Force and The Greatest Battle, is by consensus a muddled WW2 Action picture with some good battle scenes and a confused plot. It maybe that the film is a lazy effort on the part of its writers but it also, in its incoherence, manages to say something about war and history which is inexpressible through a more formally consistent narrative.A disparate group of people – an American general (Henry Fonda), an Irish-American war correspondent (John Huston), a German officer (Stacey Keach) and a famous German-Jewish actress (Samantha Eggar) meet in Berlin on the day that Jessie Owens wins an Olympic gold medal and the German chancellor, Adolf Hitler, refuses to shake the athlete's hand. The characters gossip casually about this and go their separate ways, with Fonda and Keach swapping souvenir Olympic medallions as a measure of their friendship. Six years later, these and a number of other characters are enmeshed in the second world war, the film consisting of various seemingly random sequences involving the characters in some kind of dramatic situation or undertaking a battle mission. Some of them are killed and some are still alive in 1943, where the film arbitrarily ends. But a coincidence means that the now dead Keach's medallion is in the hands of Fonda's American hero son (Ray Lovelock, of Living Dead at the Manchester Morgue 'fame').Taking the film at face value and allowing it not to conform to classical narrative structures, it seems that the arbitrary and the coincidental are the rules of the game here. There is no narrative arc or learning curve to most of the characters' lives; they are driven to undertake their roles in the war, through either loyalty to their homeland or to their professions, without even really coming to a consciousness of their situation. This is most striking in Keach's story: he marries Eggar and fights and dies, heroically, for the German side in Africa; at home, his wife is sexually harassed and persecuted by the Gestapo until she commits suicide. Keach dies without knowing that the ideology he has been fighting for has killed the woman he loves.Another sub-plot features Edwige Fenech as a French woman driven to prostituting herself to German officers by poverty. She isn't a bad person, she's eaten with self-loathing through her circumstance and is genuinely shocked when the Germans execute a Resistance fighter who has tried to hide in her apartment. Nevertheless, she herself is shot dead by the Resistance who are under the misguided impression that she was behind their compatriot's death. Her murder is quick and brutally achieved and her death doesn't teaches anyone anything. Life in war, for her and for most of the characters, is meaningless, degrading, dangerous and comes to a sudden end, as if life were a drive which simply stops when it meets an opposing, amoral force. Earlier in the film, Fenech has been helped by German officer Helmut Berger, here playing a character somewhat similar to Brando's in The Young Lions. Berger is fiercely loyal to Germany but doesn't seem ideologically Nazi nor does he seem to have lost his humanity – he looks seriously disturbed as he sees the death around him. Yet like Keach he never learns anything but how to die, which he (like an American soldier he'd previously shot) begs for. That Fonda's son doesn't kill Berger at the latter's request means nothing, as Berger croaks whilst drinking the water that Lovelock tries to force down his throat.There is a brief respite from the film's grimness at the end, as Fonda learns that Lovelock has survived thus far and been commended. Yet this is a bitter sweet given that this takes place after Fonda's visit to his other son's grave, who has been killed a few months before. More telling is the moment where Huston and a young cameraman are killed filming a battle – the camera is shown strewn in the sand, as if in a reflexive moment Il grande attacco realises and admits that the process of filming battles is futile.There's no point in arguing that this is a great film. There is something rather distasteful about its predominant concentration on the lives of the officer classes (Fenech's character is the only exception) and it may be that Il grande attacco really is not worthy of serious consideration. Yet its inconsistency and randomness adds up to a curiously consistent vision of war as a meaningless serious of events for those unlucky enough to be caught up in its history and unconscious enough not to comprehend their predicament. Director and co-writer Umberto Lenzi was, during the same period as this film was produced, producing some of the sleaziest and sickest of the giallo, crime and even cannibal films of the age; perhaps this is better understood as part of that movement in Italian cinema that produced films which deliberately undercut the meaning-making inherent in the Hollywood model, producing a provoking vision of a universe of cruelty, absurdity and violent death which shows that the world is more made up of swirling, futile vortices than character-building, consequential journeys.

This film has the unmistakable whiff of tax write off about it and I can't believe the non-Italians in this Italian made World War II film weren't doing this one for nothing more than a paycheck and a European vacation.For an Italian film you would think Italy would be mentioned somewhere in this story. The climax of the movie is the battle for Tunisia where the Italians had a lot of soldiers. The battle scenes are merely stock footage from other and better films.The only tie in this whole story is a meeting in Berlin of retired army general Henry Fonda, war correspondent John Huston, German-Jewish actress Samantha Eggar and German major Stacy Keach. Meeting at the time of the Olympics there, the four dismiss the possibility of war.After that it seems like you're watching four or five separate films all at once. Everyone seems to be just reciting the dialog by rote and hurrying off to do better things presumably. Even Orson Welles who narrates the English language version, can't whip up any excitement in his voice.It's just another one done for the money.

Director Umberto Lenzi's movies have always been the subject of criticism on web boards and even from nationally known reviewers, including Leonard Maltin. It seems as though he takes a lot of flak simply because his films are made overseas. At its heart, "The Greatest Battle" is really no better or worse than the slew of epic war films to come out of Hollywood in the 1970s. During the Berlin Olympics of 1936, German Major Roland (Stacy Keach); American General Foster (Henry Fonda); reporter Sean O'Hara (John Huston) and Jewish actress Annelise Ackerman (Samantha Eggar) meet and become friends. Flash forward to late 1941: America is embroiled in World War II. Several more characters are introduced, namely: Foster's loser son, John (Ray Lovelock); gutsy British commando leader Captain Scott (Giuliano Gemma) and dedicated Nazi commando officer Lt. Zimmer (Helmut Berger). All of these characters become interconnected over the course of the next two years and wind up coming face-to-face at the Battle of the Mareth Line in North Africa. Each turn in a dedicated, honest performance – something to be admired in this genre. Several familiar European actors appear in the supporting cast, and although their parts are unimportant to the storyline, it's essential to mention some of them: Giacomo Rossi-Stuart ("Hornets' Nest") plays John Foster's commander; Andrea Bosic ("Hell's Brigade") as the leader of Greek partisans; Ida Galli ("Eagles Over London") as Scott's estranged wife, and Venantino Venantini ("The War Devils") as her new husband; Geoffrey Copleston ("The Assisi Underground") as a menacing SS Colonel; Luciano Catenacci ("The Battle of El Alamein") as a British radio operator; the list goes on forever. Even Orson Welles ("The Battle of Neretva") narrates the proceedings rather unnecessarily – and, often, incorrectly. For the most part, this is a plot less series of scenes, chronicling major events in the characters' lives and campaigns. Lenzi fills out the running time with stylistic action sequences and well-integrated stock footage. Lenzi's directorial style and energy are apparent in a number of battle scenes. He takes a lot of ideas and scenarios from his earlier war films – notably, "Battle of the Commandos" (a partisan ambush of a German armored convoy looks awfully familiar, as does a commando raid on a coastal bunker) and shoots them with a bigger budget and more professionalism. The Federico Zanni photography is simply dazzling and excellently edited by Eugenio Alabiso, one of my favorite genre-editors. Unfortunately, a lot of familiar stock footage from "Battle of the Commandos", "Commandos", "Desert Assault" and "The Battle of El Alamein" is used as a substitute for original action footage, which really hampers the original, epic feel of the movie. But look at Hollywood's epic "Midway" released in 1976: it's a hodgepodge of stock footage and cameos, yet is much better received by audiences than this film. The major action sequences revolve solely around the stock footage, but that's okay in this movie, because the material surrounding these sequences is so good.The production values are amazingly high in this film, setting it another notch among its' peers. The sets, from Parisian bars and brothels, to huge entrenchments, fuel dumps and railroad stations look fantastic. The costumes and props are appropriate, too. There are hundreds of extras, tanks, APCs, jeeps and airplanes dotting the screen, giving the film the appropriate epic look. This Italian-produced war epic is typically underrated and undeserving of the criticism it so often receives. While it does lack a storyline and has no character development whatsoever… and contains reels of stock footage, the original material, style and slew of actors help to offset these flaws. "The Greatest Battle" is no better or worse than any similar film made in Hollywood, and is certainly much more entertaining and engaging than titles like "Midway".

For a low-budget movie set during World War II, it does have a rough and violent edge. Above all, BATTLE FORCE surrenders to a non-existent plot and storyline that's been duped hundreds of times repeatedly. Don't expect much here as there's no specific meaning. Explosions and body counts are nothing new! Adding to the troop casulty count is of Orson Welles' annoying and interrupting narration, making it feel like a made-for-television documentary. War movies are instant classics in the grade "A" Hollywood circuit, and SAVING PRIVATE RYAN triumphs realism today. Despite a fairly good replica of those WW2 days, BATTLE FORCE is another run-of-the-mill production without enough substance. Anyone who grew up watching Hollywood war dramas in their lifetimes probably avoided this one while history was made.