The Victors
Directed byCarl Foreman
Written byCarl Foreman
Based onthe short story collection The Human Kind
by Alexander Baron
Produced byCarl Foreman
StarringVincent Edwards
Albert Finney
George Hamilton
Melina Mercouri
Jeanne Moreau
George Peppard
Maurice Ronet
Rosanna Schiaffino
Romy Schneider
Elke Sommer
Eli Wallach
and Michael Callan
CinematographyChristopher Challis B.S.C.
Edited byAlan Osbiston
Music byComposed and conducted
by Sol Kaplan
Color processBlack and white
Production
companies
Open Road Films
Highroad Productions
Distributed byColumbia Pictures
Release dates
  • 18 November 1963 (1963-11-18) (London-Royal Premiere)
  • 19 November 1963 (1963-11-19) (United Kingdom)
  • December 19, 1963 (1963-12-19) (United States)
Running time
153 minutes
CountriesUnited Kingdom
United States
LanguageEnglish
Box office$2,350,000 (US/ Canada)[1]

The Victors is a 1963 British-American war film written, produced and directed by Carl Foreman. He called it a "personal statement" about the futility of war. Both victor and vanquished are losers.[2]

It follows a group of U.S. soldiers through Europe during the Second World War, from Britain in 1942, through the fierce fighting in Italy and the invasion of Normandy, to the uneasy peace of occupied Berlin. It is adapted from a collection of short stories called The Human Kind by English author Alexander Baron, based upon his own wartime experiences. The British characters were changed to Americans in order to appeal to American audiences.

The Victors features an all-star cast, with fifteen American and European leading players, including six actresses whose photographs appear on the posters — Melina Mercouri from Greece, Jeanne Moreau from France, Rosanna Schiaffino from Italy, Romy Schneider and Senta Berger from Austria and Elke Sommer from West Germany.[3]

Plot

The story is told in a series of short vignettes, each having a beginning and an ending in itself, though all are connected to the others.

A U.S. infantry squad is sent to Italy, including Sergeant Craig, Corporals Trower and Chase, and GI Baker. The squad takes possession of a small town in Sicily. Craig has to stop his men from looting. Baker strikes up a relationship with Maria, a young mother whose soldier husband is missing. They talk to a Sikh soldier who is lonely and misses his children.

A diverse group of allied soldiers intermingles in a bar. Four white American soldiers burst in ominously. One of them announces that they are "coon huntin' " tonight and wields a switch blade which he apparently intends to use. Two black American soldiers seated at a table become their focus. Others clear a path as two of the group pounce on the two black soldiers. They are beating the blacks when the MPs (Military Police) enter the bar. The perpetrators flee. Trower goes to help one of the two black soldiers recover, but hides himself instead right before the MPs rush in. The MPs take over asking the woman bar owner if there was any resulting damage. She answers, "Only business." The MPs take the victims out of the bar. The bar owner asks Trower, "Why they fight, you are same peoples, American 'comaradies', why you fight?" He replies,"I really don't know," quickly exiting as the radio plays,"Let's Remember Pearl Harbor".

The squad are then sent to France. Craig enters a nice home that might be used by American officers when they enter town. He comes upon the French woman (Jeanne Moreau) who owns the place, and has just survived a night of bombing. He spends the night to comfort the terrified woman.

The men help liberate a concentration camp. In Ostend, Trower meets Regine, a violinist at a bar, and falls in love with her. He walks her to her hotel and says he'd like to see her next time he's in town. They kiss. The next time he sees her at the bar she's working for a pimp, Eldridge, who tells Trower that she rents by the hour.

One truckload of GIs is chosen out of a convoy to witness the execution by firing squad of a GI deserter in a snow-covered field near a chateau at Sainte-Marie-aux-Mines on Christmas Eve. Frank Sinatra sings "Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas", followed by a chorus of "Hark! The Herald Angels Sing".

Chase has a relationship with Magda, a Polish woman who suggests he desert and join her in the black market. He refuses just as he learns that his unit is marching out of town in the rain. Some of his friends hide his gear under their rain ponchos, and he slips into formation. Back at the front he is wounded in the leg.

A newcomer to the squad, a misfit named Weaver, adopts a dog even though another man in the unit tells him that it is against regulations. They can't take dogs with them when they redeploy at the front, so they have to shoot them. Weaver feeds the dog anyway, even after the other men kick him and the dog out of the tent. When the unit moves out, one of the other men in the unit, Grogan, tells Weaver to call his dog. Weaver thinks that the others have changed their minds and are letting him bring his dog with them, but Grogan shoots the dog as it runs after the truck.

When Chase gets out of hospital in England, he is stuck at a bus stop in the rain. A man, Dennis, invites him to have tea with his family. He has a pleasant time, but when he visits Craig in the hospital, he discovers that most of Craig's face has been blown off. Craig screams at him to get out.

The war in Europe ends. In 1946 Trower is still in the Army and stationed in Berlin. He is in love with Helga, a young German woman who was raped by the Russians during and after the Battle of Berlin. Trower brings her parents imported goods from the PX (military Post Exchange) when he visits their apartment, noticing a mezuzah on the doorway. Helga's sister, Trudi, enters the apartment to the chagrin of her parents. Her current lover, a Russian "commander", has given her an expensive fur coat that she flaunts in front of Helga, their parents, and Trower. She explains to Trower that without the Russian her parents would be living outdoors. He spends the night with Helga; it's her night in the shared bedroom. Trower is returning to his base when he meets a drunken Russian soldier (Albert Finney). He provokes a fight with the Russian, asking how many women he's raped tonight. The two men pull knives and stab each other to death. As the camera pulls back to show seemingly endless ruins, we see that the position of the allied soldiers' bodies suggests the letter 'V' for Victory.

Cast

Starring in alphabetical order

Co-Starring

With

The Squad [Firing squad members]

Songs listed in opening credits

Source material

The film was based on the book The Human Kind, which was published in 1953.[4] It was the third in a trilogy of autobiographical war works from Alexander Baron, the first two being From the City, From the Plough and There's No Home. The Human Kind was a series of autobiographical notes and sketches which covered the war from 1939 to 1945, with an epilogue in Korea.[5] The Independent called it "an ambitious collection of vignettes pitched between fiction and autobiography, short story and novel, which took pitiless stock of what the war had done to people and their sense of goodness or hope, political hope especially."[6]

Production

Development

Film rights were bought by Carl Foreman. In May 1957, he announced a slate of productions he wanted to produce under a deal with Columbia in England, including an adaptation of The Human Kind. The deal was for four films over three years, with a budget of $8–10 million. He called Human Kind a "series of vignettes of the early days of the blitz in England."[7]

In 1960, Foreman announced The Human Kind would follow his production of The Guns of Navarone. Foreman's intention was to "select several of the stories, adapt them to the screen and make one overall drama out of the kaleidoscopic collection." Foreman also said he intended to make his directorial debut with the movie.[8]

In August 1961, Foreman said the project would be titled The Victors as he felt the theme of the book was that in war the winners are also the losers.[9] In February 1962, Foreman arrived in Los Angeles to cast the movie.[10]

"It will be controversial and may well shock people, said Foreman in August 1962, just as filming began. "But it represents a deeply personal feeling I have about war and specifically heroism. People are very capable of coming up with heroism when it is necessary - but it's not a game anymore. What I resent is the need for heroism in warfare."[11]

Sophia Loren and Simone Signoret were originally cast, but dropped out and were replaced by Jeanne Moreau and Rosanna Schiaffino.[12]

Shooting

Filming began 7 August 1962, first in England, then Italy and France, then the unit returned to England.[13] Filming took place in Sweden, France, Italy and England.[14]

Mercouri admitted in her memoirs that "I gave Carl Foreman a hard time" during the shoot but said this was because she was physically unwell.[15]

Saul Bass created the opening montage and title sequence that covers European history from the First World War to the Battle of Britain in the Second World War. Bass's edit of historical footage in The Victors explicitly argues that the failures of World War I and its aftermath directly resulted in the rise of Fascism and World War II. Bass had previously gathered together much of the newsreel material for similar historical montages used in The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse (1962).[16]

Release

Censorship

The Victors was cut by about 20 minutes within a few weeks of opening. The version in circulation is 154 minutes (see Leonard Maltin's Film & Video Guide).

Among the sequences cut was one where an 11-year-old boy, Jean Pierre, propositions the American soldiers to exchange sex for food money. The Hollywood Production Code, also known as the Hays Code, insisted that several scenes be deleted. While the Code had been gradually liberalised in the 1950s-early 1960s, homosexuality was still something that could only be, vaguely, implied in order to get approval from the Hollywood Production Code and the Catholic Legion of Decency.[17]

American film executives encouraged Foreman to include a nude scene with Elke Sommer, already in the version released in Europe and Britain, when he submitted it for a Production Code seal. This was to be used as a bargaining chip in case of any other objections. Foreman submitted the more modest version of the scene that had been shot for the American market and the film was passed without incident.[18]

Box office

The film disappointed at the box office. George Hamilton argued it "was way too dark, foreshadowing the great paranoid movies of the later sixties, ahead of the bad times that seemed to begin with the Kennedy assassination."[19] This is the movie that was playing on the screen at the Texas Theater in Dallas when Lee Harvey Oswald was arrested at the theater hiding out shortly after he assassinated President Kennedy.

Awards

Peter Fonda was nominated for a Golden Globe for Most Promising Newcomer.

Paperback novelization

In November 1963, Dell Publishing issued a novelization of the screenplay by critic, author and war veteran Milton Shulman. The book's presentation is idiosyncratic, as it is both unabashedly a tie-in edition, yet seems to cautiously sidestep labeling itself an adaptation of the script per se (though within Shulman's sensitively internalized retelling, it is quite faithful to the film's dialogue and structure). Both the cover and title page proclaim "Carl Foreman's The Victors" under which the byline is "by Milton Shulman, based on The Human Kind by Alexander Baron." bypassing mention of the actual screenplay. It is unknown whether Dell bid for the publishing rights and commissioned the novelization, or if Foreman engineered its publication. The latter would seem the more likely, given Foreman's possessive over-the-title billing, and that the short story collection providing the source of the screenplay is itself an established work of fiction. What does seem clear is that Baron himself was approached to write the novelization, and that he declined—possibly because, with the Americanization of the characters, he felt the novel's authorship should have a genuinely American voice—but nonetheless wanted to select the author and supervise. That he did so can be extrapolated from the copyright registration: The copyright is assigned to Baron, with a notation that he engaged Shulman to write the book as a work for hire. The resultant novelization sold well enough to earn at least a second print run, indicated on that identical edition's copyright page, issued in January 1964.

References

  1. ↑ "Big Rental Pictures of 1964", Variety, 6 January 1965 p 39. Please note this figure is rentals accruing to distributors not total gross.
  2. ↑ Cinema: Up in Arms for Peace, Time Magazine, 20 December 1963
  3. ↑ Greco, John. "Where Are They? The Victors (1963)" (Twenty Four Frames. Notes on Film by John Greco, 2009–15) Includes images of The Victors film posters
  4. ↑ 'England's Chicago Tribune' Strout, Richard L. The Observer 4 March 1951: 5.
  5. ↑ How Savage Man Can Be: The Human Kind. By Alexander Baron. 187 pp. New York: Ives Washburn. By John C. Neff. New York Times 28 June 1953: BR12.
  6. ↑ BOOKS: [3 Edition 3] Williams, John. The Independent; London (UK) 11 June 1994.
  7. ↑ Noted on the Local Screen Scene: Foreman's Full Agenda --On the Schulbergs' Slate--Addenda Anatomy of Fear By A.H. Weiler. The New York Times 17 March 1957: X5.
  8. ↑ By Way of Report: Metro, French Company Team -- Other Items By A.H. Weiler. The New York Times 4 December 1960: X7.
  9. ↑ Blowing Up of Guns Pet Foreman Effect: Minnelli's Is Sky Horsemen; Stage-Play Titles Real Gone Scheuer, Philip K. Los Angeles Times 14 August 1961: C9.
  10. ↑ Film Roles Await Yankees in Florida Hedda Hopper's Hollywood: The Washington Post and Times-Herald 6 February 1962: B8.
  11. ↑ Foreman Will Show Victors Are Losers: Producer-Director Indicts Wartime Heroism in Movie Scheuer, Philip K. Los Angeles Times 7 August 1962: C9.
  12. ↑ 'Cleopatra' Movie Cast Coming Home This Week Hopper, Hedda. Chicago Daily Tribune 11 July 1962: a2.
  13. ↑ Looking at Hollywood: Sports Writer to Do Williams' TV Script Hopper, Hedda. Chicago Daily Tribune 6 June 1962: b2.
  14. ↑ 1963 Film The Victors, at Orato
  15. ↑ Mercouri, Melina (1971). I was born Greek. Doubleday. p. 158.
  16. ↑ Horak, Jan-Christopher (19 November 2014). Saul Bass : anatomy of film design. ISBN 978-0-8131-4718-5. OCLC 876686064.
  17. ↑ Russo, Vito (1986). The Celluloid Closet: Homosexuality In The Movies. Harper & Row. p. 136. ISBN 978-0060961329.
  18. ↑ Schumach, Murray (1964). The Face On The Cutting Room Floor:The Story Of Movie And Television Censorship. William Morrow. pp. 13–14. ISBN 978-0306800092.
  19. ↑ George Hamilton & William Stadiem, Don't Mind If I Do, Simon & Schuster 2008 p 177
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