Most Helpful Customer Reviews
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166 of 171 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Well Worth Seeing, December 3, 1999
This movie focuses on a sad chapter in the history of the U.S Army in World War II. The Hurtgen Forest was a deathtrap the could have more or less been bypassed. Certainly a low point in the annals of command, though through no fault of the G.I.s involved. This movie made a point to bring out the frustration and waste experienced by the men of the 28th Inf. Div. in that campaign. I think Spielberg set a new standard for the war movie genre with Saving Private Ryan. So far, When Trumpets Fade is one of the few recent military movies to even come close to that standard. It's a shame that, being a made for cable release, it hasn't been seen by more people. The movie is technically very well done. Uniform and equipment portrayal is excellent. For those reviewers above who find fault with a G.I. wearing his watch cap backwards, try wearing one under an M-1 helmet sometime. It's more comfy turned backwards I assure you. The only thing the movie couldn't represent, being filmed in Hungary, was the true geography of the Kall River Valley, which is much worse than shown on the film. Having hiked the Kall Trail quite a bit, it's a rough walk. Hats off as well to my fellow US military members, stationed in Hungary, that played extras in the film. A very well made movie that they can be proud to have participated in!
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109 of 118 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
A Gritty & Realistic Look At Life In The Front Lines!, July 21, 2000
The opening scene in this HBO movie is perhaps one of the grittiest and most realistic depictions of the realities of combat ever filmed, at least this side of the first 30 minutes of `Saving Private Ryan'. The viewer is immediately transported into the surreal world of death, decay, and destruction, where the panorama in view is a smoke-seared scene that the young soldiers labor through in the midst of all this horror. In this excellent depiction of General Omar Bradley's ill-fated decision to strike deep into the forbidding terrain of the Hurtigen Forest, accuracy and detail are everywhere one looks. The situation described in the film is quite accurate, and the young cast of mostly unknown actors do a convincing and credible job in conveying the insane circumstances surrounding combat, especially of the lonely, nerve-racking and suddenly murderous nature of isolated units moving cautiously forward through the sometimes impenetrable glades of the forest. All of the craziness and chaos of battle is well presented, and the story line lends itself to the strong anti-war message of the movie. A friend expressed outrage at the scene in which a platoon leader shoots a deserting private, without realizing it is standard battle procedure. There is nothing uplifting about the scenes and situations the soldiers faced, no over-riding morality or contrived happy ending to dislodge the reality of the horror and futility of all this carnage. If you are looking for a pleasant evening of entertainment, a couple hours of mindless diversion, better find another movie. But if you want to watch a well-made and memorable movie that accurately recounts the events of one of the most ill-conceived and bloodiest series of engagements and firefights in the Allied campaign in France in the late Fall of 1944, and if you don't mind a sobering slap of reality hitting you in the face while you're being drawn into a thoughtful and engaging statement about life and death in the 20th century, this may be for you! Enjoy.
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70 of 74 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
The Anti-Ryan, January 25, 2002
If you watch films about WWII, and maybe even if you haven't, you've seen "Saving Private Ryan" which has apparently become the definitive movie about The Big One....well, if that film as a polar opposite, this is it. "Trumpets" follows a few days in the miserable life of a miserable man, Private Manning, a dogface who is part of the ... disasterous 1944 - 1945 campaign by the American army to seize the Huertgen Forest from the Wehrmacht. Everybody knows about D-Day and the Bulge, while the Huertgen is forgotten, probably because there is no glory in recounting the story of how 30,000 GI's got fed into a human meatgrinder they called "The Death Factory" for no purpose. The Germans never could understand why the American army chose to attack them at their strongest, most easily defensible point, but were more than content to let it happen. WWII histories, most notably Eisenhower's and Bradley's, who oversaw this idiocy, gloss it over, but "Trumpets" rips open the scab and gives a glimpse of what really went down. Unlike "Ryan" which stressed the nobility of the individual soldier even as it attacked the logic of war, "Trumpets" has no heroes. Private Manning is a no-account malingerer who doesn't give a damn about anyone but himself and as a result, keeps surviving while better men get killed off. His officers foolishly assume he is therefore a good soldier, and keep promoting him against his will. Thus he ends up having to break in the replacements soldiers being fed into the grinder, a task which requires empathy, leadership, courage, and patience, so naturally Manning is the worst possible choice. The battle scenes are not especially terrific, but the film does a good job of showing how the stress of combat can make good man bad and bad men worse. Officers lose their nerve, privates run away, everybody is cold, tired, and afraid, and there is always one more mindless "push" into the impregnable defence just over the horizon. The performances, especially by Robert Eldard as Manning and Frank Whaley as his only (sort of) friend, a combat medic, are very good. The film never sentimentalizes the characters, and the scene where Manning brutally tells the basket-case lieutenant "If there's any way I can help you without endangering my own life, I won't hesitate, but I'm not taking a bullet for anybody" is about as far from Tom Hanks' speech at the end of "Ryan" as you are gonna get. The lieutenant, near tears, tells him that's not good enough, whereupon Manning says, "That's as good as it gets." The medic overhears this and tells him, "When you're out there with your guts shot out crying for a medic -- if there's any way I can help you without endangering my own life, I won't hesitate." You wouldn't hear that in a Steven Spielberg movie. "Trumpets" could have been better, but it goes on about a half-hour too long after the story is really resolved, and it does have a bit of a cable-movie feel to it. Other than that, I would recommend it to anyone who wants a taste of some of the fun that followed "The Longest Day."
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