The Victors (1963 film)

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.

The story 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.

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, the squad includes "Sergeant Craig", "Corporals Trower", "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]
 * Vincent Edwards as Baker
 * Albert Finney as Russian soldier
 * George Hamilton as Trower
 * Melina Mercouri as Magda
 * Jeanne Moreau as Frenchwoman
 * George Peppard as Chase
 * Maurice Ronet as French lieutenant
 * Rosanna Schiaffino as Maria
 * Romy Schneider as Regine
 * Elke Sommer as Helga Metzger
 * Eli Wallach as Craig
 * and Michael Callan as Eldridge
 * Peter Fonda as Weaver
 * Jim Mitchum as Grogan
 * Senta Berger as Trudi Metzger
 * Albert Lieven as Metzger
 * Mervyn Johns as Dennis
 * Tutte Lemkow as Sikh soldier
 * John Crawford as Captain
 * Peter Vaughan as Policeman
 * George Mikell as Russian sentry
 * Alf Kjellin as Priest
 * Russ Titus
 * Alan Barnes as Tom
 * John Rogers as British soldier
 * Marianne Deeming as Frau Metzger
 * Sean Kelly as Giggling Sergeant
 * Patrick Jordan as Tank sergeant
 * James Chase as Condemned soldier
 * Mickey Knox
 * Peter Arne
 * Malya Nappi as Barmaid
 * Veite Bethke
 * Milo Sperber as Camp prisoner
 * George Roubicek as Russian sentry
 * Bee Duffell as Joan (Uncredited)
 * Riggs O'Hara
 * Charles De Temple
 * Al Waxman
 * Tom Busby
 * Robert Nichols
 * Graydon Gould
 * Larry Caringi
 * Ian Hughes
 * Anthony McBride

Songs listed in opening credits

 * "March of the Victors" • "Sweet Talk" • "No Other Man" by Sol Kaplan • Freddy Douglass
 * "My Special Dream" by Sol Kaplan • Freddy Douglass • Howard Greenfield
 * "Does Goodnight Mean Goodbye?" by Howard Greenfield • Jack Keller • Gerry Goffin

Source material
The film was based on the book The Human Kind, which was published in 1953. 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. 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."

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."

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.

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. In February 1962, Foreman arrived in Los Angeles to cast the movie.

"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."

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

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

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.

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).

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.

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.

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."

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.