When Trumpets Fade

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.


The Anti-Ryan   January 25, 2002
M. G Watson (Los Angeles)
47 out of 49 found this review helpful

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."


Pretty Accurate Portrayal of the Hurtgen Forest Fight   February 20, 2000
Blair Williams (Fort Leonard Wood, Missouri)
42 out of 45 found this review helpful

I am a captain in the United States Army and have studied the battle for the town of Schmidt and the Hurtgen Forest. This movie accurately portrays one of the darkest moments in US Army history in World War II. Inept leadership from the highest levels down to the regimental and battalion level launched the underesourced 28th Infantry Division into a suicidal attack across 13 miles of dense forest. The movies characters very closely showed the horrible confusion and improper tactical decisions made by leaders under fire. The poor weather negated the American advantages of tanks and close air support. The American infantry as shown in the movie were victim to attacks by unrelenting artillery and tanks. In one real case, the American soldiers of the 2nd Battalion, 112th Infantry regiment, so unnevered by constant artillery, actually got up and fled their positions in the forest village of Vossenack. This was 400 soldiers, including officers, who up and ran. The movie does the miserable conditions and combat fatigue faced by the soldiers justice. I recommend it.


The german point of view   November 25, 2003
T. Kurpjuhn
31 out of 33 found this review helpful

As my granddad fought in Huerttgen Forest on the german side (he was part of the Waffen-SS)I was very enthusiastic to watch this movie with him (he is now 79). He was very dissappointed because he told me that fighting bach then was much more surreal. The whole day and night thre was intesnse shelling and nobody knew really from where the shooting came. Fog and rain made the whole place to a scenery which seemed to come from another planet. He said he never understood why they wanted this bloody forest. They just had to wait with their 42 and gun them down. And they came again and again. Today you find this information table in Huerrten saying that 55 000 US-soldiers died there and sometimes when they build streets and building they still find human remains from both sides. To make it short: Grandpa gave it 3 stars for trying hard, but having been there he said it was just different