8 / 10
The Lost Battalion is an A&E television movie that punches above its budget. Russell Mulcahy directed it. Rick Schroder plays Major Charles Whittlesey, a New York lawyer who took five hundred and fifty-four men of the 77th Infantry Division into the Argonne Forest in October 1918 and came out with one hundred and ninety-four. The Germans surrounded them for five days. He refused to surrender.
You can see the TV money. The forest is a few acres of trees, the artillery is mostly off-camera, the German army is a couple of squads. None of it matters because the source material is so strong. The real Whittlesey wrote “Come and get us” on a piece of paper when the Germans demanded surrender. The film doesn’t improve on that line because it doesn’t need to.
What Works
Schroder is the right kind of small for Whittlesey. The real man was a thin, bookish lawyer with no business commanding infantry. Schroder plays him exhausted from the first frame and stays there, and that’s what the role wants. The supporting cast plays the men as they were, meaning a mix of immigrants and tough Brooklyn boys who could barely speak English. The script doesn’t soften that.
The pigeon scene is the best ninety seconds in the film. Cher Ami, the real bird who carried the real message that got the friendly artillery to stop shelling the battalion, gets a proper moment. Lost an eye and a leg, kept flying. The film puts the message in his canister and the canister on the bird and the bird in the air and lets you watch.
For Writers
When the historical record is dramatic on its own, the smart move is to get out of its way. The Lost Battalion doesn’t invent new heroic moments. It films the ones that happened. The “Come and get us” line is verbatim. The pigeon is real. The numbers are accurate. The lesson is that nonfiction-based fiction often fails because the writer tries to improve the truth. The truth is usually already the better story. Find it, frame it, don’t embellish it.
The Officer Class Problem
The film takes a swing at the British and French commanders who left the 77th hanging. The relief that was supposed to come on day two didn’t come for five days. The script blames the brass, fairly, but does it through stagy expository scenes back at headquarters that drain energy out of the forest plot. Every time the film cuts to a general staring at a map, you can feel the budget getting spent on tea sets instead of explosions.
That’s the trade-off with the production. The film is honest about the failure of allied command, which most American war films aren’t, but it doesn’t have the resources to show command failing visually. So you get talking. The Argonne footage is better than the chateau footage by a wide margin.
For Writers
Constrained productions reveal what the writer values. When you can’t afford to show everything, you have to pick. The Lost Battalion chose to give its money to the men in the hole instead of to the men sending them there. That’s the right choice for what the story is about. If your budget, page count, or word limit forces you to cut, cut from the side of the story that’s not the heart.
What’s Less Great
The third act does the standard TV-movie thing of letting the survivors give too many speeches. Whittlesey gives one when relief finally arrives. Several of the men give them around the campfire on day four. None of these are bad scenes individually. Together they push the emotional tone too hard, too late.
The real Whittlesey killed himself in 1921. Jumped off a steamship. The film doesn’t mention this and doesn’t need to, but if you watch knowing it, the speeches feel different. The real man didn’t believe his own heroism. The TV version believes it for him.
For Writers
A character can survive an event. The character’s belief about that event can survive too, or it can break. Most war stories pick survival and call it growth. The harder version is when the body comes home and the belief about who the character is doesn’t. Whittlesey didn’t survive what happened to him in the Argonne. He survived for three years and then he didn’t. If your story has a survivor, decide whether the survival is real.
Craft Note
Russell Mulcahy directed for A&E. Rick Schroder played Major Charles Whittlesey. Supporting cast included Phyllis Logan, Phil McKee, Adam James, and Jay Rodan. Based on the actual five-day stand of the 77th Infantry Division in the Argonne Forest, October 1918. Cher Ami the pigeon carried the message that stopped friendly artillery from shelling the battalion’s position. Released December 2001. Runtime ninety-two minutes.
Is The Lost Battalion worth watching?
8/10. A TV movie that respects its source. The budget shows. The story is bigger than the budget can carry but the film knows it and works around it. If you want a tight ninety-minute introduction to one of the great untold American stories of the First World War, this is the version to watch.
Frequently Asked Questions
The Craft Behind It
This film appears on one of my film lists
