8 / 10
Official trailer
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.
I’m fond of this movie out of all proportion to its budget. It knows the true story is the whole show, it stays out of the way, and for most of its ninety-two minutes it makes a few acres of trees feel like a trap. My one real gripe is how much speechifying it saves for the end.
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.
That pigeon chokes me up. A bird that lost an eye and a leg did more for these men than their own generals, and the film is smart enough to let the moment play without a word of comment.
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. Usually the truth already makes 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.
I’d have cut most of the headquarters scenes. The point about the brass comes across in the first one, and every trip back to the map table after that is time I’d have spent in the forest.
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. That’s the flaw in the finale. The Whittlesey of the first hour is a tired lawyer holding on by his fingernails, and I believe every minute of him. The man giving speeches at the end belongs to a cheaper movie.
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. I rate it this high because it respects its source and trusts the real events, and I knock it down for the tea-set headquarters scenes and the late speeches that push too hard. The budget shows everywhere, but the film knows its story is bigger than its money and works around it. If you want a tight ninety-minute introduction to a great untold American story of the First World War, this is the version I’d hand you.
