I love February.

Why?  Well, first off, we all know that February is the most romantic month of the year.  February is Valentine’s Day, romantic movies, flowers, lingerie, and chocolate.  February is also the month when, in a lead up to the Oscars, TCM devotes a good deal of its programming to showing Oscar nominees of the past.

As I’ve mentioned in the past, one of my dreams is to watch and review every single film that has ever been nominated for best picture. Now, realistically, I’ll never be able to accomplish this goal because the 1929 Best Picture nominee The Patriot is currently a lost film.  But, even if it does mean that I’ll only be able to see 510 out of the 511 nominated films, it’s still a dream that I’m pursuing and, with the help of TCM and the month of February, it’s a dream that’ll come true.

Take, for instance, Battleground.  This 1949 Best Picture nominee (it lost All The King’s Men) recently aired on TCM.  I’m not exactly a fan of war films but, since it was a best picture nominee, I still made sure to DVR and watch it.

Set during the final days of World War II, Battleground follows one platoon of soldiers as they fight and attempt to survive the Battle of the Bulge.  The platoon is made up of the type of characters that we usually expect to find in a WWII film but, fortunately, they’re played by an ensemble of likable actors who all bring their familiar characters to life.  There’s Jim Layton (Marshall Thompson), the newest member of the platoon who nobody wants to run the risk of getting close to.  There’s Holley (Van Johnson), the cheerful soldier who is unexpectedly thrust into a position of leadership that he might not be right for.  Roderiques (Ricardo Montalban) is from Los Angeles and is amazed by the sight of snow.  “Pops” Stazak (George Murphy) is the type of older soldier who you would totally expect to be nicknamed “Pops.”  Bettis (Richard Jaeckel) is scared of combat.  Kippton (Douglas Fowley) spends nearly the entire film looking for his lost teeth.  And finally, of course, there’s the hard-boiled but warm-hearted Sgt. Kinnie (James Whitmore).

In some ways, Battleground is a very conventional film and it’s easy to wonder how it ended up getting nominated for best film of the year.  (Among the eligible films that were not nominated: The Bicycle Thief, Champion, The Fountainhead,  On The Town, Sands of Iwo Jima, She Wore A Yellow Ribbon, They Live By Night, and White Heat.)  However, the film’s nomination makes a bit more sense when you consider that it was released just four years after the end of World War II.  It was a film that appealed both to the veterans who were able to relate to the film’s story and to the patriotic spirit of a country that had just defeated the greatest evil of the 20th Century.

Battleground did not exactly make me a fan of war movies but it’s still a well-made and effective film. As opposed to a lot of other war films, Battleground never makes war look like fun.  For the most part, the emphasis is less on strategy and combat and more on the soldiers who are simply trying to survive from day-to-day.  The end result is a film that serves as a moving tribute to the soldiers who fought in World War II.