Average Reviews:
(More customer reviews)I wasn't at the Battle of the Bulge, the last great battle of World War II whose little-known and unknown byways form the locale of this true-life story, but SILENT NIGHT is, in its way, as evocative and illuminating of this momentous event in history as its far-better-known counterpart, the 1949 front-line combat film, BATTLEGROUND.
Rather than concentrating on the fierce, frozen struggle that the Bulge certainly was -- leaving as it did, thousands of Americans and Germans dead in the dark, snowy Huertgen Forest during that brutal winter of 1944-'45 -- SILENT NIGHT deals with the intertwined universality of soldiers' longing for home, a war-weary German mother's longing for peace in her own home, and her little boy's desperate need for a sign that the world he'll inherit might be filled by something other than the hollow, ranted slogans of the Hitler Youth.
The performances, especially those of Linda Hamilton, as the frightened, yet determined, Frau Vincken, and the young men who play the GI's and Wehrmacht infantrymen, convincingly convey the snow-blanched weariness and wariness that surely contributed to the real participants' touch-and-go attempt to lay aside their arms for one last wartime Christmas, as a sign that their world may have tired of its madness.
Also utterly convincing, by the way, is the film's depiction of the snowbound German landscape -- photographed, as I understand it, in Quebec in the height of summer!
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