Hart's War (2002): a Technical Advisor's Retrospective

Doyle | Hart's War (2002): a Technical Advisor's Retrospective Hart's War (2002): a Technical Advisor's Retrospective by Robert C. Doyle Hart's War. Directed by Gregory Hoblit with Bruce Willis, Colin Farrell, Terrence Howard, Cole Hauser, and Marcel lures. MGM, 2002. Plot Summary Army 1/Lt. Tommy Hart (Colin Farrell), a former second year Yale law student and son of a prominent American senator, finds himself stationed close to the front lines in Belgium at the beginning of the Battle of the Bulge in December 1944. While traveling with another officer in the combat zone, German soldiers posing as American MPs stop their jeep and attempt to send the two officers in the wrong direction which would have delivered them into the arms of the attacking German army. When Hart's passenger is brutally shot dead by the impostors, the panicked Hart attempts to drive away from hostilities, but, after a near lethal crash in a snow bank, the Germans take him prisoner. After a series of difficult interrogations and a harrowing trip by train east from the Ardennes, Hart arrives at a POW camp full ofAmericans and some Russians. In the prison camp, he meets the American Senior Ranking Officer (SRO), Colonel William McNamara (Bruce Willis), who tells Hart that he has to bunk with the enlisted POWs. Uncomfortable at first and fresh from the front, Hart tries to make the best of a unsatisfactory situation as do the men. He meets the master scrounger/trader Sergeant Vic Bedford (Cole Hauser) who gives him a new pair of boots as well as a bunk in the barracks. Soon, the Germans place two black Tuskegee airmen, bothjunior officers, into the same enlisted barracks, and Bedford makes his blatant racism known to everyone. The German guards shoot 1/ Lt. Lamar Archer (Vicellous Shannon), one of the Tuskegee officers; Bedfordis murdered secretly by theAmericans. The camp believes falsely that the second Tuskegee officer, 1/Lt. Lincoln Scott (Terrence Howard) killed Bedford out of revenge, and McNamara playing for time decides to conduct a court martial, knowing full well that the entire proceeding is a deception. The naive Hart, an untried and untrained lawyer, does his best to defend Howard and even receives trial documents from the camp commandant, the scary and murderous Colonel Visser (Marcel lures). Scott pleads not guilty; Hart shows that the evidence is contrived, and that the whole endeavor makes no sense, especially in a prison camp. Events unravel as Hart learns the truth: that McNamara has a self-appointed mission to destroy an ammunition factory near the camp and willingly sacrifices his men to accomplish it. After a successful tunnel escape, the trial dissolves into a near execution while the camp focuses its attention on the massive explosions in the ammunition factory. With the mission accomplished, McNamara calmly walks back into the camp to face the enraged and dangerous Colonel Visser. In a rage, Visser shoots McNamara; the POWs including Tommy Hart, Lincoln Scott and the others stand rigidly horrified, and the film fades into a post-war barren, liberated, empty POW camp with nothing resolved except for 1/Lt. Hart's short denouement consisting of his description of McNamara's burial and his perception of personal honor. Hart's War. Production History In late October 2000, MGM sought a POW historian to work as a Technical Advisor to a feature film project then in development. Based on John Katzenbach's novel Hart's War (1999), David Ladd and David Foster decided to produce a film adaptation that synthesized a courtroom thriller and the wartime captivity environment. The result was a feature film focusing on POW resistance inside a fictional German POW camp, 1944-45, directly following the Battle of the Bulge (in which over 22,000 American soldiers were taken prisoner). Gregory Hoblit, well known and highly respected for Frequency (2000), Fallen (1998), and Primal Fear (1996) along with television thrillers NYPD Blue (1993), LA Law (1986), and Hill Street Blues (1981), directed the movie. MGM and the producer/director team first contacted the U. S. Army Liaison Office in Hollywood, which in turn contacted the Department of History at the U. S. Air...