Location
Poor choice of filming location - area around Madrid has no relation to topography and vegetation of the Ardennes!
shareAs I've said on other threads here, my theory is that since this movie was made by the same studio and had many of the same cast and crew as Custer of the West (1967), including Robert Shaw, Robert Ryan, Ty Hardin and writer/producer Philip Yordan, the studio location managers got the last few pages of the two scripts mixed up. That's why Custer's Last Stand took place in an area about the size of a couple of football fields surrounded by a few trees, while the site of the final tank battle bears a strange resemblance to the Little Big Horn Battlefield.
shareI've been at the LBH battlefield and to my mind the resemblance is only in the treeless nature of the landscape (wonder where they go tht logs to use as tank obstacles?) The area is basically an undulating plain. The place in Madrid is more like a semi-desert.
btw - The reason they used that area with the same crew for both films is they found a good tapas restaurant nearby. 😃
I was at LBH for the 125th anniversary in 2001.
I was thinking of the final panning aerial shot of BotB, with all the immobilized M47s ("King Tigers") as the credits roll; the ravines and coulees weren't as deep as the ones at LBH, but they still remind me of them. The scenes where much of the actual tank battle were filmed, and the spot where Conrad gets exiled to rolling fuel drums after his falling out with Hessler, do look more arid.
Yes - 'remind' - but maybe more in the sense that the reference point was not John Muir Woods NP ☺
I think it was more a question of them having found a good tapas restaurant in Spain when they made the western 😉