1 Of the Best World War II Movies Ever Made

Agreed. I bought the dvd because I like war movies and i like steve mcqueen it was worth it because the movie is great. I wonder why is this movie forgotten nowadays.

I remember watching this film with my late father for the first time when it was aired on television back in the mid-1960s. And my father, who had been a soldier in North Africa and Europe during World War II, expressed the opinion that "Hell is for Heroes" was an extremely realistic film in its portrayal of the fighting in the ETO.

In the film, you see that Steve McQueen has two ammunition clips taped together to his "grease" gun, with one taped clip loaded into the weapon and the other taped clip facing down from the gun. My father said that soldiers would also do that with a standard tommy gun, so that you could load the weapon even faster and return fire at the Germans and Italians more quickly.

And, how about that scene in which the bumbling Bob Newhart's rifle accidentally goes off and the shot whizzes by an obviously angered Steve McQueen? That was classic!

Incidentally, in his autobiography, Mr. Newhart related that he couldn't wait to get off of the set of "Hell is for Heroes," because he wanted to get back to Las Vegas and resume his growing and flourishing nightclub comedy career (which eventually lead onto tv sitcom greatness)!

You're crazy! Why would a war film aficionado use the IMDb rating system? Don Siegel was a great director being a major influence On Clint Eastwood and resurrecting Sam Peckinpah's career. Check out Siegel's resume as he directed several classic films. "HIFH" has a star studded cast led by the icon of cool Steve McQueen in one of his best performances. The screenplay by Robert Pirosh was excellent and subsequently he pitched Selig Seligman on a TV series based on this script which became "Combat", one of the greatest TV series of all time. Siegel, even on a shoestring budget, made the battle scenes of his anti-war film much more realistic than viewers of the early sixties were accustomed to with his use of blood and the sounds of the agonies of dying men.

Regarding "Band of Brothers", Stephen Ambrose is a discredited historian and being a Baby Boomer, Tom Hanks has some strange ideas "The Assassination of President Kennedy, "Parkland", "Charlie Wilson's War" (pure fiction), to name a few.