This weekend my wife and I watched a great movie most people have never heard of: Saints and Soldiers. This gritty WWII film opens with the the Malmedy Massacre (Dec. 17, 1944), where a German SS unit killed 86 American POWs. The film follows five soldiers who escape into the woods and reunite. The main protagonist, "Deacon," is a sharpshooter and a former missionary who always has a Bible in hand. I won't give away the storyline, but I will say that it's a movie well worth seeing.Despite winning 14 Best Picture Awards at film festivals, it lacked a major distributor and few have heard of it. By the way, one interesting fact about the film is that it was filmed in less than a month, in Utah, for under $1 million. Many of the actors in the opening sequence are reenactors who traveled to Utah at their own expense. But as Michael Medved has said, this is “a gritty independent film with more soul and substance and more thrilling combat scenes than big studio projects.”
