War in film

Pioneering filmmakers recognized immediately that motion pictures could present moments of dramatic action in ways that imaginatively transported an audience to regions, eras, and aspects of experience beyond the limits of their lives. Early single-reel films depended on the novelty of depicting moments of action without a developed narrative, but by end of the first decade of the twentieth century, films such as the Italian La caduta di Troia (1910; The Fall of Troy, 1910), several films by Swedish director Georg af Klercker, and, most significantly, D. W. Griffith’s The Birth of a Nation (1915) had begun to realize the compelling power of sequences presenting masses of men at arms clashing on fields of battle. Griffith’s cinematographer Billy Bitzer developed a technique using long shots that conveyed the epic sweep of a major battle. Griffith’s method of cross-cutting between these panoramic shots and closeups of fighting individuals demonstrated how engrossing such scenes could be. Although neither the United States nor Western Europe—the leaders in film production in the first years of the silent cinema—were involved in wars, audiences were fascinated by films that dealt with strife in prior decades.

World War I

The outbreak of war in Europe in 1914 radically transformed the film industry on the continent. Before the inception of hostilities, Belgian filmmaker Alfred Machin directed Maudite soit la guerre (1913; Cursed Be War, 1913), a pacifist drama. During the war, film studios in France, Germany, and Great Britain concentrated on films designed to induce patriotic fervor and boost morale, including Abel Gance’s J’accuse (1919; I Accuse!, 1919); however, the devastating effects of the war severely curtailed film production in Europe. The war years also established a precedent of avoidance or deflection in which the negative aspects of war and the facts of battle were ignored.

Immediately after the war, in the 1920’s, the experience of World War I was too immediate to confront. The work of the great comic masters of the time—Charlie Chaplin, Buster Keaton, and Harold Lloyd—helped refocus people’s attention, as did the films of the German Expressionist movement, which invented a series of techniques and styles designed to offer an alternative version of reality that avoided dealing with the grim facts of World War I.

In reaction to the revelation of what modern warfare was like, films such as King Vidor’s The Big Parade (1925) and Raoul Walsh’s What Price Glory? (1926) began a reasonably candid exploration of World War I. Vidor reached for an epic mood that cast the events further back in history than they actually were, while introducing battle scenes that still seem harrowing. Walsh mixed comedy with action so that the film’s social satire muted the overall effect of its combat sequences. Sergei Eisenstein’s Bronenosets Potyomkin (1924; Battleship Potemkin, 1925) dealt as much with the social consequences of warfare as the action on the battlefield. In spite of his frequent concentration on individuals, Eisenstein was primarily concerned with historical forces and the results of power. These films exhibited the fluidity of the silent camera at its most impressive and prepared the ground for Lewis Milestone’s landmark All Quiet on the Western Front (1930), which established a vision of warfare that remains influential and affecting.

The Realism of the 1930’s

Postwar disillusion combined with an erosion of confidence in authority during the Great Depression led to films exhibiting an antiestablishment, pacifist position during the 1930’s. Drawing on Erich Maria Remarque’s widely read novel, Im Westen nichts Neues (1929, 1968; All Quiet on the Western Front, 1929, 1969), Milestone showed how a group of young, idealistic men went to war with expectations of glory before being physically and psychologically devastated by their experiences in the trenches. In Howard Hawks’s Dawn Patrol (1930), the director captured the sense of heroism exhibited by the aviators while showing the senseless waste of World War I, a theme continued by Edmund Golding in a 1938 remake that emphasized the camaraderie and gallantry of the flyers. Howard Hughes’s otherwise commonplace Hell’s Angels (1930) contained some breathtaking aerial photography that showed the cinematic potential for taking an audience into the midst of excitement and danger.

The military buildup of Nazi leader Adolf Hitler’s Reich led to a shift in focus as European countries began to anticipate another round of conflict. In Eisenstein’s Alexander Nevsky (1938; Alexander Nevsky, 1939), the director reached back into the thirteenth century for an epic battle between the Russians and Germans. In a spectacular scene on a frozen lake, Russian soldiers defeat invading German knights, with music by Sergei Prokofiev accenting the action. At a time when U.S. involvement in World War II was still uncertain, Gone With the Wind (1939) mixed battlefield scenes with scenes showing the effect of war on the civilian populace. In addition, some critics have seen the flying monkeys of The Wizard of Oz (1939) as a veiled allegorical commentary on the German air force’s bombing of noncombatants. As the war expanded, propagandistic releases became more prevalent, ranging from obvious delineations of “the enemy” as barbarians committing atrocities as in Walsh’s Objective Burma (1945), which labels the Japanese as “monkeys,” to laments for the sacrifices of fallen heroes such as John Farrow’s Wake Island (1942) or Tay Garnett’s Bataan (1943), which were produced when the war in the Pacific was still undecided, to Hawks’s Sergeant York (1941), which suggested a reluctant United States obligated to fight.

World War II in Retrospect

Although the Allied forces were victorious in World War II, the cost in lives was staggering and the destruction of European cities extensive. In addition, in the Cold War that soon began, the fear of further hostilities, possibly using nuclear weapons, was pervasive. Thus, films about World War II covered the full range of response from celebration to very sober reflection. John Ford’s They Were Expendable (1945), starring John Wayne, showed the terrible rate of casualties and personal tragedy of a PT boat squadron that resulted from the idea that individual losses are acceptable in forming a formidable fighting unit. Ford, among other U.S. directors, personally shot many reels of film recording actual footage of the war that were used as models for later efforts. Films covering every aspect of the war proliferated in the late 1940’s. These films, none of which are exceptional, but which effectively portray the specific nature of the fighting, include William Wellmann’s The Story of G.I. Joe (1945), which examined the infantry; Allan Dwan’s Sands of Iwo Jima (1949), which covered the marines, and Walsh’s Fighter Squadron (1948), which depicted the air force. These films ceased to be produced in the1950’s as a revisionist critique of war in general emerged.

By this time, men who had seen action in the war were beginning to make films. Samuel Fuller’s dour, gripping The Steel Helmet (1950) and Fixed Bayonets (1951) were both set in Korea during the early days of that conflict, and although some critics have regarded them as prowar, their candid, clear-eyed presentations of men in trying situations were attempts to show how individual acts of courage were necessary for survival and not necessarily supportive of warlike attitudes. The idea of a small group of men from different backgrounds as a microcosm of American society has been a dominant motif in Hollywood films, especially when absent officers sent soldiers into hopeless situations, as in Robert Aldrich’s Attack (1956) or in Milestone’s somber Pork Chop Hill (1959)—made three decades after his All Quiet on the Western Front—which was a response to the inconclusive outcome of the Korean War.

The 1960’s

The continuation of the Cold War, the radical political and cultural changes of the 1960’s, and the commitment of U.S. soldiers to a war in Southeast Asia were factors in the treatment of war in films during the middle decades of the twentieth century. Stanley Kubrick’s devastating depiction of World War I trench warfare in Paths of Glory (1957) reflected a growing distrust for the previous generation. The true valor of a conventional man of honor was captured by David Lean’s The Bridge on the River Kwai (1957), in which Alec Guinness’s British officer is viewed as being right in helping the Japanese achieve a strategic objective because the lives of many men depend on his judgment. Don Seigel’s Hell Is for Heroes (1962) and Denis Sanders’s War Hunt (1962) dealt with psychopathic killers finding their milieu on the battlefield.

By the 1960’s, the films of the defeated Axis powers were also beginning to consider the effects of the war. In German director Bernhard Wicki’s Die Brucke (1959; The Bridge, 1960), which echoes All Quiet on the Western Front, a group of teenage boys are sent in 1945 to defend a bridge against the Allied invasion forces. Japanese director Akira Kurosawa’s Shichinin no Samurai (1954; The Seven Samurai, 1954) reached back to medieval Japan to show the gallantry of seven wandering ronin (masterless samurai) who defend helpless, decent civilians against predatory bandits. The combination of extraordinary action scenes with an incisive, philosophic examination of character and social values is one of the most thoughtful and searching presentations of war on film. Wicki collaborated with Ken Annakin and Andrew Marton on The Longest Day (1962), a typical big-budget, large cast epic about the invasion of Normandy, anticipating the Japanese-American collaboration Tora! Tora! Tora! (1970) directed by Toshio Masuda, Kinji Fukasuku, and Richard Fleisher, which showed the events leading to the attack on Pearl Harbor from the perspective of both countries. The stagnant Russian film industry managed to tentatively consider World War II in Mikhail Kalatozov’s Letiat zhurauli (1957; The Cranes Are Flying, 1980) and in Grigori Chukrai’s Ballada o soldate (1959; Ballad of a Soldier, 1960), two films emphasizing the sense of personal loss and social destruction caused by the clash of tyrants, Germany’s Adolf Hitler and Russia’s Joseph Stalin.

Vietnam

Retrospective examinations of World War II such as Tora! Tora! Tora! and Franklin Schafner’s Patton (1970) were affected to an extent by the war in Vietnam and the resistance to the war in the United States. Actor George C. Scott’s brilliant portrayal of Patton suggested the dangers of a general who was in some ways blind to the political aspects of his campaign. Robert Altman’s M*A*S*H (1970), which showed the results of combat rather than combat itself, was a commentary on Vietnam despite its ostensible setting in Korea. John Wayne’s The Green Berets (1968) was an unsubtle attempt to link the war in Vietnam with the favorably regarded defense of the Alamo. As had been the case with World War I, film re-creations of the warfare in Vietnam were avoided immediately after the fall of Saigon in 1975. Ted Post’s Go Tell the Spartans (1978), which starred Burt Lancaster as a commander in 1964 already doubtful about the American mission, was a realistic exploration of the problems facing American adviser-soldiers. Francis Coppola’s imaginative, surrealistic Apocalypse Now (1979) used Joseph Conrad’s novella Heart of Darkness (1899) to present an oblique but shattering examination of the costs of U.S. intervention in Asia on the local landscape and on Americans involved in the conflict. Oliver Stone’s Platoon (1986) was a vividly realistic and deeply moving account of American soldiers attempting to survive with integrity in an extremely harrowing situation, and Kubrick’s Full Metal Jacket (1987) followed a company through basic training into combat. Its climactic battle sequence epitomized the power of modern cinematic technique to fully involve an audience in the soldiers’ struggles.

The Gulf War and Beyond

In the 1990’s, a renewal of interest in pivotal events of the past century led director Steven Spielberg to recall World War II—the defining event of his father’s generation—in the very realistic opening sequence of Saving Private Ryan (1998) before continuing with a more conventional narrative following a small group of soldiers on a heroic quest. This film aspired toward a kind of definitive depiction of combat in the spirit of Fuller’s The Big Red One (1980) or Terrence Malick’s The Third Red Line (1998), both distinctly personal films that project their director’s particular vision of combat. The German director Wolfgang Petersen’s film Das Boot (1981; Das Boot, 1982), British director Cy Endfield’s Zulu (1964), and Kurosawa’s Kagemusha (1980; Kagemusha the Shadow Warrior, 1981) used very intense presentations of combat to get at larger issues concerning the aggressive policies of the directors’ nations. Zulu and Kagemusha the Shadow Warrior were set in previous centuries; Das Boot followed a U-Boat in a suspenseful trial of endurance universal in its implications. Two films dealing with the brief Gulf War (1991) may indicate the direction of war films in the early twenty-first century. Edward Zwick’s Courage Under Fire (1996), which featured a woman in a command role, and David O. Russell’s Three Kings (1999), which used violent, hypertechnical, almost delirious moods, are examples of how the sweeping epics of the past may be reduced to compact, regional settings.

Twelve Landmark War Films

Bibliography

Basinger, Jeanine. The World War II Combat Film. New York: Columbia University Press, 1986.

Devine, Jeremy. Vietnam at Twenty-four Frames a Second. Jefferson, N.C.: Garland, 1995.

Dougherty, Thomas. Projections of War: Hollywood, American Culture, and World War II. New York: Columbia University Press, 1993.

Garland, Brock. War Movies: The Complete Viewer’s Guide. New York: Facts on File, 1987.

Koppes, Clayton, and Gregory Black. Hollywood Goes to War. New York: Macmillan, 1987.

Langman, Larry. Encyclopedia of American War Films. New York: Garland, 1989.

Malo, Jean-Jacques. Vietnam War Films. Jefferson, N.C.: Garland, 1993.

Parish, James. The Great Combat Pictures. Metuchen, N.J.: Scarecrow Press, 1990.

Schatz, Thomas. “World War II and Hollywood.” In Refiguring American Film Genres, edited by Nick Browne. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998.

Wetta, Frank K. Celluloid Wars. New York: Greenwood Press, 1992.