Everything about War Movies totally explained
For the film with Jet Li and Jason Statham, go to War (film).
War film is a
film genre concerned with
warfare, usually about
naval,
air or
land battles, sometimes focusing instead on
prisoners of war, covert operations,
military training or other related subjects. Sometimes they focus on daily military or civilian life in wartime without depicting battles. Their stories may be
fiction,
based on history,
docudrama or occasionally biographical. Most war films often include a romance somewhere in the plot.
The term
anti-war film is sometimes used to describe films which bring to the viewer the pain and horror of war, often from a political or ideological perspective.
History
1920s and 1930s
Films made in the years following
World War I tended to emphasise the horror or futility of warfare, most notably
The Big Parade (1925) and
What Price Glory? (1926). With the sound era, films like
All Quiet on the Western Front (1930),
Howard Hawks'
Road to Glory (1936) and
Grand Illusion (1937), focused on the futility of war for non-American soldiers whilst Hollywood produced American soldiers featuring in World War I comedies such as
Buster Keaton's
Doughboys (1930) and
Wheeler & Woolsey's
Half Shot at Sunrise (1930), or exciting tales of the
U.S. Marine Corps putting down rebellions in
Central America,
China, and the
Pacific Islands in films like
Frank Capra's
Flight (1930),
The Leathernecks Have Landed (1936) and
Tell it to the Marines (1926 film). Other films focused on the drama inherent in the new technology and fading
chivalry of
aerial combat in films such as
Wings (1927),
Hell's Angels (1930) and
The Dawn Patrol (
1930 and
1938 versions).
1940s
The first popular war films during the
Second World War came from
Britain and
Germany and were often
documentary or semi-documentary in nature. Examples include
The Lion Has Wings and
Target for Tonight (British) and
Sieg im Westen (German).
By the early 1940s, the
British film industry began to combine documentary techniques with fictional stories in films like
Noel Coward's
In Which We Serve (1942),
Millions Like Us (1943) and
The Way Ahead (1944). Others used the medium of the fiction film to carry a propaganda message; about the need for vigilance (
Went the Day Well?) or to avoid "careless talk" (
The Next of Kin).
The
Selective Training and Service Act of 1940 was passed by the
United States Congress on September 16,
1940, becoming the first peacetime
conscription in
United States history. Hollywood reflected the interest of the American public in
Conscription in the United States by having nearly every film studio bring out a military film comedy in
1941 with their resident comedian(s).
Universal Pictures'
Abbott and Costello came out with the first feature film on the subject
Buck Privates and followed it with the team
In The Navy and in the
United States Army Air Corps to
Keep 'Em Flying.
Paramount Pictures'
Bob Hope was
Caught In The Draft,
Warner Brothers told
Phil Silvers and
Jimmy Durante You're In The Army Now,
Columbia Pictures put
Fred Astaire in the army declaring
You'll Never Get Rich,
Hal Roach gave his new comedy team of
William Tracy and Joe Sawyer
Tanks a Million and
20th Century Fox had the former
Hal Roach team of
Laurel & Hardy going
Great Guns. The minor studios such as
Republic Pictures made
Bob Crosby and Eddie Foy Jr
Rookies on Parade and
Monogram Pictures enlisted
Nat Pendleton as
Top Sergeant Mulligan. However, the first comedians to hit the screen in an army comedy were
The Three Stooges as
Boobs in Arms.
Serious
1941 films involving training for war included
U.S. Cavalry in
MGM's
The Bugle Sounds,
RKO's
Parachute Battalion,
Paramount Pictures I Wanted Wings and
Warner Brothers'
Dive Bomber.
20th Century Fox made the last pre-war military film about the
U.S. Marine Corps To The Shores of Tripoli. When the
Pearl Harbor attack occurred the studio reshot the ending to have
John Payne reenlist in the Corps and march off with the Marines whilst his father implores him to 'Get a Jap for me'.
Prior to
Pearl Harbor,
Warner Brothers warned of
Confessions of a Nazi Spy whilst
PRC told of
Hitler, Beast of Berlin. A
metaphor for America was
Gary Cooper as the real life
Sergeant York who went from
hillbilly hell-raiser, to
pacifist, to a
draftee comparing the
Bible to the
History of the United States and deciding that his
marksmanship against the Germans was righteous.
After the
United States entered the war in 1941
Hollywood began to mass-produce war films. Many of the American dramatic war films in the early 1940s were designed to celebrate American unity and demonize "the enemy." One of the conventions of the genre that developed during the period was of a cross-section of the American people who come together with a common purpose for the good of the country, for example the need for
mobilization.
The American industry also produced films designed to extol the heroics of America's allies, such as
Mrs. Miniver (about a British family on the home front),
Edge of Darkness (Norwegian resistance fighters) and
The North Star (the
Soviet Union and its
Communist Party). Towards the end of the war popular books became the source of films of higher quality and more serious tone, extoling more long-term values, including
Guadalcanal Diary (film) (1943),
Thirty Seconds Over Tokyo (1944) and
They Were Expendable (1945).
1950s
The years after World War II brought a large number of mostly patriotic war films, which used the war as a backdrop for dramas and adventure stories. Many films made in Britain drew on true stories, such as
The Dam Busters (1954),
Dunkirk (1958),
Reach for the Sky (1956) telling the life of
Douglas Bader and
Sink the Bismarck! (1960). The immediate aftermath of the war in Hollywood avoided the action film and delved into problems experienced by the returning veterans, turning out a number of high quality movies that included
The Best Years of Our Lives (1946),
Battleground (1949),
Home of the Brave (1949),
Command Decision (1948), and
Twelve O'Clock High (1949). The latter two examined the psychological effects of combat and the stresses of command.
Hollywood films in the 1950s and 1960s were often inclined towards spectacular heroics or self-sacrifice in films like
Sands of Iwo Jima (1949),
Halls of Montezuma (1950) or
D-Day the Sixth of June (1956). They also tended to toward stereotyping: typically, a small group of ethnically diverse men would come together but wouldn't be developed much beyond their ethnicity; the senior officer would often be unreasonable and unyielding; almost anyone sharing personal information - especially plans for returning home - would die shortly thereafter and anyone acting in a cowardly or unpatriotic manner would convert to heroism or die (or both, in quick succession).
Twentieth-Century Fox made a succession of war movies realistically-filmed in black-and-white in the early 1950s that highlighted little-known aspects of World War II, among them
The Frogmen,
Go For Broke!,
You're in the Navy Now, and
Decision Before Dawn.
Another large group of films emerged from the plethora of popular war novels penned after the war. Their quality was largely dependent on their faithfulness to the plot or theme of the original, casting, direction,and production values. Much of their appeal for the American public was that they covered virtually every branch of the service involved in the war. These include:
The Young Lions (1958),
The Naked and the Dead (1958),
Battle Cry (1955),
Run Silent, Run Deep (1958),
Captain Newman, M.D. (1963),
The Caine Mutiny (1954),
Away All Boats (1956),
From Here to Eternity (1953),
Kings Go Forth (1958),
Never So Few (1959),
The Mountain Road (1960), and
In Harm's Way (1965).
POW films
A popular sub-
genre of war films in the 1950s and '60s was the
prisoner of war film. This was a form popularised in
Britain and recounted stories of real escapes from (usually
German)
P.O.W. camps in World War II. Examples include
The Wooden Horse (1950),
Albert R.N. (1953) and
The Colditz Story (1955). Hollywood also made its own contribution to the genre with
The Great Escape (1963) and the fictional
Stalag 17 (1953). Other fictional P.O.W. films include
The Captive Heart (
1947),
Bridge on the River Kwai (1957),
King Rat (1965),
Danger Within (1958),
The Secret War of Harry Frigg (1968) and
Hart's War (2002). Unusually, the British industry also produced a film based on German escaper
Franz von Werra,
The One That Got Away in (1957).
1960s
By the early 1960s films based on
commando missions like
The Gift Horse (1952) based on the
St. Nazaire raid, and
Ill Met by Moonlight (1956) had begun to inspire fictional adventure films such as
The Guns of Navarone (1961),
The Dirty Dozen (1967) and
Where Eagles Dare (1968), which used the war as the backdrop for spectacular action films. The latter films had American producers, stars and financing but were filmed in England or on location with British film crews, supporting actors, and expertise.
The late 1950s and 1960s also brought some more thoughtful big war films like
Andrei Tarkovsky's
Ivan's Childhood (1962),
David Lean's
Bridge on the River Kwai (1957), and
Lawrence of Arabia (1962) as well as a fashion for all-star epics based on battles which were often quasi-
documentary in style and filmed in Europe where extras and production costs were cheaper. This trend was started by
Darryl F. Zanuck's production
The Longest Day in 1962, based on the first day of the 1944
D-Day landings. Other examples included
Battle of the Bulge (1965),
Anzio (1968),
Battle of Britain (1969),
Waterloo (1970),
Tora! Tora! Tora! (1970) (based on the Japanese attack on
Pearl Harbor),
Midway (1976) and
A Bridge Too Far (1977). A more recent example is the
American Civil War film
Gettysburg which was based on events during the battle, including the defense of
Little Round Top by Colonel
Joshua Chamberlain.
Though trouble in
Southeast Asia was shown in
Jack L. Warner's
Brushfire (1961), and
Marshall Thompson's
A Yank in Viet-Nam (1964) and
To the Shores of Hell (1966), the major Hollywood studios refused to make any
Vietnam War films with the exception of
John Wayne's
The Green Berets based on the best selling book by
Robin Moore and using the theme song
Ballad of the Green Berets. No Vietnam war films followed until
Jack Starrett's
Nam Angels AKA
The Losers (1970) filmed on Philippine sets left over from
Robert Aldrich's
Too Late the Hero (1970).
Post-Vietnam films
The effects of the
Vietnam War tended to diminish the appetite for fictional war films by the turn of the 1970s. American war films produced during and just after the Vietnam War often reflected the disillusion of the American public towards the war. Most films made after the Vietnam War delved more deeply into the horrors of war than movies made before it. (This isn't to say that there were no such films before the Vietnam War;
Paths of Glory is a notable critique of war from 1957, the beginning of the Vietnam War era.) Later war films like
Catch-22 (set in WWII) and the
black comedy MASH (set in Korea), reflected some of these attitudes.
In the decades following the War, the American film industry produced many war films either critical of American involvement in Vietnam, depicting American war crimes or the negative effects of war on combatants. These films included works by the most prominent actors and directors in American film and garnering the highest accolades and commercial success including:
Oliver Stone trilogy of Vietnam War films:
Platoon (1986) — winner of Academy Award for Best Picture.
Born on the Fourth of July (1989) — winner of two Academy Awards.
Heaven & Earth (1993)
1990's to 2000's
The success of Steven Spielberg's visceral Saving Private Ryan in 1998, helped to usher in a revival of interest in World War II films. A number of these, such as Pearl Harbor and Enemy at the Gates were aimed fairly squarely at the blockbuster market, while others, like Enigma, Captain Corelli's Mandolin, and Charlotte Gray, were more nostalgic in tone.
The military and the film industry
Many war films have been produced with the cooperation of a nation's military forces. The United States Navy has been very cooperative since World War II in providing ships and technical guidance; Top Gun is the most famous example. The U.S. Air Force provided considerable verisimilitude for The Big Lift, Strategic Air Command and A Gathering of Eagles, filmed on Air Force bases and using Air Force personnel in many roles.
Typically, the military won't assist filmmakers if the film is critical of them. Sometimes the military demands some editorial control in exchange for their cooperation, which can bias the result. The German Ministry of Propaganda, making the epic war film Kolberg in January 1945, used several divisions of soldiers as extras. Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels believed the impact of the film would offset the tactical disadvantages of the missing soldiers.
If the home nation's military won't cooperate, or if filming in the home nation is too expensive, another country's may assist. Many 1950s and 1960s war movies, including the Oscar-winning films Patton, Lawrence of Arabia, and Spartacus, were shot in Spain, which had large supplies of both Allied and Axis equipment. The Napoleonic epic Waterloo was shot in Ukraine (then part of the Soviet Union), using Soviet soldiers. The D-Day scenes in Saving Private Ryan were shot with the cooperation of the Irish army, and all of the major sequences in Dark Blue World were shot in the Czech Republic, at a disused air force base.
Further Information
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