World War II has been called "the good war," but it might better be called "the movie war." More than any other American war: it is fought and refought in films where the average person could regularly and easily see at the local theather. A new newsreel arrived every few days, soon after or sometimes even during great battles. Along with documentary films and newspaper and magazine photos, these images showed people what war "really looked like" so often as to make it common place. Stories about WW II did not disappear when the war ended.
Why do people want to see war on film? ``I want to see the war," says a character in A Walk in the Sun (1945). ``I want to see what it looks like."He climbs a ridge to ``see" war and dies for his effort. Having seen war, he must become its victim. Movie audiences, however, can see the war without paying that price by sharing his fictional death, they can "see" and keep faith with those who really fought. War is cinematic. It explodes from dark into light, and it moves across space through time.It mixes night and day, safety and danger. The best antiwar film has always been the war film itself.
They Were Expendable,
Ford directored this. In my notes pages were missing all i could find was ``one of my favorites" I will have to rent it again to find out why.
Air Force (1943)
Since airplanes can fly out of combat and return to a safe base, most films about air warfare spend a lot of time sitting around on the ground. Air Force is an exception. Unlike Twelve O'Clock High and Thirty Seconds Over Tokyo, Air Force is a story about fighting the war from inside a flying machine. A B-17 bomber leaves San Francisco on the evening of December 6, 1941, to proceed routinely to Hawaii, only to fly straight into the attack on Pearl Harbor the morning of December 7. From then on, the crew is forced to fly to Wake Island and on to Manila under combat conditions, a miniature replay of the opening days of the war, with all the fear and propaganda intact. Like some hideous wagon train west, their flight is under constant attack from hostile forces, and they are forced to cope with problems of supplies, ammunition, and an overwhelming vast space that offers no safe haven. Director Howard Hawks was famous for making films about groups of professional men, an Dudley Nichols's script provided him with material appropriate to his needs. The bomber's crew are forced to learn to work together, and to face and understand the new war. One of the members, effectively played by John Garfield, is a reluctant holdout, but his ultimate initiation into the need to fight parallels that of the audience. Although occasionally weighed down by embarr- assing propaganda (``One fried Jap, going down"), for the most Air Force takes off and soars.
Bataan (1943)
Bataan was released during the dark, early davs of the war, when America was on the Air Force takes ogunder attack. losing side, and it contains a strong sense of the fear and helplessness people felt then. It's not the.best of the World War II combat films, but it certainly is the most passionate. It has an eerie, almost shameful power, marked by an unblinking presentation of brutal and dirty combat. Writer Robert D. Andrews anddirector Tay Garnett put together a movie clearly modeled after the 1934 Lost Patrol, a story about thirteen diverse men surrounded by overwhelming enemy forces. Forced to make a brave "last stand" (an American tradition), they fight unto death. With the release of Bataan, the combat genre was firmly established, as demonstrated by its cast of mixed American types (Robert Taylor, Robert Walker, Lloyd Nolan, Thomas Mitchell, Desi Arnaz). Watching it today, it is impossible to duck its overt propaganda and its warlike mentality. The Japanese are referred to with insulting epithets, and presented like monsters out of a horror film. They sneak up on the heroes in the dark, and their mysterious samurai swords are found sticking out of bodies that lie abandoned in swirling mists and fogs. There seem to be literally zillions of them as they advance relentlessly on the thirteen Americans who are slowly picked off, one by one, until only Robert Taylor is left. Standing in a grave he has knowingly dug for himself, he snarls, ``Come on you" as the movie ends in a burst of his machinegun fire.
So Proudly We Hail (1943)
So Proudly We Hail is no cinematic masterpiece. It's not in a class with such films as Raoul Walsh's Objective Burma (1945) or Robert Aldrich's Attack! (1956), as it grinds out its story about nurses caught on Bataan. However, it would be wrong not to include one movie about women in war, and how can I resist a movie with the immortal line ``Gee, I hope there'll be a good beauty parlor on Bataan. My hair is a mess.`` In addition. it illustrates a genre women's film with the combat film. So Proudly We Hail skillfully weaves the two types, presenting the traditional mixed group of soldiers (Claudette Colbert, Veronica Lake, and Paulette Goddard) undergoing combat conditions, but also finding time to fall in love, worry about careers versus marriage, and debate what to wear for a foxhole wedding night. These women are not cowards, and they function as real combat heroes, not only saving lives in hospitals but rescuing comrades under fire. The high point comes when Veronica Lake lures a group of Japanese soldiers to their deaths by taking off her helmet to reveal her long blonde hair. Having thus gotten their leering attention, she slowly walks toward them. Too late they discover the hand grenade she pulls from inside her blouse, blowing herself and all of them to smithereens in a moment of semiotic bliss.
A Walk in the Sun (1946)
Released shortly after the war ended, Lewis Milestone's A Walk in the Sun marked the beginning of a new attitude toward WWII combat. Although it contains the usual ethnic mix doing the usual combat things, it presents the American fighting man as a vulnerable human being coping with fear, grousing comrades, and lack of direction and leadership. The movie going audience now contained the veterans who had really been there, and making combat glamorous seemed inappropriate. This film's foot soldiers (Dana Andrews, Richard Conte, John Ireland) are not godlike, fearless warriors. They're ordinary guys who rise to the occasion, meet the challenge, and make the best of a horrible situation. As they fight their way forward, the film distances their experiences through voice-over narration, song, and poetic dialogue all of which refers to their march through Italy to Rome as "a little walk in the noon day sun." The men keep up a running commentary about their memories of all things Americana a popular culture checklist of the times. These strange, dream like observations, set against realistic battle, show that combat is a surreal event, detached from normal human behavior, in which men hang onto sanity by reciting the truth of what they know (Norman Rockwell, Bing Crosby) and what they hope ``Nobody dies". A Walk in the Sun demythologizes World War II, but in a way that creates a new, tougher myth, built to last in the postwar period.
Sands of Iwo Jima (1949)
The star most associated with war movies, John Wayne, is the hero of Allan Dwan's phenomenona perfect merger of the Sands of Iwo Jima. has a realistic touch,death, they can ``see" and keep faith with those who really fought. Wayne plays a tough sergeant who's ``got the regulations tattooed on his back." He's a professional soldier who puts duty before his personal life, and who is rough with his men because he alone knows what waits for them on Tarawa and Iwo Jima. He is a classic macho hero, strong and tough in battle, but the interesting thing about Sands of Iwo Jima is that it shows Wayne to be a failure in his private life.A controlled alcoholic whose wife and son have left him, he is hated by the men he trains, even though they come to understand in battle why men like him are needed. The implication is that such men are needed only in war. They have no place in normal society Although the film presents the hard won Pacific battles with pride, Sands of Iwo Jima contains a postwar message: Try to prevent war. The finale presents nearly twenty minutes of intense combat, involving grenades, bombs, tanks, flame throwers, and hand-to-hand fighting. The men fight and many die, and war is observed not to be much fun. As for John Wayne, his character gets a bullet in the head, moments after victory is assured. Who needs him now? The war is over. Sands of Iwo Jima is not the only film in which John Wayne dies, but it is the one in which his death is the most dramatic and unexpected, and thus the most significant.
Hell Is for Heroes (1962)
Steve McQueen's image as the ultimate loner has never been put to better use than in this tough war movie set on a surreal and empty landscape of war in Montigney, France, in 1944. The film breaks genre tradition by presenting the hero as a man who never can nor ever will be a part of any group. McQueen functions as a kind of human war machine. During the intense and graphic combat, well directed by Don Siegel, McQueen runs forward, shoots, throws explosives, falls down, gets up, and runs forward again as if he were superhuman. In the final sequence, he seems to have fallen for good, yet he rises up like Frankenstein's monster one last time, ultimately throwing himself and all his explosives into an enemy pill box. Strongly antiwar, Hell Is for Heroes suggests that only the "war hero" represented by McQueen can really understand what is expected from the young men who fight a nation's war. They are supposed to die. The sight of McQueen falling down, getting up, falling down, and getting up again is like watching endless reruns of old WWII movies. The end result is not only the questioning of war, but the questioning of war movies. The final image is frozen and transformed into a newspaper photo. Image becomes history and seems to say can we put our glamorous combat movies away for good now?
The Longest Day (1962)
Some of the best WWII combat films were made in a wide-screen format: In Harm's Way, Merrill's Marauders, Bitter Victory, Play Dirty, Midway, The Battle of the Bulge, and Tora! Tora! Tora! to name only a few. This movie that refought the war in pseudo-documentary style shot in CinemaScope and black and white,The Longest Day painstakingly recreates the events of the Normandy invasion, with characters carefully identified by subtitles that label them by name, rank, and nationality. Real life heroes were recast with better, more familiar faces John Wayne as Ben Vandervoort, Robert Mitchum as Norman Cota, and Henry Fonda as Teddy Roosevelt, Jr. (``If anybody acts in The Longest Day," said Zanuck, ``it is unintentional.") It's as if all the scattered newsreels, photographs, and memories of the true event have been pulled together and effectively replaced by a coherent, entertaining big budget hit with an all-star cast of favorites from earlier war movies. Once Hollywood makes it real, it stays real forever.
The Dirty Dozen (1967)
Set against the real elements of WWII the combat group of mixed types, the tough hero, the difficult objective, and the inevitable death and destruction. All these generic components are in place, but turned upside down, mocked, and made into something to present violence for its own sake. The group is a bunch of criminals and murderers, given a reprieve from hanging. The hero is a bully, an outsider who has put his own criminal tendencies to work within the system he says to one of the prison inmates, ``Your only mistake is that you let them see you do it." He calls his own superior officer ``a raving lunatic" and his training instructions are simply ``March or I'll beat your brains out." The objective is to blow up a fancy brothel retreat for German officers, and the operative command is that anything goes. A huge box-office hit, Dirty Dozen starred an impressive cast Lee Marvin, Charles Bronson, Telly Savalas, Donald Sutherland, John Cassavetes, Jim Brown, Robert Ryan and spawned a series of imitations and a 1985 television sequel. Under the tight control of Robert Aldrich, it is fast, funny, cruel, violent, shocking, and one of the most entertaining of WWII films. Its values seem ugly, but by working against the established genre, it places those values in perspective and illustrates the changes in America's attitudes toward war from 1945 to the days of Vietnam.
The Big Red One (1980)
Samuel Fuller, who wrote and directed this film about the U.S. First Infantry Division actually fought in World War II in that same ``Big Red One," undergoing battles in North Africa, Sicily, Italy, and Normandy. This amazing visual recreation of his youthful battle experience is like some detached retinal memory he might have of those events an abstracted, chaotic, disjointed, yet realistic story about a hardy band of four survivors and their tough old leader (Lee Marvin). It's possible that Fuller's real-life war was exactly such a story himself, the few guys closest to him, and whoever led them. No foot soldier has the big picture in war, nor a very wide group of friends as he fights. While unknown people died around him, Fuller fought and lived, and that's the story of The Big Red One. ``Survivin,"says the film's narrator. ``That's the glory of war."
Das Boot (1981)
A WWII submarine movie. Credit has to go to the Germans for making the best one, directed by Wolfgang Petersen and starring Jurgen Prochnow. Das Boot has no heroics. No glamorous speeches about duty. No propaganda. No incredible moments where the pharmacist's mate takes out somebody's appendix. What it has is tense realism, tight quarters, and total desperation for both sub crew and audience. It makes no apologies for Germany in WWII, but it does show the conditions under which some men had to make war whether they wanted to or not. One of the most striking scenes reverses an American film, Survivors of Das Boot on the dock.
Action in the North Atlantic (1943)
The German sub that torpedoed her coming in close to make a movie of the drowning sailors but showing them no mercy. Das Boot depicts the same situation, but from the other side. With no extra rations, desperate for space, and under orders to patrol for weeks, the Germans know they cannot take prisoners. Silently, grimly, the sub backs out of the frame. It's not hard to imagine the German filmmakers, having seen Action in the North Atlantic, deciding to reconstruct the scene without apology and without propaganda, to show what men who decide to make war have to do.
