Post by caucasoididiot on Oct 26, 2011 17:43:30 GMT -5
For once I'm going to try launching a thread sober, though I suspect it will still come out rather discursive.
Recently I stumbled onto a couple of YouTube "Best War Movie" lists. Now, right off the bat, as the years go on I become ever more dubious of rating movies in such terms. While one seems on pretty firm ground by an assertion like "Barry Lyndon is a better film than Red Zone Cuba," that is nonetheless an inherently subjective viewpoint with which someone (likely in some institution) might honestly disagree. Even for myself, different movies have different flavors and aren't always directly comparable in that way.
All of which is to say that this list in not my idea of "best" war movies, simply ones that are, for one reason or another, memorable to me.
There's also a question of just what constitutes the class of "war movies." Schindler's List made one of the lists I saw, but I'm not sure I'd count that. It focussed not on the war the Nazis unleashed but on the industrialized genocide they practiced. Similarly, a film like From Here to Eternity is more a story of peacetime soldiers, with the Pearl Harbor attack being a shocking intrusion into their lives. Thus I'm thinking more about films in which warfare or its effect on those it touches are central, but again my judgement of that need not be yours.
TORA! TORA! TORA!
The trailer for this movie is awful, so I've substituted Jerry Goldsmith's marvelous theme (though my wife thought it was way too Japanesey).
Now, I've read a lot of film school type critiques of this film, dinging it for poor direction and pacing. While I like reading such reviews for the new insights they often bring to me, I believe it's misplaced here. Rumour has it that Kurosawa lost interest in the project when he found that David Lean was not directing the US side. While I'd love to see what they would have done with the material, it might well have been a brilliant and yet more typical war picture. Fleischer came from a documentary background and was trying to stay as close to historical fact as it was understood at the time as possible. No, you can't quite cite the film in history class (Yamamoto's "sleeping giant" quote can't be documented, for instance) but you'll get a far more accurate picture than you will from the egregious Pearl Harbor.
Similarly, the film is unusual in dealing not with the waging of war but with the oppressive feeling of struggling against its inexorable coming. So many moments when Yamamoto tries to dissuade his government, when the codebreakers try to at least give a warning, when the Opana Point radar does but is ignored . . . for me there's always a tense feeling of "maybe this time it won't happen!"
And for all that they had to make do without CGI Zeroes the action sequences are not at all bad. Watch for that great accident of the blown off propeller dancing across the flight line at Kaneohe.
James Whitmore's portrayal of Admiral Halsey is another strong point, but Shougo Shimada as Ambassador Nomura (with a vocal assist from Paul Frees) has the most poignant moment in the film. Nomura was the last of the Shidehara "doves" in the Foreign Office, and was callously used and misled in order to put the US off its guard. His scene with Secretary of State Hull is short, but the crushing of the man is heartbreaking, a tiny tragedy that brings the global one to a sharper focus.
Battleground
Again, this one has an awful trailer, so I've used a scene (again with James Whitmore, as it happens).
Personally, I think that this 1949 movie is what Saving Private Ryan wanted to be. Not to be too dismissive of Ryan, having heard a lot of vets say it was quite meaningful to them, but for me it felt overly sentimental and self-conscious. Perhaps that was inevitable in a movie meant to tell grandkids what GIs must have felt like, as opposed to a '49 film that could take the whole subtext of why the war was fought as read.
I also found Ryan a bit manipulative, as in making the SS trooper (war criminally) killed at the end an older guy. True, Nazis are about the only group one can guiltlessly hate (and with good reason), but how would that scene have played had he been cast as a teenager, which would have been quite common at that stage of the war.
But back to the movie at hand. Battleground tells the story of a platoon of the 101st Airborne (Screaming Eagles) trapped in the Battle of the Bulge's Bastogne Pocket. Veterans were used as technical advisers, and while neither gore nor swearing were allowed in a movie of that era, you sort of get the feeling that both are right off camera. These men's lives aren't spent wondering what the war is all about, but in just how many g.d. holes they'll have to dig before they can sleep in one. It also shows heroism and cowardice as interpenetrating each other in an almost yin-yang manner. Thankfully I've never experienced combat, but this movie seems to have the right vibe. I'd be curious if vets agree (where is DaWormFace, anyway?).
The Dick van Dyke Show's Jerry Paris has a bit part as one of the Germans bringing the surrender offer. I love the wordless interaction between that group and the GIs guarding them.
Das Boot
At last! A decent trailer! No subs though.
Was that a pun?
This movie is sort of interesting in terms of Germany coming to grips with its own past (on that note, where's Sheik Yerbouti?). I used to know an East German who seemed deeply haunted by war guilt, despite his not having been born at the time. Postwar German pop culture seems to indicate a deep struggle with that, probably resulting not only from the horrific crimes of the Nazi regime but from awareness of the "we got screwed at Versailles" mindset that they used to win over so many Germans.
With that, it felt like the groundwork had been laid to honor the sacrifices of individual Germans without seeming to raise side issues of defending Nazism. Perhaps U-boat crewmen most deserved that, having been demonized in both world wars for a heartlessness that was largely unavoidable given the technical limits of their boats, and of which US sub crews in the Pacific or Anglo-American bomber crews were no less guilty (though it's true that the middle-class Navy and Air Force commands tended to be more pro-Nazi than the aristocratic Army, but that's neither here nor there).
I can't think of another film which is so evocative of the claustrophobia and filth that marked these boats on patrol, not to mention the terror once their torpedoes alerted the Royal Navy escorts and the hunters immediately became the hunted.
My copy is the long "director's cut" which I found used, and I must say that I wish I had the original theatrical release instead. The re-edit is much longer, and while I think that was trying to illustrate the "long stretches of boredom punctuated by moments of sheer terror" aspect of war, I remember the tighter version being a better film.
Idi i Smotri (aka Come and See)
Many thanks to afriendlychicken for recommending this one to me.
Perhaps someday there will be a calculus of suffering, but for all that Stalin was an unsavory character, probably only the Chinese are in the running as competitors for just the sheer weight of Hell World War 2 thrust upon the Russians. Come and See is the story of Fliora, a young Byelorussian boy who runs off to join the partisans. This doesn't go as smoothly as it might (to quote Clausewitz: "In war everything is simple, but even the simplest things are very difficult") and he becomes separated from them and stumbles into a village just as it's descended upon by an Einsatzgruppe.
Make no mistake, this film is disturbing and haunting. It's also brilliant. I won't give away the ending, except to say that the essence of drama is that a character must make a decision, and that Klimov has Fliora make a momentous one in a wordless final sequence involving a rifle and a photograph.
Hard to say much more about this one. You have to just see it.
Breaker Morant
At last, a war other than '39~'45.
Now, one could argue that Breaker Morant is more of a courtroom drama, but as the charge stems from issues of prosecuting and directing the war and the emotional state it has imposed on the defendants, I would tend to count it. Morant is an officer of the Bushveldt Carbineers, an Australian volunteer unit doing what today would be called countre-insurgeny for the British during the Boer War. Without wishing to ignite any sort of Observer's Brain stuff, the relevance to the present world is obvious.
Even well short of the sort of crimes against humanity perpetrated by Einsatzgruppen and their ilk, war is fundamentally a matter of killing people solely because they wear a certain uniform. There has probably been no war in history in which civilians didn't catch a few wild rounds, and modern warfare has come to stress attacking the logistical basis of the enemy. In big wars this means killing the workers who man the factories (and as the R.A.F.'s "Bomber" Harris put it, "and if old Granny Schickelgruber upstairs cops it too that's too bad") and in small ones leaning on the peasantry among whom Mao told insurgents to "swim like fish in the sea."
Breaker Morant is a well made exploration of the morality of all this. The killings in question are pretty certainly criminal, but how should the blame be justly apportioned? And given the brutal nature of all war, just where should the line of criminality lie? There's a line in that trailer that's a little mysterious if you don't know a bit of military trivia: "We executed them under Rule Three-Oh-Three!" The caliber of the Lee-Enfield service rifle was .303, thus the rule of the gun or law of the jungle. And yet Morant is a perfectly civilized and cultured man, as are his superiors who put him in that position. Much food for thought in this film.
Platoon
What was it about the '80s and this topic?
I was lucky enough to find the DVD of Platoon at Walmart for $5. One interesting feature is two commentary tracks, both Stone's and one by technical adviser Dale Dye, USMC ret.. Both are well worth a listen. Now, I doubt that a movie which makes someone who hasn't experienced war fully get it is possible, but there's definitely something that comes through when someone who has seen the elephant sets out to describe it. Stone sometimes irritates me as a director, but I see this as the cinematic All Quiet on the Western Front.
The film has been called "anvilicious," as in beating you over the head with its message as if your head were an anvil. I suppose there's something to that, given the Manichean nature of good Sgt Elias and bad S/Sgt Barnes, but it works for me. Indeed, I find Barnes a fascinating character, Ahab-like (some of Dye's observations on him are quite interesting). The scene in which he confronts the heads is a favorite of mine. "You boys smoke this sh*t to escape reality? I don' need to escape reality . . . I am reality," and takes a pull of whisky.
Oh! What a Lovely War
The opening credits, precisely what I'd have picked as an intro to this movie.
If memory serves, about one in every 250 US military age males died in Vietnam. Consider the impact that war had on the US psyche, then consider that about one in eleven military age Britons died in the First World War, and one in four among the officer classes.
Oh! What a Lovely War is Attenborough's brilliantly dark* musical comedy about the war. It opens with a surreal sequence of Europe's leaders at a party. Posing them for a group portrait, the photographer (who will turn out to be something of a guide throughout the film) hands Archduke Franz-Ferdinand and wife Sophie poppies (which we'll soon realize are the movie's death symbol). The flash rings out like a gunshot and they fall, at which the others begin a stylistic interchange which pretty accurately maps out the diplomatic moves leading to hostilities (Ralph Richardson's delivery of Sir Edward Grey's "The lamps are going out all over Europe; we shall not see them lit again in our lifetime" always moves me).
The movie then traces the war's impact on both historical figures and the various every(wo)man characters of the Smith family. Much of the film involves period musical numbers, both popular songs and British soldier rewrites of same, as in:
Send for the boys of the Girls' Brigade
To keep old England free
Send for me brother
Me sister or me mother
But for gods sake don't send me
The movie is full of unforgettable images, not least the final one, which I won't describe. It's on YouTube, but wait until you can see it in context.
Well, I could certainly think of some honorable mentions, like maybe We Were Soldiers for the bit with the wives, or Thin Red Line, which I thought worked better than Ryan and was a great adaptation of the novel (would have liked to see Bead's first kill, but it was a long novel). I'd also mention 1945's A Walk in the Sun, made before the smoke had even cleared but already showing GIs with the attitude that while someone's gotta fight the war, why the hell them?
What do you, the viewers at home, think?
*Brilliantly dark? Can one say that?
Recently I stumbled onto a couple of YouTube "Best War Movie" lists. Now, right off the bat, as the years go on I become ever more dubious of rating movies in such terms. While one seems on pretty firm ground by an assertion like "Barry Lyndon is a better film than Red Zone Cuba," that is nonetheless an inherently subjective viewpoint with which someone (likely in some institution) might honestly disagree. Even for myself, different movies have different flavors and aren't always directly comparable in that way.
All of which is to say that this list in not my idea of "best" war movies, simply ones that are, for one reason or another, memorable to me.
There's also a question of just what constitutes the class of "war movies." Schindler's List made one of the lists I saw, but I'm not sure I'd count that. It focussed not on the war the Nazis unleashed but on the industrialized genocide they practiced. Similarly, a film like From Here to Eternity is more a story of peacetime soldiers, with the Pearl Harbor attack being a shocking intrusion into their lives. Thus I'm thinking more about films in which warfare or its effect on those it touches are central, but again my judgement of that need not be yours.
TORA! TORA! TORA!
The trailer for this movie is awful, so I've substituted Jerry Goldsmith's marvelous theme (though my wife thought it was way too Japanesey).
Now, I've read a lot of film school type critiques of this film, dinging it for poor direction and pacing. While I like reading such reviews for the new insights they often bring to me, I believe it's misplaced here. Rumour has it that Kurosawa lost interest in the project when he found that David Lean was not directing the US side. While I'd love to see what they would have done with the material, it might well have been a brilliant and yet more typical war picture. Fleischer came from a documentary background and was trying to stay as close to historical fact as it was understood at the time as possible. No, you can't quite cite the film in history class (Yamamoto's "sleeping giant" quote can't be documented, for instance) but you'll get a far more accurate picture than you will from the egregious Pearl Harbor.
Similarly, the film is unusual in dealing not with the waging of war but with the oppressive feeling of struggling against its inexorable coming. So many moments when Yamamoto tries to dissuade his government, when the codebreakers try to at least give a warning, when the Opana Point radar does but is ignored . . . for me there's always a tense feeling of "maybe this time it won't happen!"
And for all that they had to make do without CGI Zeroes the action sequences are not at all bad. Watch for that great accident of the blown off propeller dancing across the flight line at Kaneohe.
James Whitmore's portrayal of Admiral Halsey is another strong point, but Shougo Shimada as Ambassador Nomura (with a vocal assist from Paul Frees) has the most poignant moment in the film. Nomura was the last of the Shidehara "doves" in the Foreign Office, and was callously used and misled in order to put the US off its guard. His scene with Secretary of State Hull is short, but the crushing of the man is heartbreaking, a tiny tragedy that brings the global one to a sharper focus.
Battleground
Again, this one has an awful trailer, so I've used a scene (again with James Whitmore, as it happens).
Personally, I think that this 1949 movie is what Saving Private Ryan wanted to be. Not to be too dismissive of Ryan, having heard a lot of vets say it was quite meaningful to them, but for me it felt overly sentimental and self-conscious. Perhaps that was inevitable in a movie meant to tell grandkids what GIs must have felt like, as opposed to a '49 film that could take the whole subtext of why the war was fought as read.
I also found Ryan a bit manipulative, as in making the SS trooper (war criminally) killed at the end an older guy. True, Nazis are about the only group one can guiltlessly hate (and with good reason), but how would that scene have played had he been cast as a teenager, which would have been quite common at that stage of the war.
But back to the movie at hand. Battleground tells the story of a platoon of the 101st Airborne (Screaming Eagles) trapped in the Battle of the Bulge's Bastogne Pocket. Veterans were used as technical advisers, and while neither gore nor swearing were allowed in a movie of that era, you sort of get the feeling that both are right off camera. These men's lives aren't spent wondering what the war is all about, but in just how many g.d. holes they'll have to dig before they can sleep in one. It also shows heroism and cowardice as interpenetrating each other in an almost yin-yang manner. Thankfully I've never experienced combat, but this movie seems to have the right vibe. I'd be curious if vets agree (where is DaWormFace, anyway?).
The Dick van Dyke Show's Jerry Paris has a bit part as one of the Germans bringing the surrender offer. I love the wordless interaction between that group and the GIs guarding them.
Das Boot
At last! A decent trailer! No subs though.
Was that a pun?
This movie is sort of interesting in terms of Germany coming to grips with its own past (on that note, where's Sheik Yerbouti?). I used to know an East German who seemed deeply haunted by war guilt, despite his not having been born at the time. Postwar German pop culture seems to indicate a deep struggle with that, probably resulting not only from the horrific crimes of the Nazi regime but from awareness of the "we got screwed at Versailles" mindset that they used to win over so many Germans.
With that, it felt like the groundwork had been laid to honor the sacrifices of individual Germans without seeming to raise side issues of defending Nazism. Perhaps U-boat crewmen most deserved that, having been demonized in both world wars for a heartlessness that was largely unavoidable given the technical limits of their boats, and of which US sub crews in the Pacific or Anglo-American bomber crews were no less guilty (though it's true that the middle-class Navy and Air Force commands tended to be more pro-Nazi than the aristocratic Army, but that's neither here nor there).
I can't think of another film which is so evocative of the claustrophobia and filth that marked these boats on patrol, not to mention the terror once their torpedoes alerted the Royal Navy escorts and the hunters immediately became the hunted.
My copy is the long "director's cut" which I found used, and I must say that I wish I had the original theatrical release instead. The re-edit is much longer, and while I think that was trying to illustrate the "long stretches of boredom punctuated by moments of sheer terror" aspect of war, I remember the tighter version being a better film.
Idi i Smotri (aka Come and See)
Many thanks to afriendlychicken for recommending this one to me.
Perhaps someday there will be a calculus of suffering, but for all that Stalin was an unsavory character, probably only the Chinese are in the running as competitors for just the sheer weight of Hell World War 2 thrust upon the Russians. Come and See is the story of Fliora, a young Byelorussian boy who runs off to join the partisans. This doesn't go as smoothly as it might (to quote Clausewitz: "In war everything is simple, but even the simplest things are very difficult") and he becomes separated from them and stumbles into a village just as it's descended upon by an Einsatzgruppe.
Make no mistake, this film is disturbing and haunting. It's also brilliant. I won't give away the ending, except to say that the essence of drama is that a character must make a decision, and that Klimov has Fliora make a momentous one in a wordless final sequence involving a rifle and a photograph.
Hard to say much more about this one. You have to just see it.
Breaker Morant
At last, a war other than '39~'45.
Now, one could argue that Breaker Morant is more of a courtroom drama, but as the charge stems from issues of prosecuting and directing the war and the emotional state it has imposed on the defendants, I would tend to count it. Morant is an officer of the Bushveldt Carbineers, an Australian volunteer unit doing what today would be called countre-insurgeny for the British during the Boer War. Without wishing to ignite any sort of Observer's Brain stuff, the relevance to the present world is obvious.
Even well short of the sort of crimes against humanity perpetrated by Einsatzgruppen and their ilk, war is fundamentally a matter of killing people solely because they wear a certain uniform. There has probably been no war in history in which civilians didn't catch a few wild rounds, and modern warfare has come to stress attacking the logistical basis of the enemy. In big wars this means killing the workers who man the factories (and as the R.A.F.'s "Bomber" Harris put it, "and if old Granny Schickelgruber upstairs cops it too that's too bad") and in small ones leaning on the peasantry among whom Mao told insurgents to "swim like fish in the sea."
Breaker Morant is a well made exploration of the morality of all this. The killings in question are pretty certainly criminal, but how should the blame be justly apportioned? And given the brutal nature of all war, just where should the line of criminality lie? There's a line in that trailer that's a little mysterious if you don't know a bit of military trivia: "We executed them under Rule Three-Oh-Three!" The caliber of the Lee-Enfield service rifle was .303, thus the rule of the gun or law of the jungle. And yet Morant is a perfectly civilized and cultured man, as are his superiors who put him in that position. Much food for thought in this film.
Platoon
What was it about the '80s and this topic?
I was lucky enough to find the DVD of Platoon at Walmart for $5. One interesting feature is two commentary tracks, both Stone's and one by technical adviser Dale Dye, USMC ret.. Both are well worth a listen. Now, I doubt that a movie which makes someone who hasn't experienced war fully get it is possible, but there's definitely something that comes through when someone who has seen the elephant sets out to describe it. Stone sometimes irritates me as a director, but I see this as the cinematic All Quiet on the Western Front.
The film has been called "anvilicious," as in beating you over the head with its message as if your head were an anvil. I suppose there's something to that, given the Manichean nature of good Sgt Elias and bad S/Sgt Barnes, but it works for me. Indeed, I find Barnes a fascinating character, Ahab-like (some of Dye's observations on him are quite interesting). The scene in which he confronts the heads is a favorite of mine. "You boys smoke this sh*t to escape reality? I don' need to escape reality . . . I am reality," and takes a pull of whisky.
Oh! What a Lovely War
The opening credits, precisely what I'd have picked as an intro to this movie.
If memory serves, about one in every 250 US military age males died in Vietnam. Consider the impact that war had on the US psyche, then consider that about one in eleven military age Britons died in the First World War, and one in four among the officer classes.
Oh! What a Lovely War is Attenborough's brilliantly dark* musical comedy about the war. It opens with a surreal sequence of Europe's leaders at a party. Posing them for a group portrait, the photographer (who will turn out to be something of a guide throughout the film) hands Archduke Franz-Ferdinand and wife Sophie poppies (which we'll soon realize are the movie's death symbol). The flash rings out like a gunshot and they fall, at which the others begin a stylistic interchange which pretty accurately maps out the diplomatic moves leading to hostilities (Ralph Richardson's delivery of Sir Edward Grey's "The lamps are going out all over Europe; we shall not see them lit again in our lifetime" always moves me).
The movie then traces the war's impact on both historical figures and the various every(wo)man characters of the Smith family. Much of the film involves period musical numbers, both popular songs and British soldier rewrites of same, as in:
Send for the boys of the Girls' Brigade
To keep old England free
Send for me brother
Me sister or me mother
But for gods sake don't send me
The movie is full of unforgettable images, not least the final one, which I won't describe. It's on YouTube, but wait until you can see it in context.
Well, I could certainly think of some honorable mentions, like maybe We Were Soldiers for the bit with the wives, or Thin Red Line, which I thought worked better than Ryan and was a great adaptation of the novel (would have liked to see Bead's first kill, but it was a long novel). I'd also mention 1945's A Walk in the Sun, made before the smoke had even cleared but already showing GIs with the attitude that while someone's gotta fight the war, why the hell them?
What do you, the viewers at home, think?
*Brilliantly dark? Can one say that?