10 War Films You Need to See
Sounds like it should be a Steven Spielberg movie — and that's just what "War Horse" is. There's even a certain serendipity in Michael Morpugo having written this children's novel around the time Spielberg was celebrating another inter-species heart-to-heart in "E.T.—The Extra-Terrestrial" (1982). The movie doesn't follow Morpugo's strategy of narrating the entire tale from the horse's POV; we trust that a human cast including the likes of Emily Watson, Peter Mullan, Benedict Cumberbatch, and newcomer Jeremy Irvine will hold up their end. When the film opens on Christmas Day, to borrow a line from E.T. himself, we'll be right there.
But while awaiting the release of this most unorthodox war film, we invite you to ponder some other distinctive entries in the genre. The idea isn't necessarily to select the "10 Greatest War Movies" — though some of these would be in the running — or recycle the received wisdom on "All Quiet on the Western Front," "Platoon," Spielberg's own "Saving Private Ryan," "The Hurt Locker," et al. Instead we salute a gallery of fine films that deserve to be better known.
You couldn't find a title more elemental than "Men in War", and that goes for the film as well. The epigraph sounds as if it might have come from Xenophon: "Tell me the story of the foot soldier and I will tell you the story of all wars." The action, set during the Korean War, covers a single day and the following dawn. Robert Ryan plays a lieutenant named Benson, a non–career officer and liberal humanist whose patrol is utterly isolated in a wasteland nameless but for numbers on a map. In the eerie yet plain-as-day mise-en-scène, the enemy is barely seen but omnipresent, almost literally part of the landscape — which is to say, this is an Anthony Mann picture par excellence, building on and extending the stylistic and spiritual legacy of the director's great Westerns and films noirs Aldo Ray co-stars as a case-hardened sergeant who crosses the path of Ryan's patrol while attempting to get his shell-shocked commandant to safety. Philosophically, he's more adversary than likely ally to Ryan, yet both men are crucial to the prospect of anyone surviving the day. The warfare is harrowing; the heartbreaking finale, unforgettable.
A landing craft heads toward an Italian beach, the faces of the infantrymen aboard only smudges in the darkness. Several minutes later, those same men huddle in a gully a hundred yards inland, with dawn coming on as, on the other side of the rise they just crested, shells whistle and billows of black smoke climb to the sky and the platoon tries to guess what's going on in the place they just were. "A Walk in the Sun" is the last of four World War II movies made during the war by Lewis Milestone, who at the dawn of sound had directed "All Quiet on the Western Front." "A Walk in the Sun" never achieved that film's classic status, but it could be the finest battlefield film of its day. Milestone produced it as an independent — a financially precarious course, but indie status licensed him to experiment with stylized dialogue , adventurous camera and editing techniques, and narrative punctuation by way of an Earl Robinson ballad composed specifically for the film . The action is limited to "one little job, one day from dawn until noon," as the platoon makes their way six miles overland to take a farmhouse almost certainly occupied by German troops. The cast — Dana Andrews, Richard Conte, Norman Lloyd, Lloyd Bridges — is first-rate, as is Russell Harlan's raw-light cinematography. There's a lot of this movie's DNA in "Saving Private Ryan."
"In 1964, the war in Vietnam was still a little one — confused and far away." In 1978, "Go Tell the Spartans" was just a little one, released without fanfare in the dog days of summer and ignored in deference to two higher-profile productions, "Coming Home" and "The Deer Hunter," which went on to dominate the year's Oscar race. Three decades later, it's easier to appreciate that "Spartans" had it all over its big-name competition for lucidity and insight into what became the Vietnam quagmire (though, to be fair, neither of the other pictures was really about that). Wendell Mayes' trenchant screenplay, based on the novel "Incident at Muc Wa" by former war correspondent Daniel Ford, foregrounds the fatal logic whereby a hapless contingent of U.S. Army "military advisers" is sent to garrison a village the jungle has all but swallowed up. The village, and the cemetery of 302 French troops who died there when Vietnam was still Indochine, and the war wasn't yet America's. There's especially sharp attention to the hostility of both the ARVN ("our Vietnamese") and the Viet Cong. 1978 viewers may be forgiven for shrugging the movie off: Burt Lancaster was deemed over-the-hill as a movie star, the supporting cast seemed as callow and hapless as the misfits and burnt-out cases they played, and the production values were TV-movie-grade. And yet, what a good and true film.
"San Pietro"is only a little over half an hour in length, but critic James Agee reckoned it the best picture of 1945. Written, directed, and also eloquently narrated by John Huston, it's a combat documentary focused on the fight for one small town in Italy's Liri Valley during the winter and spring of 1944. The film is both an official document of the War Department and a personal, utterly characteristic Huston movie. The finely judged irony of his delivery in no way subverts the noble, unsentimentalized tribute to the men who fought and died at San Pietro, yet the film is a lucid index of the inherent futility of war, as the war itself becomes a metaphor for absurdity. After reels of slamming battle , the actual occupation of the town is eerily anticlimactic: The Germans are simply no longer there, having withdrawn to prepare for "more San Pietros, a thousand more" further along the route of the war. The U.S. Army, having won its objective, must immediately march beyond it, a strategic goal having been transmuted by the very success of their mission into a liberated irrelevancy.
Here's one nobody saw coming, then or now. "Went the Day Well?" was made in 1942, though part of what's dislocating about it is that it pretends to be some time later, looking back at an incident that's already taken on the augustness of history. The setting is a picture book-quaint English village called Bramley End, the residents of which awaken one morning to learn that some British troops are to be billeted among them. These troops are fine fellows, surely, and the locals set about finding room for them in their homes and public places. Thing is, the visitors aren't British at all, but impeccably anglicized German paratroopers preparing the way for a full-scale invasion of the Sceptred Isle. Based on a story by Graham Greene and directed by the gifted, Brazil-born Alberto Cavalcanti, this movie is simply astonishing. The patented homely touch of Ealing Studios, usually in the service of folksy comedy, is amply at play, but with the aim of making the eventual moments of betrayal and murderous violence the more horrific, even obscene. Leslie Banks, not only an established star but an icon of English cinema, is brilliantly cast as the village squire secretly in cahoots with the Nazis, while Basil Sydney (later Claudius in Olivier's "Hamlet") plays the German commandant. The desperately improvisational resistance force includes such stalwarts as Marie Lohr, Edward Rigby, Mervyn Johns and Frank Lawton
Some wars are fought far from battlefields, and every glance, meal, smoke, crossing of a street is part of an existential strategy. "Army of Shadows" is Jean-Pierre Melville's great movie about the French Resistance during World War II. Melville himself served in the Resistance, and although the credits of his film cite Joseph Kessel's novel "L'Armée des ombres" as its source, key incidents and details in the movie were inspired by things the filmmaker experienced or heard about from colleagues. The action is organized into episodes, many of them unconnected by anything but the presence of certain characters we know and the spiritual arc of the film. Don't watch "Army of Shadows" expecting to see saboteurs blow up German supply trains or assassins target Nazi officers. There are some ingenious and daring capers, but often as not they are foredoomed or, even more tragically, successful in ways and for reasons no one but the dead will ever know. In one scene the central character (Lino Ventura), in German custody, proposes an escape plan that will free a fellow prisoner, but the upshot is that Ventura gets free and the other guy almost certainly does not — and that was the part of the plan we didn't hear about. You see, there's a war on. A bleak, eerily beautiful film, with superb performances by Ventura, Paul Crauchet, Jean-Pierre Cassel, Paul Meurisse, Simone Signoret, and Claude Mann.
There are people who regard Elem Klimov's "Come and See" as the greatest of war films. Certainly few match its capacity to immerse audiences in the horrors of war, so that watching it leaves one's face feeling scorched. In 1943 Belarus, a 13-year-old peasant named Florya probes the soil of a recent battlefield till he finds a rifle — all that he needs in order to join the partisans in the nearby forest. When the company marches off to confront the German invaders, the commander sensibly has him stay behind as "too new," but "behind" is no safer than battle: German bombs tear up the forest around Florya and leave him — and, in effect, the viewer — with a case of tinnitus that seems to linger for half the film. This is only one of the ways in which reality, and family and comradeship and everything he holds dear, is shattered from one movement of the film to the next, till Florya lands at the center of a village the Germans intend to expunge from the face of the Earth, cauterizing "an inferior nation that has no right to exist ... the microbe of communism." Extreme as the incidents in the film may seem, the scenario reflects the wartime experiences of Klimov's co-writer, Ales Adamovich. Some of Klimov's images are as extraordinary as the events they depict.
All the years he was writing and directing one gritty, ballsy B-movie after another, Sam Fuller hung on to the dream of filming his memoir of World War II service with "The Big Red One," the 1st Infantry Division, United States Army, from North Africa through Sicily, France, Belgium, and finally to Germany and Czechoslovakia. In 1980, it happened. The picture follows one eternal Sergeant and four youthful members of his rifle squad through myriad, often verging-on-surreal adventures: the moment when a German officer who's wounded the Sergeant in North Africa is himself wounded by the spitting muzzle of a German tank gun careening by; or the amazing scene when, in a tiger tank in a field strewn with corpses, the squad delivers a woman's baby. Fuller's refracting of the D-Day slaughter on Omaha Beach is as harrowing in its way as Steven Spielberg's flesh-ripping realization for "Saving Private Ryan," and his design for the film overall arcs from the very first shot fired in the war — by a dead man! — to the last. Invited in Jean-Luc Godard's film "Pierrot le fou" to define the cinema, Sam Fuller famously took out his cigar and scowled, "The cinema is like a battleground. Love, hate, action, violence, death. In one word: emotion." Lee Marvin's Sergeant is the personification, and Sam Fuller's single finest realization, of that definition. By the way, try to catch the 2004 reconstruction of the film, nearly an hour longer than the cut released in 1980.
Is "Ride With the Devil" a war film? For that matter, is it a Western? Audiences in 1999 didn't know how to file it. Then again, there were hardly any audiences, since it was released in an insanely truncated run designed to close the ledgers rather than set a filmmaker's work in front of viewers who might value it. Never mind. "Ride With the Devil" looks more and more like a great film — Taiwan-born director Ang Lee's other Western besides "Brokeback Mountain." And if it's not a war film, then what should we call a film with such acute feeling for how lives, families, communities, traditions and the earth itself can be wounded and changed by war? The setting is the countryside and a couple of towns along the Kansas-Missouri border as the Civil War is getting under way. Some folks who have known one another all their lives find themselves on opposite sides, though it's not so much a matter of North vs. South as bushwhackers vs. Jayhawkers. There are many deaths, reprisals, realignments; and a black man — Jeffrey Wright is superb — fighting for the Confederacy; and the raid on Lawrence, Kansas, is devastating. Tell people Jewel is among the principal cast members and they snicker, but she's splendid; likewise Tobey Maguire as a first-generation German-American trying to suss out just how he should fit into America; and as a quite mad and murderous guerrilla, Jonathan Rhys Meyers. Find your way into this movie soon.
In 2006, at age 76, the indefatigable Clint Eastwood directed not one but two great films about the World War II battle for Iwo Jima, a near-desert of an island in the shadow of Mount Suribachi. "Letters From Iwo Jima," the second in order of release, portrayed the battle from the Japanese point of view, an expression of sympathy so unprecedented in American cinema that critical praise and awards nominations were all but mandated. "Flags of Our Fathers," from the U.S. perspective, met with a more mixed response; we had, after all, watched American troops win so many cinematic battles. Yet "Flags" was anything but a gung-ho celebration of American can-do. It was a brilliant, challenging, daringly multileveled interrogation of the battle as a historic event, of how a politically expedient myth was erected around the instantly world-famous raising of the American Flag on Suribachi, and of the toll this exacted from the soldiers who participated in it. Rarely if ever had a major American studio (Paramount) released such a radical film. More reviewers should have noticed. So really, the primary impulse behind this gallery selection is to honor "Flags of Our Fathers." Yet finally and essentially, the two films are one — each superb on its own, and cumulatively overwhelming.
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