Movies at war

This being the Memorial Day weekend in the US, not at the moment having any home DIY projects to attend to and being disinclined to go shopping or incinerate slabs of meat outdoors, I thought I’d commemorate the holiday by listing some of my top picks in war movies.

Back in college a visiting Russian professor of films said something that really stuck with me: you can tell a lot about the prevailing attitudes towards the nation and the world by how the motion pictures of a country view some iconic events or eras. The example she gave for the US was westerns—think the 50s and 60s and any flick with John Wayne; pure Manifest Destiny. Starting in the 70s think Little Big Man or The Wild Bunch; all sorts of ambiguities seeping through. (For the Soviet Union she cited the Russian Revolution and the Great Patriotic War.)

But I think this holds true also for how we (and especially we in America) portray any war—those films are a sign of the times, regardless of which war, exactly, a picture is about.

Anyway, here are the ones I particularly recommend (in order of conflict chronology):

Henry V, 1989. Yes, it’s Shakespeare, but the depiction of the battle of Agincourt is absolutely stunning, one of the best I’ve ever seen. Kenneth Branagh’s take on the story whips Olivier’s ass—that 1944 propaganda piece is effete and antiseptic by comparison. (Don’t get me wrong—Henry V itself is propaganda; Shakespeare was pumping up the Tudors big-time when he wrote the play. But Olivier just over-egged the pudding.) And this one was made before brilliance and; success expanded Branagh’s ego to the point he permanently lodged his head up his own butt.

Everyone knows Henry’s Saint Crispin’s Day speech at Agincourt, but I really like his warning to the burghers of Harfleur; it’s very like what you’d expect from a commander who’s pissed off by civic resistance and really wants nothing so much as a hot bath and a bed. He basically describes their choices, up to them: you can surrender now and lose nothing but some face and supplies, or you can continue fighting and I’ll personally see that my soldiers make Harfleur a wasteland.

"What is it then to me, if impious war,
Array'd in flames like to the prince of fiends,
Do, with his smirch'd complexion, all fell feats
Enlink'd to waste and desolation?"

Carthage, anyone?

(BTW—they surrender.)

Napoléon, 1929. Abel Gance’s film was meant to be the first of six chronicling the life of the Emperor of the French; he never got the readies to complete the series. Pity, as this one is just brilliant. Back in the 80s Francis Ford Coppola rediscovered the film and reissued it with a score written and conducted in live orchestral accompaniment by Carmine Coppola. You can get it on DVD.

Gettysburg, 1993. Yes, it’s long, and a Ted Turner vanity-piece. But it’s really a good overview of the seminal battle of the War Between the States (or “the war of northern aggression”, as my thesis director referred to it). Martin Sheen as Robert E. Lee is cringeworthy, but let that go. Focus on Jeff Bridges as Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain, a professor of classics at Bowdoin College who turned out to have a superb gift for command.

(Stephen Lang as George E. Pickett is also excellent. Following the criminally futile charge up Cemetery Ridge ordered by Marse Robert, when Lee urges Pickett to reform his division for defense, Lang’s delivery of the reply is scathing: “General Lee, I have no division.”)

What’s particularly good about Gettysburg is some of the detail. When Chamberlain gives the order to fix bayonets you hear that metallic clicking sound all up the line. Listen to that and think about what was going through the minds of the 20th Maine Regiment: you fix bayonets because you know the fighting is going to be hand-to-hand, you’re going to meet your enemy face to face and blade to blade.

(Forget the prequel to Gettysburg. Gods and Generals is all over the place. And you can discuss Gone with the Wind amongst yourselves.)

The other WBTS film of note is Glory, 1989. This is a stunning picture, about the 54th Massachusetts regiment, a unit of African Americans commanded by white officers. It’s a good study not only of the war, but also of the psychological strains imposed by putting freed slaves through the rigor of military training. Think about it: you spend a good part of your life having every aspect of your existence dictated by a master; you escape one way or another and start experiencing the new world of freedom; and then you join the army, which demands you surrender your life to your commander.

Zulu, 1964. Leave aside the fact that this was Stanley Baker’s paean to the 24th Foot, a Welsh outfit, and that there are some extraneous bits that make no sense storywise. It portrays the defense of a small station by 140 British soldiers against a force of more than 4000 Zulu warriors, fresh from a major victory against the Brits at Islandlhwana.

Zulu has, without question, the single best battle scene ever filmed. As in Henry V, the battle is filth, blood, fury, luck, fear and some degree of strategy and tactics. The camera focuses in on the three lines of riflemen formed by the two commanders as they alternate firing—front rank, fire; second rank, fire; third rank, fire. Then fire, fire, fire, fire. Focus on the faces and the gunpowder smoke. When the shooting stops, the camera slowly pulls back to reveal the pile of twitching bodies mere steps from the firing lines.

During the aftermath, the colour sergeant whispers, “It’s a miracle!” To which one of the commanders replies, “If it's a miracle, Colour Sergeant, it's a short-chamber Boxer Henry point 45 caliber miracle.”

World War I got more attention from filmmakers outside the US than here. Of the movies out there, the one you must see is Gallipoli, 1981. If you know nothing about the actual campaign, it was an attempt by the Brits to unhinge the alliance among the Central Powers by invading Turkey. As Kitchener refused to shake loose any troops from the Western Front, most of the invading forces were Australians and New Zealanders. It was bungled from the git-go.

Gallipoli is Peter Weir’s homage to those Anzacs who fought and died. It stars a very young Mel Gibson (back in the days when he acted rather than postured) and is utterly heartbreaking. Weir is brilliant and he had a devastating story to tell.

La Grande Illusion, 1937, is an interesting study. Here’s an example of that understanding-national-views-thru-war-films thing: Jean Renoir made this picture about French POWs in the First World War during the immediate run up to the Second World War, when France was really struggling with how to deal with an increasingly bellicose Germany. No one really wanted to go to war again, and Grande Illusion speaks to this.

The Shooting Party, 1985, isn’t strictly speaking a war film; it’s a pre-war film. If you want a taste of what that last summer before the four years of carnage was like, this is your introduction.

And it’s taken its hits, but I like the 2001 TV mini, The Lost Battalion. Again—filth, fear and men carrying out their duty because that’s what’s expected of them, no matter the cost. Colonel Whittlesey collecting the dog tags of his dead men at the end sums it up visually.

And King of Hearts, 1966, about a British soldier holing up in an insane asylum, is quite the commentary on the Vietnam War.

There’s an embarrassment of riches on World War II. Saving Private Ryan, 1998, was Spielberg’s apotheosis, and it’s fine. But check out The Big Red One, 1980. This is Samuel Fuller’s cinematic memoir of his own experiences, and it’s very good indeed.

I also like A Midnight Clear, 1992, about a small group of American soldiers during the Battle of the Bulge. It’s focused and I’m getting frostbite just remembering it.

Most of the films on my list are outside the immediate post-war years, because from the 40s to the end of the 60s WWII movies were pretty one-dimensional. One exception in my mind is 1951's Go for Broke! It's still gung-ho, but it's the subject matter that sets it apart: the 442nd Regimental Combat Team. Like the 54th Mass, the 442 was all volunteers of the disenfranchised: a Japanese-American unit, commanded by white officers. It was the most decorated unit in the history of the US military; many of the soldiers had families in concentration camps, yet they still volunteered to serve.

Go for Broke! is the Hollywoodized version, so in a purely filmic sense it's pretty much second rate. And way too much is made of Van Johnson as the commander. But the rest of the cast is largely unknown Japanese-American actors (not Chinese or Caucasians with heavy make-up) and the story is mostly true overall, following the men from training to being awarded a Presidential Unit Citation from Harry S. Truman. Until a better telling comes along, this'll have to do.

(There's plenty of dreck out there on WWII. The Longest Day, 1962, and Valkyrie, 2008, come to mind as examples, both more concerned about star turns than verisimilitude. There are also a number of fine films like Best Years of Our Lives, 1946; Bridge on the River Kwai, 1957; The Great Escape, 1963; Das Boot, 1981; Soldier of Orange, 1977; and Windtalkers, 2002. You could even count The Third Man, 1949.)

Empire of the Sun, 1987, takes us to the Pacific. It’s Spielberg’s adaptation of J.G. Ballard’s autobiographical novel, and it’s a very powerful account of a young British boy separated from his parents during the Japanese invasion of Shanghai, and who survives several years in captivity.

Hope and Glory, 1987, is John Boorman’s film of his own experiences as a boy in England during WWII. Perhaps because it’s so personal, and seen from the viewpoint of a pre-teen, it’s very human.

Finally, okay—it’s TV, and it’s a mini-series; but you can’t do better than Band of Brothers, 2001. It follows Easy Company, 506th PIR, 101st Airborne. Each episode is filtered through one of the men’s viewpoint; it’s extraordinarily powerful.

One of the seminal moments is toward the end of the war, when Easy Company is traveling in deuce-and-a-halfs into Germany, passing columns of bedraggled German POWs, walking and in horse carts. One of the soldiers just can’t stand it any more. He stands up and shrieks at the Germans (who, exhausted and dazed, don’t even notice):

“Hey, you! That's right, you stupid Kraut bastards! That's right! Say hello to Ford, and General fuckin' Motors! You stupid fascist pigs! Look at you! You have horses! What were you thinking? Dragging our asses half way around the world, interrupting our lives... For what, you ignorant, servile scum! What the fuck are we doing here?”

I think by 2001 we were far enough away from WWII to produce something as thoughtful as Band of Brothers. You can take a look at almost any movie from the 1940s through the 60s and pretty much find the John Wayne western viewpoint.

There’ve been a few films about the Korean War, although I’ve seen very few of them. M*A*S*H’s 1970 subject matter is Korea, but it’s actually about Vietnam.

And I have to say that we’re probably still too close to that war to produce anything but polemics. Or maybe I’m just too close to it to be able to bear anything that comes out about it. But look: The Deer Hunter, 1978; Coming Home, 1978: Apocalypse Now, 1979; Platoon, 1986; Full Metal Jacket, 1987; Born on the 4th of July, 1989—they may be stunning or stirring, but they’re all screeds.

The thing about my picks is that none of them (except possibly Grande Illusion) speaks to the "gallantry" of war. There's a moment in Zulu when the retreating warriors salute the remaining Brits, but they mostly give you a sense of what one of humanity’s oldest activity is about, what it costs. Something to think about on Memorial Day.