War films

Vintage Cinema presents

War film

War has been a popular topic for motion pictures since the invention of the medium in the late 1800s. Although no one can be certain of the exact "first" war movie, many historians feel it is probably a one-and-a-half-minute pro-war film, Tearing Down the Spanish Flag , made on a set in New York City immediately after the United States declared war on Spain in April 1898.

Tearing Down the Spanish Flag (1898)

Movies called "war films" do not reflect one attitude or a single purpose. They may be antiwar (All Quiet on the Western Front, 1930) or pro-war (Bataan, 1943). How I Won the War (1967) is a satiric and mocking comedy about World War I, but The Big Parade (1925) tells a tragic story about the toll its events take on one man's personal life. The Green Berets (1968) is a gung-ho celebration of the US Special Forces and their role in Vietnam, but Platoon (1986) presents the soldier's life there as an almost insane universe.

The popularity of the war film and of war as a topic in movies is borne out by two factors: artistic recognition as reflected in Academy Awards for Best Picture, and box-office returns. War films that have won Best Picture Oscars include Wings (1927), the very first such winner; All Quiet on the Western Front; Patton (1970), a biographical portrait of World War II general George S. Patton; The Deer Hunter (1978), a stark look at the lives of young steelworkers before, during, and after their combat in Vietnam; and Platoon, combat veteran Oliver Stone's (b. 1946) first-person account of the infantry in Vietnam. Other Oscar winners whose stories involve war include Gone with the Wind (1939), From Here to Eternity (1953), The Bridge on the River Kwai (1957), Lawrence of Arabia (1962), Braveheart (1995), Mrs. Miniver (1942), Casablanca (1942), The Best Years of Our Lives (1946), and Schindler's List (1993). Because they are based in reality and frequently star big-name actors and contain scenes of exciting action, war movies, both pro- and anti-, have a strong record of success at the box office. Among the many top-grossing films, as evidenced by records reported in the The Motion Picture Herald, Motion Picture Daily, and Film Daily, are Hell's Angels (1930), Sergeant York (1941), Air Force (1943), So Proudly We Hail! (1943), Guadalcanal Diary (1943), Battleground (1949), Operation Pacific (1951), Battle Cry (1955), The Longest Day (1962), Tora! Tora! Tora! (1970), Midway (1976), Saving Private Ryan (1998), Three Kings (1999), and Pearl Harbor (2001).

DEFINING THE WAR FILM:

Coming up with a generic definition of the war film presents problems. Sometimes movies are labeled "war films" even when they are not set in combat. Since You Went Away (1944), the story of the American home front in 1944, is not about fighting battles with weapons but fighting the daily battle of morale for those whose lives are indirectly affected. Similarly, The Best Years of Our Lives is about the return to civilian life of three soldiers from different economic backgrounds and the difficult adjustments they must make. Yet the basis of the story is the combat stress they experienced and the impact it had on them mentally and physically. Coming Home (1978), set largely outside of combat, is nevertheless a movie about the Vietnam War. War can also be presented as a metaphor (War of the Buttons, 1994, in which children's playtime quarrels escalate) or as a computerized challenge (War Games, 1983).

To define the war film, it is thus necessary to establish parameters, the first of which is to separate fact (documentaries and newsreels) from fiction (created stories, even if based in fact), and to determine how much fighting must appear on screen to constitute designating a movie a war film. Some movies have war as a significant background but do not depict any combat. Some have combat sequences as an episode in the larger story, like Gone with the Wind, which begins in the peaceful Old South, moves forward into and through the Civil War, and goes on to the Reconstruction period and postwar problems. For this reason, Gone with the Wind, a major film about the Civil War, is seldom labeled simply as a war film.

The war film as a genre is best defined as a movie in which a fictionalized or fact-based story is told about an actual historical war. Fighting that war, planning it, and undergoing combat within it should fill the major portion of the running time. This would include biographies of combatants, such as the World War II hero Audie Murphy (1924–1971) (To Hell and Back, 1955), and movies set inside combat but which remove their characters from the conflict through visualized flashbacks (Beach Red, 1967). This definition eliminates the home setting, the war as background or single episode movie, the military camp film, the training camp movie, and the biography that does not contain actual combat.

The purpose of the war film made by commercial enterprises is primarily to entertain. A film made during the war itself, such as the 1943 Guadalcanal Diary, has additional goals: to lift morale, to help civilians understand what their fighting men are going through, to provide information, and to involve the audience in positive support for the war that might perhaps influence an outcome still in doubt. A war movie made after the strife has ended needs to find other purposes, and unlike movies made during the fighting, needs to justify its morality.

After the combat genre was established, movies appeared with comic tones that would have been inappropriate during the war itself. What Did You Do in the War, Daddy? (1966) and Operation Petticoat (1959) were successful comedies set in World War II, the first in the Italian campaign and the second in a submarine in the South Pacific. M*A*S*H (1970) was a harsh comedy about Korea, set in a mobile surgical hospital unit; the television sitcom McHale's Navy treated the PT-boat war in the Pacific as a lark; and Hogan's Heroes, also a television series, made fun of life in a prisoner-of-war camp in Germany.

HISTORY:

As soon as cameras could take moving pictures of combat, war became a popular subject for narrative movies. Although no one can be certain of the exact "first" war movie, many historians feel it is probably a one-and-a-half-minute pro-war film, Tearing Down the Spanish Flag, made on a set in New York City immediately after the United States declared war on Spain in April 1898. The precedent was set. All the wars in American history have had stories told about them by Hollywood, although some wars are more popular than others. A relatively small number are based on the Revolutionary War, among them The Patriot (2000), staring Mel Gibson, and Revolution (1985), starring Al Pacino. The Civil War was a popular topic in silent film days, but because "the enemy is us," it has become a war used to tell stories about family conflicts ("brother against brother"), racial issues, or romances. Successful Civil War movies include The Birth of a Nation (1915), Gone with the Wind, The Red Badge of Courage (1951), The Horse Soldiers (1959), and Glory (1989).

World War I inspired such successful films as The Big Parade (1925), What Price Glory (made in 1926 and remade in 1952), Lilac Time (1928), Wings, Hell's Angels, All Quiet on the Western Front, The Fighting 69th, Dawn Patrol (made in both 1930 and 1938), and Sergeant York. Although the World War I movie tended to be less popular after World War II, there are such later films as Lafayette Escadrille (1958), Paths of Glory (1957) and The Blue Max (1966). World War II has been the most frequently depicted conflict in American cinema and is discussed in more depth below.

EARLIEST WAR FILMS:

The first war film to be documented was a one-reel, 90-second propagandist effort - the Vitagraph Company's fictitious Tearing Down the Spanish Flag (1898), produced in the year of the Spanish-American War. It portrayed a faked, reconstructed version of the seizure of a Spanish government installation in Havana by U.S. Army troops, the removal of the foreign flag, and its replacement by the Stars and Stripes.

One of the first to show the necessity for preparedness during the Great War's European conflict, thereby demonstrating the propagandistic power of the new medium, was Vitagraph's silent film drama The Battle Cry of Peace (1915) with Norma Talmadge. It proposed the idea of what would happen if America was invaded on its own soil by a hostile European power and taken over, with an invasion of New York City. In 1918 in particular, many films documented the momentous sinking of the Lusitania in May of 1915 by a German U-boat and argued for US entrance into the war, such as Vitagraph's Over the Top (1918) (with its hero James Owen joining the British army after the Lusitania's sinking) and Winsor McKay's short animated film The Sinking of the Lusitania (1918).

The Birth of a Nation – 1915 Early filmmakers steered away from making war pictures because of their enormous cost for extras - uniformed and equipped in massive battle sequences. Hollywood producers did not recognize the box-office potential of propagandist war and anti-war films until the success of D. W. Griffith's influential Civil War epic adapted from Thomas Dixon's The Clansman,  The Birth Of A Nation (1915), focusing on the effects of the war on two families - the Southern Camerons and the Northern Stonemans. The film included semi-documentary, panoramic battle scenes and other historical events during the Civil War era.

A few major films argued for pacifism, such as producer Thomas Ince's preachy epic film Civilization (1916), in which the character of Christ himself toured the Emperor through the devastating results of war and preached a message of Love (not War). D. W. Griffith's 4-strand epic  Intolerance (1916) was deliberately designed to show man's inhumanity to man and the horrors of war so that audiences would reject war. The film ended with divine intervention interrupting the conflict. One of the most popular hit songs of 1915 reflected the pacifistic mood: "I Didn't Raise My Boy to Be A Soldier," and President Wilson narrowly won a second term on a campaign promise to keep the US out of the European conflict.

WORLD WAR I (THE GREAT WAR) ERA FILMS:

However, the pacifist mood began to change and the eventual US entry into the war in April of 1917 provided Hollywood with one of its greatest sources of plots - and profits. This was evidenced by the new hit song of the time, George M. Cohan's Over There (1917): "Johnny get your gun, get your gun, get your gun, Johnny, show the "Hun" you're a son-of-a-gun, Hoist the flag and let her fly, Yankee Doodle do or die." The propagandistic films served mostly as recruitment tools, and as emotional tirades against the enemy, distastefully suggesting that heroic American involvement would bring about victory, and serve as a crusade to 'make the world safe for democracy'. Americans were persuaded to buy 'liberty' war bonds, often by movie stars, to help finance the war.

Hollywood director D. W. Griffith's Hearts of the World (1918) was a sentimental, propagandistic film to encourage US entry into the European conflict of the first world war - it included actual battle footage filmed on location in 1917 on the outskirts of the war itself (with the cooperation of the British War Office and the French Government). Griffith's film expressed the effects of the war on a recruit, and displayed the viciousness of the Germans in the person of actor/director Erich von Stroheim, who played the part of a ruthless, cold-blooded, hateful officer - a "beastly Hun." The semi-documentary My Four Years in Germany (1918), the first real hit for Warner Bros' Studios, was presented as fact - it presumed to show the first-hand experiences of James Gerard, the American ambassador to Germany from 1913-1917, including his witnessing of innumerable and cruel German "atrocities" that were greatly exaggerated in re-enactments, although they appeared true when mixed with actual footage.

After the Armistice ending World War I in 1918, war films ceased for the most part. European film-making centers were in ruins, giving Hollywood the boost it needed. Hollywood was now responsible for 80% of US film production and New York controlled world film distribution. The anti-war film that made Rudolf Valentino a star was Rex Ingram's very successful The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse (1921) - it used WWI as a backdrop for its story of illicit love. Appearing around the same era to express the freedoms of American democracy was Griffith's epic America (1924), a melodramatic account of the American Revolution with innumerable set-pieces (the ride of Paul Revere, Wintering at Valley Forge, etc.).

A REVIVAL OF WAR FILMS IN THE MID-1920S:

The Big Parade - 1925War films were revived in the mid-1920s during peace-time. MGM's and King Vidor's The Big Parade (1925) was a new kind of war film, and the first to realistically portray the horrors of battle and the struggle for survival by three soldier-comrades (a bartender, a riveter, and a millionaire's son) in the trenches. It also told of a love affair between an American doughboy (John Gilbert) and a French peasant girl (Renee Adoree). The film was a spectacular success, and made more money than any other MGM film production up to its time. MGM wished to repeat the film's success with Tell It To the Marines (1926), with Lon Chaney as tough Marine sergeant, O'Hara (Chaney's own favorite role, a 'straight' one without makeup). Next to Garbo's Flesh and the Devil (1926), it was MGM's second most profitable film of the year.

Director Raoul Walsh's pacifistic What Price Glory? (1926), Fox's answer to Vidor's film, was very different -- it told of two Marines - Captain Flagg and Sgt. Quirt (Victor McLaglen and Edmund Lowe), who were fighting in WWI in France against the enemy in authentic-looking trench warfare. It also showed the two comrades as rivals among themselves vying for the affection of a French village girl named Charmaine (Dolores Del Rio) - in many semi-comic scenes, they would obviously be swearing and using profanities toward each other (decipherable if one could read lips), but the title cards reflected more dignified talk: ("Thank you, Captain Flagg! Personally, I'd as soon find a skunk in my sleeping bag.") [John Ford remade the film in 1952 with James Cagney and Dan Dailey.]

Wings – 1927 Soon after, director William Wellman's (and Paramount's) silent and early anti-war film Wings (1927) appeared, the greatest of the early aviation epics with spectacular dog-fight combat sequences, and a spectacular reconstruction of the Battle of St. Mihiel. It was the first film (and only silent film) to be awarded Best Picture. It was the first film to introduce sound effects on a separate strip of film, and with dogfight scenes shot in the air (and not in the studio). Starring both "It" girl Clara Bow and Gary Cooper (in an early role), it told the twisting romantic story of two aviators (Charles "Buddy" Rogers and Richard Arlen) both in love with the same girl - Sylvia (Jobyna Ralston). Both the first and third Best Picture winners were war films!

WAR FILMS AT THE START OF THE TALKIES:

Hell's Angels - 1930War films were suddenly big business again, after the success of war genre films in the mid-20s caused a revival, such as The Patent Leather Kid (1927) (with Best Actor-nominated Richard Barthelmess) and the early talkie She Goes to War (1929) with Eleanor Boardman. The start of the talkie era meant that war films would now be supplemented with the realistic sounds of war - aerial dogfights, explosions, gunfire, etc. Millionaire director/producer Howard Hughes' expensive Hell's Angels (1930) featured more impressive WWI aerial battle sequences - and the debut of platinum blonde sex symbol Jean Harlow (speaking the famous saucy line: "Would you be shocked if I put on something more comfortable?") in love with two English brothers who were British Royal Flying Corps pilots (Ben Lyon and James Hall).

PRE-WWII WAR FILMS:

La Grand Illusion - 1937For most of the decade of the 1930s, war films went into decline due to increasing US isolationism, and Hollywood made fewer and fewer of them. Then, in the late 1930s, French filmmaker Jean Renoir attempted to signal a warning about warfare's 'grand illusions' with the classic anti-war film La Grande Illusion (1937, Fr.), set in a WWI German prison camp in 1916 where an aristocratic French officer faced a dilemma regarding his escape with other POWs. Likewise, Renoir's comedy/farce The Rules of the Game (1939) was an indictment of decadent, morally-bankrupt, self-indulgent French upper-class aristocrats.

When the war in Europe commenced in 1939, British film directors tried to alert Americans about the looming German and Italian Fascist threat. Alfred Hitchcock's political/war-time thriller Foreign Correspondent (1940), his second American film, concluded with a plea to the American public to enter the war ("It's as if the lights were all out everywhere, except in America. Keep those lights burning there! Cover them with steel! Ring them with guns! Build a canopy of battleships and bombing planes around them! Hello, America! Hang on to your lights. They're the only lights left in the world..")

The Great Dictator - 1940Charlie Chaplin lampooned Adolf Hitler (in the role of Adenoid Hynkel) and The Third Reich in The Great Dictator (1940), the director/actor's first all-talking picture - it was Chaplin's last film with the Little Tramp character. Hitler banned German audiences from viewing the picture due to its offensive characterization and even some American audiences believed that Chaplin had become self-indulgent. In the late 30s and early 40s, Hollywood began to increase its own number of war-related films, such as director Anatole Litvak's bold Confessions of a Nazi Spy (1939) with Edward G. Robinson and Paul Lukas, about a Nazi espionage/spy ring operating in the US. The beautiful romantic tragedy and tearjerker Waterloo Bridge (1940) told the tale of a ballerina (Vivien Leigh) whose love affair with a British officer (Robert Taylor) was shattered by the events of World War II. For Whom the Bell Tolls (1943), based on the novel by Ernest Hemingway, told the story of Robert Jordan (Gary Cooper), an American demolition expert who gave his abilities to the Anti-Fascist freedom fighters of Spain in the 1930s.

WORLD WAR II FILMS:

Samuel Fuller is a key figure in the history of the American war film because his movies are shaped by his own experience in combat. Fuller became a crime reporter by the age of seventeen and moved to Hollywood to begin writing screenplays in 1936. He joined the army after World War II broke out, serving in the Sixteenth Regiment of the First Army Division ("the Big Red One"), receiving the Bronze Star, the Silver Star, and the Purple Heart. Fuller fought the full European war, from the African campaigns on through Sicily and Anzio to, ultimately, landing at Omaha Beach on D-Day. His combat experience became the seminal event of his life. No matter what settings his films take, they are all in some way about war. In Jean-Luc Godard's Pierrot le fou (1965), Fuller, appearing as himself, states his credo: "Film is like a battleground: love, hate, action, violence, death." Although other directors, such as Oliver Stone, have been in combat, it is fair to say that no other movie director served as long in the trenches as Fuller.

Fuller's war movies cover World War II (Merrill's Marauders, 1962; the autobiographical The Big Red One, 1980), the Korean conflict (The Steel Helmet, 1951; Fixed Bayonets, 1951), the Cold War (Pickup on South Street, 1953; Hell and High Water, 1954), and an early presentation of the problems in Vietnam, concerning the French colonials versus the Viet-Minh rebels (China Gate, 1957). He also made Verboten (1959, set in postwar Germany); House of Bamboo (1955), about a gang of ex-Army men who organize their criminality along military lines; and a story of the native American "wars," Run of the Arrow (1957). Only Merrill's Marauders (1962) is based on a true story, that of Brigadier General Frank D. Merrill, who commanded the first American infantrymen to fight in Asia, the 5437th Composite Group, who were trained as guerrillas to fight deep behind Japanese lines in Burma.

Fuller's war movies are presented in a distinctive visual style that may be described as combative, to the extent that they break cinematic rules. He shifts from rapid montages to lengthy camera movements, from closeups to long shots, from real locations to rear projections, and from objective to subjective points-of-view without first clearly establishing the original position. Perhaps the definitive statement regarding war movies was made by Fuller: "The only way you could … really let the audience feel what it's like is to fire live ammo over the heads of the people in the audience."

POST WORLD WAR II FILMS:

Stories of the Korean War include The Steel Helmet (1951), Fixed Bayonets! (1951), The Bridges at Toko-Ri (1955), and M*A*S*H. Vietnam movies, apart from The Green Berets, were seldom made during the war itself. Early examples include The Boys in Company C (1978), Go Tell the Spartans (1978), and two highly respected and influential films, The Deer Hunter (1978) and Apocalypse Now (1979). Other Vietnam films are

Platoon, Full Metal Jacket (1987), and We Were Soldiers (2002). War movies have been set in Grenada (Heartbreak Ridge, 1986), the Persian Gulf (Three Kings; Jarhead, 2005), and Nigeria (Tears of the Sun, 2003). A new war, the war of terrorism, has emerged in noncombat movies such as the Die Hard series with Bruce Willis (1988, 1990, and 1995), in which terrorist groups threaten various American settings. The terrorist movie first appeared in the 1970s with the French-Italian film, Nada (1974), in which left-wing terrorists kidnap the American ambassador to France, and Rosebud (1975), a story about Arab terrorists kidnapping a yacht to hold five wealthy young women as political hostages.

The popularity of the war movie has not diminished since the turn of the twenty-first century. In 2000 a World War II submarine movie was released (U-571), and a Vietnam-era training camp movie, Tigerland, earned critical respect. The year 2001 brought Enemy at the Gates, about war-torn Stalingrad in 1942, Captain Corelli's Mandolin, set on a Greek island in World War I, and a successful television miniseries based on fact, Band of Brothers. Two movies about combat were huge boxoffice hits in 2001: Pearl Harbor, which once again recreated the events of 7 December 1941, and Black Hawk Down, based on the true story of the US Army Rangers and Delta Force soldiers sent to Somalia in 1993 to capture a local warlord's top lieutenants.