War Film

War film

Films of the war film genre deal primarily with actual warfare, usually featuring sea, air, or land battles and their combatants, or on daily military or civilian life in the midst of battle or the threat of battle. Their stories may be fiction, historical re-enactment, docudrama or documentary in nature.

World War I
Films made in the years following World War I tended to emphasise the horror or futility of modern warfare, as in All Quiet on the Western Front (1930) and La Grande Illusion (1937); or concentrated on the drama of the new form of aerial combat in films like Wings (1927), Hell's Angels (1930), and The Dawn Patrol (1930 and 1938 versions).


World War II
During this period, these films really came into their own. Many of the dramatic war films in the early 1940s in the United States were designed to create consensus at the expense of "the enemy". In fact, one of the conventions of the genre that developed during the period was that of a cross-section of the American people which comes together as a crack unit for the good of the country.

British films tended to follow a similar pattern, depicting ordinary people joining forces for the good of the war effort. In Which We Serve (1942), Millions Like Us (1943), The Way Ahead (1944) and The Way to the Stars (1945) are among the most celebrated British films of the war years. The British industry continued to produce war dramas throughout the 1950s and 1960s. Many of these were based on true stories, like The Dam Busters (1954), Dunkirk (1958), Reach for the Sky (1956) and Sink the Bismarck! (1960). Films based on real life commando missions like The Gift Horse (1952) and Ill Met by Moonlight (1956) would inspire a series of fictional adventure films popular in the 1960s, such as The Guns of Navarone (1961), The Dirty Dozen (1967) and Where Eagles Dare (1968).

Hollywood films in the 1950s and 1960s were often inclined towards spectacular heroics or self-sacrifice in films like Sands of Iwo Jima (1949), Halls of Montezuma (1950) or D-Day the Sixth of June (1956). They also tended to have a number of cliches associated with them: often a small group of men would tend to be fairly diverse ethnically, but most of the characters would not be developed much beyond their ethnicity; the senior officer would often be unreasonable and unyielding; almost anyone sharing personal information--especially plans for after returning home--would die shortly thereafter; and anyone acting in a cowardly or unpatriotic manner would convert to heroism or die (or both, in quick succession).

A popular sub-genre of war films in the 1950s and '60s was the prisoner of war film. This was a form popularised in Britain, and usually recounted stories of real-life escapes from (usually German) P.O.W. camps in World War II. Examples include The Wooden Horse (1950), Albert R.N. (1953) and The Colditz Story (1955). Hollywood also made its own contribution to the genre with The Great Escape (1963) and the fictional Stalag 17 (1953). Other fictional P.O.W. films include The Captive Heart (1947), Danger Within (1958) and The Mackenzie Break (1970). Unusually, the latter is about German prisoners attempting to escape from a British camp. A more recent example is Hart's War from 2002.

The late 1950s and 1960s brought some more thoughtful big-scale war films like David Lean's Bridge on the River Kwai (1957) and Lawrence of Arabia (1962), as well as a fashion for all-star epics based on real battles, and often quasi-documentary in style. This trend was started by Darryl F. Zanuck's production The Longest Day in 1962, based on the first day of the 1944 D-Day landings. Other examples included Battle of the Bulge (1965), Battle of Britain (1969), Waterloo (1970), Tora! Tora! Tora! (1970) (based on the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor), Midway (1976) and A Bridge Too Far (1977). A more recent example is the American Civil War film Gettysburg, which was based on actual events during the battle, including the defense of Little Round Top by Colonel Joshua Chamberlain.

Other Modern Genres
War films produced during and just after the Vietnam War era tended to reflect the disillusionment of the American public towards the war. Most films made after the Vietnam War delved more deeply into the horrors of war than movies made before it. (This is not to say that there were no such films before the Vietnam War; Paths of Glory is a notable critique of war from 1957, the very beginning of the Vietnam War.) The last film of what can be called the pre-Vietnam style is The Green Berets. Examples of post-Vietnam style films include Apocalypse Now, Platoon and Full Metal Jacket, which deal with Vietnam itself, and Catch-22 and M*A*S*H, which do not.

Many war films have been produced with the cooperation of a nation's military forces. The United States Navy has been very cooperative since World War II in providing ships and technical guidance with Top Gun being a famous example. Sometimes the military demands some editorial control in exchange for their cooperation, which can bias the final result. Another downside, if filmed during a war: the German Ministry of Propaganda, in making the epic war film Kolberg in January 1945, used several divisions of soldiers as extras. Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels believed the impact of the film would offset the tactical disadvantages of the missing soldiers.

If they do not cooperate, then another country's military may assist. Many 1950s and 1960s war movies, and the Oscar-winning film Patton were shot in Spain, which had large supplies of both Allied and Axis equipment. The Napoleonic epic Waterloo was shot in Ukraine, using Soviet soldiers (and incidentally, helped scholars learn why Napoleon preferred the tactics of attacking in column). Saving Private Ryan was shot with the cooperation of the Irish army.

Other War Film Genres
Trojan War
• Helen of Troy (1956)
• Troy (2004)

Greco-Persian Wars
• The 300 Spartans (1962)

Crusades
• Kingdom of Heaven (2005)

Wars of Scottish Independence
• Braveheart (1995)

French and Indian War
• The Last of the Mohicans (1920) & (1936) & (1992)

American Revolutionary War
• The Battle of Bunker Hill (1911)
• Drums Along the Mohawk (1939)
• The Patriot (2000)
• Revolution (1985)
• Valley Forge (1975) made for TV
• Johnny Tremain 1957

Napoleonic Wars
• Captain Horatio Hornblower (1951)
• Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World (2003)
• Napoléon (1927)
• War and Peace (1956 and 1967)
• Waterloo (1970)

Crimean War
• The Charge of the Light Brigade (1936 and 1968)

Texas War of Independence
• The Alamo (1936)
• The Alamo (1960)
• The Alamo (2004)
• The Alamo: Thirteen Days to Glory (1987)

American Civil War
• Andersonville (1996) made for TV
• Battle of Gettysburg (1913)
• Battle of Gettysburg (1956)
• Birth of a Nation (1915), first epic film
• Cold Mountain (2003)

Indian Wars
• Buffalo Soldiers (1997) (TV)
• The Court-Martial of George Armstrong Custer (1977) (TV)
• Crazy Horse (1996)
• Custer of the West (1967)

Spanish-American War
• Tearing Down the Spanish Flag - first war movie ever made, in 1898.

Anglo-Zulu War
• Shaka Zulu (1986) (TV)
• Zulu (1964)
• Zulu Dawn (1979)

Anglo-Boer War
• Ohm Kruger (1942)
• Breaker Morant (1980)

World War I
• The African Queen (1951)
• All Quiet on the Western Front (1930)
• The Blue Max (1966)
• Lawrence of Arabia (1962)

Spanish Civil War
• For Whom the Bell Tolls (1943)
• Land and Freedom (1995)