1930 – Lewis Milestone – At the start of World War I, a German professor makes a zealous plea on behalf of the fatherland, and ten of his students enlist. The film follows them through their initial training into battle and charts how the brutality of the war first disillusions, then kills them all. Director Lewis Milestone offsets scenes of battle with those showing conversations a…
1979 – Francis Ford Coppola – Apocalypse Now is too much of a mythic and surreal journey into the heart of darkness of all war to be the definitive film on the war in Vietnam. However, it does tell a very powerful story. The plot centers on Capt. Willard (Martin Sheen), who has been hand-picked by the upper brass (G.D. Spradlin) to assassinate Col. Walter Kurtz (Marlon Brando), a co…
1963 – Guy Hamilton – The publicity bragged about rounding up over a hundred vintage aircraft for the film, and the aerial sequences are very impressive. The problem seems to be that the producers forgot to round up some personalities for the characters. The film depicts one of the key moments of the war for England, their greatly outnumbered aerial defense against the Luftwaffe in …
1959 – David Lean – During a television special on the American Film Institute's selection of the 100 Best Movies, Steven Spielberg commented on David Lean's prison camp masterpiece. Spielberg marveled at the plot construction and development—how the film simultaneously propels a number of parallel stories and masterfully brings them all to a thrilling climax. M…
1977 – Richard Attenborough – A bit too big, in some ways A Bridge Too Far is a magnificent war movie about the defeat of the Allied forces at Arnheim in World War II. The troops attempt a daring invasion of the German factories in the Ruhr to inhibit Germany's ability to produce armaments. The problems with the film are those that can easily weaken historical or wartime epic…
1954 – Mark Robson – This film does not falsify any aspect of its simple story. Harry Brubaker (William Holden), a navy pilot during the Korean War, has to ditch his plane in icy waters but is rescued by a helicopter crew (Mickey Rooney, Earl Holliman). Later, Brubaker gets a short furlough with his wife (Grace Kelly) and daughters during which he explains his imminent mission of ta…
1981 – Wolfgang Petersen – The ultimate claustrophobic epic, Das Boot recounts the experiences of a German submarine crew during World War II. It is based on a book by Lothar-Gunther Buchheim, a journalist who wrote about his experiences on a real U-Boat and who serves as the prototype for the character Werner (Herbert Gronemeyer) in the film. Director Wolfgang Petersen wrote two sc…
1978 – Michael Cimino – Few who have seen this film talk about it indifferently. To some, the sprawling story of three men from a steel mill town in Pennsylvania who enlist for service in Vietnam cries out for some cuts and the shaping hand of a good editor; to others, the intensity of the Vietnam scenes is so unsettling as to rob the film of any entertainment value. Even the film&#…
1981 – Peter Weir – This Australian film about the World War I massacre of Australian troops at Gallipoli in Turkey makes a telling point about the futility and butchery of war. The film begins with a training session for Archy (Mark Lee), a gifted runner who plans to compete in an upcoming event. After narrowly defeating Frank Dunne (Mel Gibson) at this contest, Archy becomes frien…
1993 – Ronald F. Maxwell – Depicting the battle that involved 150,000 soldiers on both sides and left a third of them dead or wounded, Gettysburg is one of the finest epic war films. The pivotal 1863 battle of the American Civil War is wonderfully documented and dramatically presented in true-to-life scenes that range from one-on-one conversational exchanges to panoramic scenes of u…
1989 – Edward Zwick – Inspiring stories usually prove to be easier to find than to commit to film with critical and commercial success. While Glory starts out a little slow, the drama and human interactions that take place once a company of black soldiers comes together eventually prove compelling. Based on the 54th Massachusetts, the first black volunteer infantry regiment in the C…
1963 – John Sturges – The Germans have put all the rotten POW eggs in the basket of one camp, but unknowingly they have also assembled a team of artists with every necessary skill to engineer an ingenious mass escape. Director John Sturges and some of the cast from The Magnificent Seven (Steve McQueen, James Coburn, Charles Bronson) reteamed to make this film based on a real World W…
1961 – J. Lee Thompson – This first in the line of sabotage-suspense war movies rather than battle pictures takes place in the Mediterranean Sea in the later years of World War II. Captain Mallory (Gregory Peck) believes that he is going on leave until he is pressed into leading a group of soldiers and guerillas to sabotage a German artillery base on the island fortress of Navarone.…
1944 – Laurence Olivier – Shakespeare begins his play with a chorus lamenting that the “wooden O” of the stage cannot hold the “vasty fields of France,” and Olivier starts his film with an extended sequence set on May 1, 1600, at the Globe theater as we watch the opening of this play in the way its original audience might have. They eagerly involve themse…
1989 – Kenneth Branagh – Kenneth Branagh's version of Shakespeare's history play, previously filmed by Laurence Olivier, emphasizes ambiguity, complexity, and realism. It suggests that the best way to remake a classic film is to start with an equally strong but different concept and follow it imaginatively. To Branagh, Shakespeare's play is a “political d…
1987 – Simon Wincer – When most people think of soldiers and horses, they think of the cavalry. But in spite of its title The Lighthorsemen is not about the cavalry. It is about the Australian Mounted Infantry and their fighting in Palestine during World War I against the Germans and Turks. Particularly, it is about one Lighthorseman, Dave Mitchell (Peter Phelps), and his inability …
1962 – Ken Annakin, Andrew Marton, Gerd Oswald, Bernhard Wicki – The Longest Day is one of the last war epics to be filmed in black and white. It covers the D-Day invasion of Normandy of June 6, 1944, in a sporadic, almost documentary way. As the movie begins, both the German and Allied forces are watching the weather. The Germans are content with the rain since the Allies have neve…
1957 – Stanley Kubrick – Some anti-wars films, like All Quiet on the Western Front, are defined by a mood of futility, some, like Dr. Strangelove, by one of absurdity. This one, directed and co-written by Stanley Kubrick, runs on anger. The rage is directed at the inhumanity of the people behind the war, especially two generals, who are portrayed by two great actors. Not since he pl…
1986 – Oliver Stone – Directed by Vietnam veteran Oliver Stone, Platoon uses the intensity of the Vietnam War to present a modern morality play about the battle for the soul of a young enlistee, Chris Taylor (Charlie Sheen, in the performance of his career). As Chris and his platoon arrive near the Cambodian border in 1967, they leave the womb-like mouth of the transport plane and a…
1998 – Steven Spielberg – Much has been made of the opening 25 minutes, as Steven Spielberg, cinematographer Janusz Kaminski, sound designer Gary Rydstrom, editor Michael Kahn, special effects supervisor Neil Carbould and stunt coordinator Simon Crane recreate the horrific D-Day assault on Omaha Beach, utilizing the Irish coastline of County Wexford and 850 extras from the Irish Arm…
1970 – Richard Fleischer, Kinji Fukasaku, Toshio Masuda – Sometimes history-based films are faulted for using fictional characters as composites for real-life people or for conflating separate events for the purposes of coherence or dramatic effect. Tora! Tora! Tora! avoids any such fictionalizing of its historical materials, but the resulting film shows that dramatic license is not…
1963 – Carl Foreman – The only film directed by writer-producer Carl Foreman, The Victors follows the adventures and loves of a group of American foot soldiers who travel from town to town in Europe near the end of World War II. Foreman, who had written such classics as High Noon, The Bridge on the River Kwai, and The Guns of Navarone, intended this as his greatest screen achievemen…
Other wartime epics have turned up on both the big and the small screen. On television, the source is often sprawling novels. Herman Wouk's The Winds of War, which follows the Henry family through the events leading to World War II, mixes historical characters in cameo-type appearances with fictional ones, and it requires the reader to accept that this one family knew quite a few luminaries…