The British war film can trace its roots straight back to Shakespeare. One of the most famous and most honored is Sir Laurence Olivier's version of Henry V, which was made, miraculously, while German bombs were falling on the country. That courageous, ambitious spirit is at the heart of the best of the English efforts. (Since this category is limited to civil and colonial wars, the fine pro…
1939 William A. Wellman Novelist Percival Christopher Wren (1885–1941) is one of the founders of the war-as-grand-adventure school of fiction. Though director William Wellman has worked with more serious war themes in his career, he does a fine job of bringing Wren's juvenile heroics to the screen. In this case, he has a top-notch ensemble cast to work with. Together, they create on…
1995 Mel Gibson Big-budget American movies are driven by star power, and this overachieving sword-and-kilt epic has so much celestial wattage that its many lapses and cliches are almost covered up. But despite all the awards and honors, Braveheart is still a cold-climate gladiator flick—an expensive and ambitious gladiator flick, to be sure—that is built on a stereotyped structure a…
1980 Bruce Beresford Few plays make the transition from stage to screen as fluidly as Kenneth Ross's courtroom drama. Though its subject is an incident in England's Boer War in South Africa, the film is really about war as it has evolved in the 20th century, where the lines between combatant and non-combatant have become so blurred as to be meaningless. They're meaningless to…
1936 Michael Curtiz Hollywood has seldom taken more liberties with history than it does with this depiction of the most famous battle of the Crimean War. Since it's based on Alfred Lord Tennyson's patriotic poem, that artistic license is to be expected. But who could have guessed that the writers would set virtually all of the action in India? That's probably a smart move. Mo…
1968 Tony Richardson Tony Richardson's version of the key events at the battle of Balaklava is very much an answer to the 1936 film. Where director Michael Curtiz and writers Michael Jacoby and Rowland Leigh find high adventure, Richardson and writer Charles Wood see incompetence, petty jealousy, and lies. Though they stick much closer to historical fact (and historical supposition), the &…
1939 Zoltan Korda Younger moviegoers tend to think of anything that's more than a few years ago as somehow dated and slow, not really on a par with today's entertainment. They're wrong. They've simply become accustomed to cookie-cutter vehicles for overpaid stars in replaceable plots. A glance at something as maniacally original as this adventure ought to change their …
1939 George Stevens George Stevens's adaptation of a short Rudyard Kipling poem is one of Hollywood's great comic adventures. It's a completely frivolous work, so lacking in substance that its inherent paternalistic racism is rendered mostly harmless. In these more sensitive times, some will take offense at the very idea of white actors in “brown-face” playing I…
1944 Laurence Olivier Shakespeare's are the most challenging and tempting plays for a filmmaker to adapt to the screen. They're filled with action—often confusing action—and far too much dialogue—dialogue often used to describe events and actions that film can show directly. How does the director streamline the weighty works so that the public will be attracted …
1989 Kenneth Branagh Kenneth Branagh boldly challenges Lord Laurence Olivier's screen interpretation of Shakespeare's great History. If his version of the play isn't as technically innovative, it is tighter. It takes different risks and—for my money—it's even more moving. Branagh cuts to the core of the story and finds a coming-of-age tale about a young m…
1935 Henry Hathaway Though it was hailed by some as the greatest war film ever made, this rousing adventure really doesn't attempt to be a realistic account of British colonial rule in India, and should not be judged as such. The movie's real importance—beyond its undiminished entertainment value—lies in its evocation of the exotic. If a National Geographic magazine fr…
1995 Michael Caton-Jones Michael Caton-Jones's Scottish period piece will probably always be known as the other Men in Kilts movie of 1995. That may be unfair, but it does bear many similarities to Mel Gibson's oversized Braveheart, telling essentially the same story of provincial resentment of overbearing English landlords. Director Caton-Jones and writer Alan Sharp pare Sir Walter…
1964 Cy Endfield Seen as an accurate depiction of a real historical event, this is one of the finest war films ever made. Though serious historians and military buffs will find fault on a few details, the film deals with such dramatic material that the conventional fictional excesses are unnecessary. It opens on January 23, 1879, at the aftermath of a massacre. Several thousand Zulu warriors have…