“Waiting! Order! Mud! Blood! Stinking stiffs! What the hell do we get out of this war anyway! Cheers when we left and when we get back! But who the hell cares … after this?” Jim Apperson (John Gilbert) The Big Parade (1925) The movies as we know them—the system of studios and stars—were born in the aftermath of the Great War. The first depictions of it on screen …
1930 Lewis Milestone “This story is neither an accusation nor a confession and least of all an adventure, for death is not an adventure to those who stand face to face with it. It will try simply to tell of a generation of men who, even though they may have escaped its shells, were destroyed by the war.” That's the preface to the first great war film, which is also the first g…
1925 King Vidor King Vidor's epic silent film would have a better reputation today if its major themes hadn't been stated so much more forcefully and memorably five years later in All Quiet on the Western Front. As it is, this one is still a landmark of the silent era, but some of its conventions are dated, and Vidor lets sentimentality soften the horror of his subject. When novelist…
1966 John Guillermin John Guillermin collects all of the conventions of the early 1930s flying adventures and adds an unmistakable mid-1960s spin to create an enjoyable but understandably uneven entertainment. Many parts of the film work beautifully. In fact, the flying scenes are among the best ever put on screen. But whenever sex-starlet Ursula Andress shows up, the illusion of 1918 reality evap…
1938 Edmund Goulding It's a cliche in the restaurant business that the key to success is three things: location, location, location. In this remake of a 1930 film, the key is casting, casting, casting. Three actors in their youthful prime make Dawn Patrol a thoroughly enjoyable, if undemanding, aerial adventure. The setting is France, 1915, where the Royal Flying Corps stages daily flights …
1940 William Keighley Rule number one of reviewing states that films should be judged by how well they do what they set out to do. This early piece of pre-war propaganda means to prepare 1940 audiences for an imminent war by lionizing a World War I regiment. It does just that without shame or subtlety, so to criticize the film as a false representation of that terrible war misses the point. It beg…
1921 Rex Ingram This landmark silent film will always be known first as Rudolph Valentino's breakthrough, and his star power remains undiminished. At the same time, though, his high-octane sex appeal is put in service to a fairly serious story of war and self sacrifice. Actually, June Mathis's script (based on Vicente Blasco Ibanez's novel) is a yeasty combination of soap oper…
1981 Peter Weir Before Platoon, before Saving Private Ryan, Peter Weir established the key themes and tone of the contemporary war film with Gallipoli. His approach is unflinchingly anti-war. In the end, he says, appeals to duty and glory are empty; destruction, waste, and futility are real. That understanding comes at a hard cost. The entire story takes place between May and July, 1915. It begin…
La Grande Illusion 1937 Jean Renoir Jean Renoir, son of Impressionist master Auguste Renoir, was virtually a self-taught filmmaker. He was also a veteran of World War I who began the service in the cavalry but left after he was kicked by a horse and hospitalized. After that, he enlisted in the infantry, where he took a bullet in the thigh and nearly lost the leg to gangrene. Finally he served as …
1964 Nathan Kroll Nathan Kroll's adaptation of Barbara Tuchman's best-selling history is an adequate introduction to World War I, but that's all. It doesn't show the human, individual side of that horrible war. In fairness, it doesn't try to. Instead, the relatively brief running time is devoted to an explanation of the tangled roots of the war and an overview o…
1930 Howard Hughes Millionaire Howard Hughes's directorial debut is a glorious mess. Despite an extended shooting schedule that encompassed monumental technical obstacles, it is still absurdly entertaining. When production began in 1927, the film was intended to be a silent picture. Then sound was introduced and the producers made adjustments, including the replacement of Norwegian female …
1962 David Lean David Lean's epic is one of the few films that legitimately deserves to be called great. It appears on virtually all “ten best” lists and reveals deeper layers of meaning with repeated viewings. It is also a film that was made for the big screen—the bigger the better—and so it loses much of its power on video. (See “Big Screen vs. Small Sc…
1987 Simon Wincer Simon Wincer's companion piece to Peter Wier's Gallipoli may not be as successful and as moving, but it is still an entertaining film marked by some absolutely spectacular riding sequences. Structurally, the two are almost identical. Both are about young Australian troops fighting in World War I and receiving their baptism of fire. Both begin in the Australian coun…
1934 John Ford John Ford's World War I adventure isn't much different from his westerns. In fact, the Arizona desert stands in for Mesopotamia, and these British mounted soldiers wear pith helmets and khaki instead of cavalry blue. Beyond that, the largely invisible Arabs are essentially Sioux in long robes. What is unusual for Ford, though, is the rigorously stripped-down quality o…
1957 Stanley Kubrick Stanley Kubrick's fourth feature is an anti-war masterpiece. It's a brilliant, flawed work that established his reputation as one of the world's pre-eminent filmmakers. Though the script came from an unlikely collaboration of writers—Jim Thompson, master of lurid pulp tales, and “serious” novelist Calder Willingham working from Humphr…
1941 Howard Hawks Hollywood's most honored piece of propaganda—and one of its most popular—is also a thoughtful, even gentle film. It can be faulted for taking a rosy view of World War I, but that's because it was part of a larger effort by the entertainment industry to prepare the country for World War II. The subject is Congressional Medal of Honor–winner Alvi…
1927 William A. Wellman The first aerial combat movie mapped out the territory for all that have followed, but it's far from the best. Like so many other works of the silent era, it's slow, and contemporary audiences will probably think that it's too soft and sentimental for its grim subject. Those flaws not withstanding, some of the flying sequences have an unvarnished reali…