In the aftermath of the attack on Pearl Harbor, Hollywood was quick to turn out movies about the campaign in the Pacific. Like the films about the European war, they reflect the realities of the time. In the first ones, the Americans fight gallantly and manage to hold back the invading Japanese long enough for the counterattack to form. True victories do not come until later. More significantly, t…
1953 Melvin Frank, Norman Panama What is it about Air Force single-mission stories that inspires directors to make films about marriage? That, inexplicably, is the case with Thirty Seconds over Tokyo, about the Doolittle raid, and with Above and Beyond, about the dropping of the first atomic bomb on Hiroshima. In both, the inner workings of the operation are no more important than the hero'…
1943 Howard Hawks Though Howard Hawks's adventure opens with a quote from Lincoln's Gettysburg Address, that's not really the tone of high seriousness he's aiming for. As the title suggests, Air Force is a flying road movie that traces the highly improbable but fact-based adventures of one B-17 flying fortress in the first days of the war. On December 6, 1941, the Mary…
1943 Tay Garnett Today, the most surprising things about this flag-waving propaganda are the brutality of its violence and the straightforward nature of the simple story. Remember that in 1943, the fall of the Philippines following the attack on Pearl Harbor was a vivid, painful memory to American audiences. Bataan is an attempt—a successful attempt—to turn that military defeat into…
1955 Raoul Walsh In the back seat of a convertible parked on a dark street somewhere near Hollywood, From Here to Eternity and Peyton Place were locked in a steamy embrace. Straps unstrapped, buttons unbuttoned, zippers ripped open. Nine months later, Battle Cry hit theaters. Leon Uris's adaptation of his own best-selling novel is, in many ways, the perfect mid-'50s war movie. First…
1944 Edward Ludwig This furious, frivolous propagandistic potboiler has virtually nothing to do with the realities of the war in the Pacific, but it is one of John Wayne's major contributions to the cause. For that, if nothing else, it's worth a look because he turns in the familiar swaggering, bellicose performance that his fans love, and he even dances a brief jitterbug. Wayne pla…
The Sullivans 1942 Lloyd Bacon In many respects, this curious family drama barely qualifies as a war film. Virtually all of the action takes place in suburban Waterloo, Iowa; the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor doesn't occur until the 90-minute mark; scenes of military service and combat are so abbreviated they seem almost an afterthought. Even so, The Fighting Sullivans is still an influe…
Nobi 1959 Kon Ichikawa Kon Ichikawa translates the experience of a Japanese soldier in the last year of World War II into a harrowing horror film. Nothing quite like it exists in American or European cinema, though other stories of defeat deal with the same emotions. This defeat is so devastating, so total and, finally, so intimate that it is difficult to describe. Near the beginning, the main ch…
1951 Nicholas Ray As the story goes, legendary Howard Hughes had the rights to some excellent Technicolor documentary footage of ground and air combat in the Pacific. After he bought controlling interest in the RKO Studio in 1948, he had a script written to build a story around the film he already owned. Flying Leathernecks is the somewhat disappointing result. The main problem is that director N…
1960 Robert Montgomery Robert Montgomery's final feature is a cinematic hagiography. It's obvious from the opening second that he and co-producer James Cagney intend to venerate their subject, Adm. William F. “Bull” Halsey, and that's exactly what they do. Their methods, however, are so unusual as to border on the experimental. This is a war movie without battle…
1943 Lewis Seiler Despite changes in fashion and permissiveness, this adaptation of Richard Tregaskis's non-fiction best-seller retains its historical significance as one of Hollywood's first “realistic” World War II combat films. It is dated however, and its lapses are heightened by the less-sentimental approaches to the subject that have been made in more recent year…
1969 John Boorman John Boorman's minimalist survival tale is recommended for fans of the two stars (who are the entire cast) and no one else. The story is told elliptically, without the background that most moviegoers and videophiles expect to see. From the first frame to the last—literally—viewers have to fill in large blanks. It begins with sunrise over a jungle island. The…
1949 Mark Robson If this curious little drama lived up to its intentions, it might have been an important war film. But it falls far short and is now little more than a footnote in Hollywood's attempts to deal with American racism. Director Mark Robson starts out with two strikes against him. First, Carl Foreman's script is based on Arthur Laurents's curiously contrived stage…
1965 Otto Preminger This long, lumbering naval epic predates the various 1980s television mini-series about World War II. It's the same mixture of soap-opera action away from the battlefields and cheap-looking naval special effects that are no more convincing on the small screen than they were in theaters. Apparently, most of the budget was spent on a first-rate cast of actors who walk thr…
1962 Samuel Fuller The wild, unexpected touches that energize director Sam Fuller's best work are absent in this straightforward war film. By all accounts, he sticks fairly close to the broad outlines of historical fact to tell the story of a particularly grueling and little-known episode of the Pacific Theater. A brief introduction made up of newsreel footage and animated maps sketches in…
1955 John Ford, Mervyn LeRoy, Josh Logan One of the most successful World War II comedy-dramas had a rough road from stage to screen. Writer Frank Nugent and Joshua Logan had adapted Nugent's novel into a hit play with Henry Fonda in the lead, both on Broadway and with the road company. When Warner Bros. decided to turn it into a film, the producers hired John Ford to direct and considered…
1945 Raoul Walsh Though many combat adventures had been made before, director Raoul Walsh set the formula in concrete with this rousing potboiler. It has virtually nothing to do with real guerrilla warfare, and as propaganda, its chest-thumping moments are few. But those moments are memorable (see quotes) and the approach that writers Alvah Bessie, Lester Cole (who were blacklisted a few years la…
1958 Robert Wise Though this underwater action film may not have much to do with the realities of Pacific submarine warfare, it is wonderfully entertaining as a showcase for two of Hollywood's finest stars, one on the ascent, and the other near the end of his career. The special effects are less than perfect—you can actually see the wires towing torpedoes in some shots—but fe…
1949 Allan Dwan “Saddle Up!” With that refrain, John Wayne solidifies the image that made him a star. He's Sgt. John Stryker, the toughest Leatherneck there ever was and, at the same time, fully believable, flawed, and sympathetic. He had played variations on the character in many of the films he made during the war, but here, for the first time, all of the pieces fit togethe…
1943 Mark Sandrich It will be difficult for some contemporary viewers to appreciate the reality that the director and stars are trying to create here. Though the film is meant to be a gritty look at the horrors of the American retreat through the Philippines to Corregidor as seen through the eyes of three Army nurses, it is overly glamorous and glossy by today's standards. Beyond a few car…
1945 John Ford On one level, John Ford's film can be seen as the Navy's answer to Air Force and Bataan. All three films are about the early days of the war in the Pacific, specifically about the humiliating American retreat from the Philippines. Ford, however, takes an approach that's diametrically opposite to the other two. Where they are essentially “unit pictures&#x…
1998 Terrence Malick Due to the timing of its release so close to Saving Private Ryan, Terrence Malick's war film will be compared to Steven Spielberg's, and that's unfair. Malick's is a bad, bloated film in its own right (possibly even more bloated on home video). It's also a curious choice for an individualistic filmmaker using it as a comeback to an industry …
1944 Mervyn LeRoy Of all the reality-inspired films of World War II, this one really cries out for a remake. Given another chance, filmmakers could focus more intently on the bold mission and the men who flew it. They could leave out the tepid romance and I'm-going-to-be-a-father subplot that clutter up the first half. The story of the Doolittle raid is fascinating enough on its own. In Ap…
Suicide Run 1970 Robert Aldrich Robert Aldrich's attempt to recapture the success of The Dirty Dozen is emblematic of the state of the war film in the late 1960s and early '70s. It begins as a standard jungle action picture along the lines of Objective, Burma!, but then changes course midway through to reflect the anti-war sentiments of the Vietnam era. Neither extreme is really con…
1970 Richard Fleischer, Toshio Masuda, Kinji Fukasaku From the early '60s to the mid-'70s, the large-scale historical re-creation of a key World War II engagement was a dominant sub-genre in war films. These are expensive productions with large, star-studded casts designed to appeal to an international audience. Tora! Tora! Tora! is among the most accurate in its depiction of the ev…
1942 John Farrow Perhaps the most astonishing thing about this early masterpiece of propaganda is not that it is so good, but that it was made so quickly. The truth-based feature premiered less than nine months after the actual events took place. It is an economically told story made on a few wellchosen locations by the Salton Sea. The facts dictate a quick pace, but the film never feels hurried …