AMERICAN WARS Movie Review

American Wars on Screen

When American filmmakers look at wars fought in their own country, they tend to be more interested in reconciliation than in victory. Their reasons are primarily commercial; they don't want to offend part of their potential audience by making them the enemy, as foreigners so often are. But historical distance plays a part, too, and relatively few films have been made about the Revolution. Today, the tactics, weapons, and costumes of the Colonial period make the films look like vaguely silly period pieces, and so it's difficult for audiences to invest much passion or involvement in the conflict. Michael Mann's Last of the Mohicans comes close, but it is still most effective as a star-driven historical romance. D.W. Griffith's America repeats the basic structure and themes of Birth of a Nation in a colonial setting.

John Wayne's preachy The Alamo suffers under a double load of heavy political baggage and a poorly written role for the leading man. Wayne was trying to turn the story of the siege into a Cold War allegory, and the combination of history and propaganda never really works.

Historical distance begins to diminish in the Civil War films. The ones chosen here differ widely in their attitudes and depiction of the conflict. That war is the central event of American history, and still capable of inspiring fiery arguments. The first important film to deal with it is a perfect example. The racist Birth of a Nation presents a false revisionist portrait of the Civil War and Reconstruction that was instrumental in the maintenance of state-sponsored segregation in the first half of the 20th century, and is still accepted by some. The unbridled romanticism in Gone with the Wind masks a less virulent racism, but the film is not much closer to the truth of the times. Sergio Leone turns the conflict into a mythic backdrop for his ambitious and violent anti-war epic, The Good, the Bad and the Ugly. John Huston, like John Wayne, attempts to make political points in The Red Badge of Courage, but they tend to be lost in that troubled production's inability to illustrate its psychological concerns.

When directors try to stick more closely to historical fact, the results are mixed. The most successful is Edward Zwick's Glory. Despite an undeniable stiffness and slow pace, the film brings the passions and hatreds of the era to life with a reality that few films match, and the depiction of combat is as emotionally moving as any war film. Gettysburg is an accurate overview of the three-day battle, and though the various generals and officers look right, they never emerge as fully fleshed characters. Jeff Daniels's Chamberlain is a notable exception. John Ford paid as little attention to history as possible in The Horse Soldiers, despite the fact that he was working with a remarkable true story.

Of course, anyone who really wants to understand that war should go first to Ken Burns's masterful PBS series, The Civil War. (See sidebar.)

Most of the films that deal with the country's westward expansion in the 19th century are more properly categorized as westerns than as war films, even when they deal with the armed encounters that took place between Indian tribes and settlers. She Wore a Yellow Ribbon represents John Ford's cavalry trilogy. They Died with Their Boots On is such a revisionist version of the Battle of Little Bighorn that it can be enjoyed only as Hollywood escapist entertainment.

The films that deal with America's ambiguous colonial aspirations—another rarely visited subject—form a lively trilogy: The Real Glory (Philippines) , The Sand Pebbles (China), and The Wind and the Lion (a minor incident in Morocco).

Finally, the comedies in this section are two of the finest films covered in the book. Everyone knows Kubrick's Dr. Strangelove, and everyone should watch it again at regular intervals. Though the immediate prospect of Mutually Assured Destruction through nuclear weapons may have abated for the moment, the Cold War mentality that Kubrick and writer Terry Southern so deftly parody is still out there and still dangerous. Buster Keaton's The General is America's great “lost” comedy—a brilliant Civil War film that young fans of Jackie Chan and Roberto Benigni would love if they'd give a silent movie a chance.