WORLD WAR Europe II and North Africa Movie Review

World War II: The European and North African Campaigns on Screen

Between 1942 and 1946, Hollywood produced a large number of films about the war, and the emphasis was strongly on the European and North African Theater. A quick count of the major war movies made during those years with an overseas setting reveals that the European productions outnumbered the Pacific almost two to one. No single reason explains the difference. The studios were trying to pay attention to every branch of the armed services, and equal venom was aimed at both the Japanese and the Germans. Certainly, America's connections to England and Europe account for some of the difference. In any case, for the movies, the European Theater is the most popular front of the most popular war, from Action in the North Atlantic to Saving Private Ryan.

During those first weeks of 1942, the Hollywood studios and the War Department forged a mutually advantageous relationship. The government wanted the studios to make inspirational films that portrayed their organizations in a favorable light. The studios wanted to make movies that would attract audiences and were happy to accept assistance from the armed services—including access to their men, bases, and equipment. In short, two powerful organizations made a good match.

The films produced during the war roughly follow its progress. The works focusing on Europe begin at a higher level of sophistication, mostly because the Brits had been involved earlier and had their propaganda machine in a higher gear. In Which We Serve, made by Noel Coward and David Lean, and Immortal Battalion, from Carol Reed, Eric Ambler, and Peter Ustinov, are both carefully crafted to inspire without overstatement. On the American side, Action in the North Atlantic and Crash Dive are much simpler calls to arms. Zoltan Korda's Sahara, Billy Wilder's Five Graves to Cairo, and Hitchcock's Lifeboat are much more polished and enjoyable works of escapism.

When Hollywood turned its attention to the G.I. on the front line, it made steady progress, from the slapdash The Immortal Sergeant, through Edward G. Robinson's transformation into a soldier in Mr. Winkle Goes to War, to the realism of William Wellman's Story of G.I. Joe, about the “mud-rain-frost-and-wind boys,” and Lewis Milestone's A Walk in the Sun.

After the war, the partnership between Hollywood and the military establishment continued. Though the films soften their partisan attitude, they remain largely uncritical of the armed services. The more complex psychological pressures created by the war are the subject of Command Decision, 12 O'Clock High, and The Caine Mutiny. The war on the ground is the setting for Audie Murphy's autobiography, To Hell and Back, and William Wellman's Battleground. For my money, Wellman's is the best combat film to come out of that theater of the war.

The German point of view provides one part of the three interconnected stories of Irwin Shaw's The Young Lions. It's also the subject of Douglas Sirk's underrated adaptation of Erich Maria Remarque's A Time to Love and a Time to Die, and The Bridge, a fine 1959 German Oscar nominee about young draftees at the end of the war.

With the increased artistic and creative freedom of the 1960s, dramatic changes come to the war film. The studios’ affinity for elephantine, multi-star epics is responsible for The Longest Day, The Battle of the Bulge, The Battle of Britain, and Is Paris Burning?. In those same years, other producers use the war as a setting for escapist adventures: The Guns of Navarone, The Train, and Where Eagles Dare. The first hints of deviation from the “official” version of history, which cast Americans as unambiguous heroes appear then, too, and are carried on into the ‘70s. Don Siegel's Hell Is For Heroes (1962) suggests that the command structure could be flawed, and men might be more concerned with survival than sacrifice. A year later, Carl Foreman's The Victors goes even farther with the same ideas on a larger scale. Perhaps the real turning point comes in 1967, with the popularity of Robert Aldrich's The Dirty Dozen, a brutally violent story that ended with Americans slaughtering helpless prisoners.

Opposition to the Vietnam War increased in the 1970s, and is reflected in Mike Nichols’ adaptation of Joseph Heller's Catch-22, Sam Peckinpah's stunning and underappreciated Cross of Iron, and even A Bridge Too Far, the most expensive production ever attempted about an Allied defeat.

In the 1980s and ‘90s, the pendulum swings back to a more realistic middle ground, where the bloody realities of war are neither ignored nor dwelt upon. The first to take that more measured look is Sam Fuller's autobiographical The Big Red One, followed by the German submarine epic, Das Boot, and Come and See, a harrowing Russian film about Nazi atrocities that can be seen as a preview of Schindler's List. In his adaptation of William Wharton's novel A Midnight Clear, Keith Gordon revives the unit picture to create a tale of humanistic redemption. He does something similar with Kurt Vonnegut's fable of complicity and guilt, Mother Night.

At a time when war films were not in favor in theaters, the cable channel HBO produced The Tuskegee Airmen, the fact-based story of a squadron of black pilots who flew P-51s, and John Irvin's When Trumpets Fade, an admirable remake of Hell Is for Heroes. Then in 1998, the European Theater returned to the big screen with Steven Spielberg's Saving Private Ryan. His depiction of the D-Day invasion establishes new standards of realism for screen violence that will certainly be reflected in the next wave of war films.