WAR and ANTI-WAR FILMS

War and Anti-War Films often acknowledge the horror and heartbreak of war, letting the actual combat fighting or conflict (against nations or humankind) provide the primary plot or background for the action of the film. Typical elements in the action-oriented war plots include POW camp experiences and escapes, submarine warfare, espionage, personal heroism, "war is hell" brutalities, air dogfights, tough trench/infantry experiences, or male-bonding buddy adventures during wartime. Themes explored in war films include combat, survivor and escape stories, tales of gallant sacrifice and struggle, studies of the futility and inhumanity of battle, the effects of war on society, and intelligent and profound explorations of the moral and human issues.

 

Some war films do balance the soul-searching, tragic consequences and inner turmoil of combatants or characters with action-packed, dramatic spectacles, enthusiastically illustrating the excitement and turmoil of warfare. And some 'war' films concentrate on the home front rather than on the conflict at the military war-front. But many of them provide decisive criticism of senseless warfare.

 

War films have often been used as 'flag-waving' propaganda to inspire national pride and morale, and to display the nobility of one's own forces while harshly displaying and criticizing the villainy of the enemy, especially during war or in post-war periods. Jingoistic-type war films usually do not represent war realistically in their support of nationalistic interests, while avoiding the reality of the horrors of war. The good guys are portrayed as clashing against the bad guys (often with stereotyped labels such as 'krauts,' 'commies,' 'Huns,' or 'nips'). These revisionistic, politically-correct and historically inaccurate films, in such diverse examples as Sands of Iwo Jima (1949) and The Alamo (1960), would often redefine the facts.

 

War films can also make political statements - unpopular wars (such as the Vietnam War and the Iraq War), have generated both supportive and critical films about the conflict (i.e., Robert Altman's M*A*S*H (1970), Kenneth Branagh's Henry V (1989), and Michael Moore's documentary Fahrenheit 9/11 (2004)).

This genre has existed since the earliest years of cinematic production in the silent era. Filmmakers have been provided ample opportunities for material from American history, stretching from the French and Indian Wars to the Vietnam War. In particular, the many wars of the 20th century (primarily the First and Second World Wars, but also subsequent wars) have provided rich material for filmmakers. War films as a major film genre emerged after the outbreak of World War I.

 

Earliest War Films:

The first war film to be documented was a one-reel, 90-second propagandist effort - the Vitagraph Company's fictitious Tearing Down the Spanish Flag (1898), produced in the year of the Spanish-American War. It portrayed a faked, reconstructed version of the seizure of a Spanish government installation in Havana by U.S. Army troops, the removal of the foreign flag, and its replacement by the Stars and Stripes. Early filmmakers steered away from making war pictures because of their enormous cost for extras - uniformed and equipped in massive battle sequences. Although American Civil War war films are scarce, they include: Gone with the Wind (1939), Glory (1989), and Gettysburg (1993).

 

World War I (The Great War) Era Films:

After the Armistice ending World War I, war films ceased. They were revived in the mid-1920s during peacetime. The Big Parade (1925) was the first to realistically portray the horrors of battle and the struggle for survival by three soldier-comrades (a bartender, a riveter, and a millionaire's son) in the trenches. It also told of a love affair between an American doughboy and a French peasant girl.  Soon after, William Wellman's silent and early anti-war film Wings (1927) appeared, spectacular dog-fight combat sequences, and the first film (and only silent film) to be awarded Best Picture.

 

Hollywood's War Films of WWII At the Time of the Conflict:

After the bombing of Pearl Harbor by the Japanese in late 1941, the mood of Hollywood changed dramatically. Once the war began, the US film industry bolstered American support by churning out many war-themed movies. Most of the films were propaganda depicting the U.S. entry into the war as a noble cause, but some displayed the human side as well. The all-time film classic of pre-World War II intrigue, patriotism and romance, Casablanca (1942) was released just weeks after the liberation of the city itself. The popular film emphasized the atmospheric intrigue and tension surrounding Humphrey Bogart's decision to assist the war effort and get involved by securing transit visas - and give up the one-time love of his life, the often tragic consequences for lovers caught up in wartime experiences. Hollywood also used propagandist musicals such as Yankee Doodle Dandy (1942, Cover Girl (1944), and Pin-Up Girl (1944) to bolster support for the war effort.

 

WWII War Films of the Actual Fighting:

World War II is easily the most popular war choice for Hollywood film-makers, due in large part to its clear-cut political struggle against the Nazi regime. During the early to mid-war years, as the United States struggled and suffered setbacks, many films provided a genuine depiction of the fighting and the human effects of WWII. Most of Hollywood's films were concerned with combat in the Pacific Theatre of the war. Director John Farrow's flag-waving Wake Island (1942), one of the most realistic and factually-based films made about the war, told of gallant US Marines (including Brian Donlevy, William Bendix and Robert Preston) fighting against the Japanese with uneven odds to hold onto a tiny base on the remote S. Pacific island shortly after the attack on Pearl Harbor.

 

Warner Bros.' action picture Action in the North Atlantic (1943) featured Humphrey Bogart as a commander in the unheralded Merchant Marines, protecting a convoy against U-boat attacks. A Walk in the Sun (1946) followed an American infantry unit struggling to survive while fighting to take a farmhouse from the Germans in Italy. Sahara (1943) was centered in the N. African Libyan desert, with Humphrey Bogart as the head of a British-American unit fighting the Germans. Another war film geographically located in N. Africa was The Immortal Sergeant (1943), with Henry Fonda as an inexperienced Canadian Army Corporal forced to take command of the British 8th Army troops in the desert following the battle death of the squad's sergeant (Thomas Mitchell).

 

Lloyd Bacon's The Fighting Sullivans (1944) told the patriotic true story of five Irish-American brothers who died together in WWII, when their ship was sunk in the South Pacific. [Years later, the film inspired director Steven Spielberg to rework the story into his film Saving Private Ryan (1998).]

 

John Wayne's WWII Films:

John Wayne starred in The Flying Tigers (1942) as the leader of a squadron of American pilots stationed in early-WWII China that were for-hire to battle the Japanese. In The Fighting Seabees (1944), Wayne also starred as the leader of a crew of civilians in a construction company that eventually formed a tough fighting force in WWII.

 

In director Allan Dwan's blatantly-patriotic wartime action drama Sands of Iwo Jima (1949, Wayne again starred as a tough and harsh but compassionate Marine sergeant (acquiring his first Academy Award nomination for the role) who trained rebellious recruit-troops that were eventually responsible for the strategic re-taking of Iwo Jima from the Japanese. And in Operation Pacific (1951), Wayne starred as an American submarine captain of the USS. In director Nicholas Ray's Flying Leathernecks (1951), Wayne played a disciplined, unpopular and macho-tough Marine squadron commander of the Flying Corps in the South Pacific, leading a group to hold Guadalcanal in WWII. In Harm's Way (1965), another WWII naval adventure, re-teamed Wayne with co-star Patricia Neal.

 

Korean War Films:

In the 1950s, the Korean War in Northeast Asia served as inspiring content for only a few Hollywood films, including two anti-war films by Samuel Fuller about the madness of war: Fixed Bayonets (1951) and The Steel Helmet (1951). One of the best films about the Korean War was director Joseph H. Lewis' Retreat, Hell (1952), portraying the US Marine Corps' valiant withdrawal from the Changjin Reservoir. In Mark Robson's The Bridges at Toko-Ri (1954), William Holden played the role of a war-weary Lieutenant - a family man recalled from the Naval Reserve to fly a possibly-fateful bombing mission over Communist-protected bridges in Korea. Pork Chop Hill (1959) starred Gregory Peck as an Army Lieutenant of a platoon in a no-win situation. Peck also starred as the rebel general in MacArthur (1977), told in flashback, including his promise at Corregidor in 1942 ("I shall return"), and his firing by President Truman for defying orders during the Korean conflict. The Manchurian Candidate (1962) examined the fearful, sinister consequences of Korean War brainwashing.

 

Epic War Films:

During the 1960s and 70s, a number of war films returned to WWII as their well-documented backdrop. They were often fact-based, historical or biographical epics, such as the following:

Zanuck's authentic-looking, 3-hour black and white war epic The Longest Day (1962) (dubbed "Z-Day" when the producer bailed out the film with his own finances) about the Normandy landing on D-Day (June 6, 1944) (restaged in Corsica); this landmark film was told from four points of view, with four directors (American, English, French, and German) and in three languages; it required 43 major roles and 23,000 extras ; the Japanese-American co-produced film Tora! Tora! Tora! (1970) of the Pearl Harbor attack told from the perspective of both sides; Jack Smight's Midway (1976), about the surprise American victory over the Japanese fleet in 1942; Roland Joffe's Fat Man and Little Boy (1989) about The Manhattan Project which tested and manufactured the devastating atomic bombs that fell on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

 

Most of the other war films at this time were all-star World War II buddy films, typically with large groups of stars bonded together in exciting, old-fashioned wartime situations. Films in this category included: The Guns of Navarone (1961), The Great Escape (1963), Von Ryan's Express (1965), The Blue Max (1966), The Dirty Dozen (1967), Where Eagles Dare (1969), Kelly's Heroes (1970), A Bridge Too Far (1977), Force 10 From Navarone (1978).

 

Vietnam-War Related Films:

The Vietnam-War experience produced only one film during the actual era of conflict and it was one of the worst films ever made about Vietnam: the propagandistic, pro-war The Green Berets (1968).

It took Hollywood a few years into the 1970s, after the end of the war in mid-1975, until it could no longer ignore the subject of the unpopular Vietnam War. The film industry soon released films of greater substance and violence on the subject of Vietnam, and realistically examined the disturbing effects of the war. [Interesting to note was that almost all of the films about Vietnam didn't include the word 'Vietnam' in the film's title.]

 

The Boys in Company C (1977) was one of the first realistic Vietnam war films, about five young and green Marine recruits sent over to fight in SE Asia. Go Tell the Spartans (1978) examined the 1964 pre-Vietnam War situation in S. Vietnam. The classic but controversial Vietnam film, Michael Cimino's compelling Best Picture-winning character study The Deer Hunter (1978), told about three young patriotic steelworkers who found only horror and death in Vietnam.

Francis Ford Coppola's harrowing epic vision of the madness of the war in Vietnam, Apocalypse Now (1979) was an exceptionally spectacular war movie loosely based on Joseph Conrad's 1911 novel Heart of Darkness. An American military assassin was commissioned to journey upriver into Cambodia to 'terminate without prejudice' an insane, renegade colonel. Coppola also directed the grim military drama Gardens of Stone (1987) about the decorated veterans of the Third Infantry (the elite Old Guard) who patrolled, guarded, and served at ceremonial funerals at Arlington National Cemetery. Critically-acclaimed films in the 1980s also examined the Vietnam experience, portraying war as a living hell. The Killing Fields (1984) was based upon the events surrounding the fall of Cambodia and the American evacuation. Stanley Kubrick's Full Metal Jacket (1987) presented the exploits of a recruited young Marine Corps soldier with his dehumanizing South Carolina boot-camp training experience on Parris Island, his work as a photojournalist for a military magazine, and his combat soldiering in the 1968 Tet offensive. In a lighter vein, Good Morning, Vietnam (1987) was centered on the irreverent, non-conformist, early morning disc-jockey Adrian Cronauer (Robin Williams).

 

Oliver Stone's Vietnam Trilogy:

Writer/director film-maker Oliver Stone, a veteran of the Vietnam War himself, presented a Vietnam 'trilogy':

• Best Picture-winning film Platoon (1986) - one of the finest, most-acclaimed combat films ever produced regarding the Vietnam War which won five Oscars, including Best Picture

• Born on the Fourth of July (1989) - a screen biography of Ron Kovic, a Vietnam War recruit and an embittered, disenchanted anti-war activist/paraplegic after rehabilitation

• Heaven and Earth (1993), about the aftermath of the war reflected in the relationship between a Vietnamese woman and the American soldier she married.

 

Spy/Espionage War-Related Films:

Most of the secret agent James Bond action films, beginning with Dr. No (1962), owe their origins to world-dominating tyrants, the Cold War and the Red Menace. Even after the Cold War ended and the agonizing post-Vietnam War period was over, Hollywood produced a number of high-tech, spectacular action-hero films with war-time suspense and superpower conflicts and thrills. These suspenseful spy and espionage films were filled with situations of military and political strife, CIA intrigue, terrorism, submarines, and nuclear warfare, etc. The following were representative examples of these political thrillers: No Way Out (1987) ,The Hunt for Red October (1990), Patriot Games (1992), Clear and Present Danger (1994), Crimson Tide (1995) ,The Sum of All Fears (2002).

 

 

 

 

Movie Genre Assignment

 

For this assignment you will be writing a 6-7 paragraph report on the genre of War movies. Your report will focus on ORGANIZED paragraphs that outline the composition of a War Movie and how it applies to an example you have watched.

 

Instructions:

1. Read the War/ Anti-War note attached and DECIDE for yourself what the MOST IMPORTANT elements are in a movie from this genre. (You should have 5-7 of them)

2. For EACH element you find, you must plan to write a paragraph that is organized and has evidence from your selected movie

3. The structure of your paragraph should be as follows:

   1. [sentence1-2]- You will discuss the element of a WAR/ ANTI-WAR movie you have selected and explain how it is important to the genre.

   2. [sentences3-4]- You will provide evidence or an example from the movie you watch demonstrating how the element you select is actually used in the movie

   3. [sentence 5-7]- You will explain how and why the element and how it is used in your movie is significant or important to the movie’s message or theme or plot

4. You must have a small introductory paragraph introducing the genre and your movie.

 

 

The finished product MUST BE TYPED and DOUBLE SPACED with an MLA header.

 

Full Assignment and RUBRIC