Films have come to dominate or reflect popular moods and war has become one of the easiest ways to dramatize individual heroism or a love story, whether through the fictional portrayal of war, its factual representation, or contemporary newsreels and propaganda. D. W. Griffith's The Birth of a Nation (1915) was cinema's first epic, and follows the story of two families as the American civil war tears them apart and forces them to take sides. Griffith started to film in July 1914, as Europe went to war. Set in the trenches, Charlie Chaplain's Shoulder Arms (1918) managed to inject humour into an unfunny, contemporary subject, as a young soldier in the trenches dreams of winning the war single-handedly, but it was not until three years after the Armistice that another US film dealt seriously with WW I. Rex Ingram's Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse (1921) was the love story of a young Argentine who fights for his father's country, France, and was Rudolf Valentino's first important cinema role.
Mirroring literature around the world, an anti-war mood began to surface in films, initially in King Vidor's The Big Parade (1925). The Russian Sergei Eisenstein depicted war of a different kind in a group of three films. Strike (1924), Battleship Potemkin (1925), and October (1928) were all sponsored by the Soviet government to promote the theme of revolution, and were shot as if they were documentary—with shocking (for the day) battle scenes. The mammoth French epic Napoleon (1927), designed to be projected simultaneously onto three screens at once, preceded the talkies by three months and survived just a few showings; it was partially salvaged and rereleased in 1980. Back in America, Ronald Colman starred in a classic, silent, romanticized view of war. Beau Geste (1926) was P. C. Wren's tale of three brothers who join the French Foreign Legion, suffer under a brutal sergeant, and die fighting the Arabs. America was still confused about the notion of fighting, and heading towards pacifism was Paramount's Wings (1927), where two flyers who love the same girl enlist, and one accidentally shoots down the other. To compete, Warner Brothers produced The Dawn Patrol (1930) three years later, also about WW I flyers (which they remade in 1938, starring Errol Flynn).
In 1929 a young German, Erich Maria Remarque, penned a novel about a group of German teenagers who volunteer for action on the western front, become disillusioned and, one by one, die. Im Westen nichts Neues was the first book ever to sell a million copies. Within a year it had been scripted to become Lewis Milestone's highly pacifist All Quiet on the Western Front (1930). Another anti-war offering of this era was the British Journey's End (1930), based on R. C. Sheriff's play, and based around the personal tensions of a group of British officers in a dugout. In Germany, the pacifist Westfront 1918 (1930) also stressed camaraderie in the trenches and the common suffering of both French and German soldiers. Paramount followed with an adaptation of Hemingway's emotive A Farewell to Arms (1932), originally written in the same year and vein as Remarque's novel. It is ironic that this wave of pacifism broke out as the dictators were coming to power throughout Europe. Morgenrot (1933) struck a different note, the story of German U-boat U-21 during the war, and proclaimed the merit of dying for the Fatherland. This was not a Nazi film, but promoted values the Nazis admired. However, Hitlerjunge Quex (1933) was an overt piece of propaganda. Goebbels understood the power of the cinema, and through this and other movies, although not strictly war films, the Nazis hoped to awaken Germany. Quex failed as a convincing vehicle: the Hitler youths were too obviously clean and virtuous, and the communists excessively evil. Another solution had to be found, and Leni Riefenstahl was commissioned to make a documentary of the 1934 Nuremberg Rally. The result, Triumph des Willens (1935), remains a PR classic today, a chilling reminder of the power of cinema, and was as popular abroad as within Germany.
While these war drums sounded in Germany, France remained disenchanted with war, as expounded in Jean Renoir's La Grande Illusion (1937), set in a POW camp, where the great illusion is that the French must hate their German captors. A curiously jingoistic note was produced by Hollywood in The Lost Patrol (1934), featuring British soldiers trapped in the desert under Arab attack, which provided a vehicle for many remakes under different names. Alfred Hitchcock produced a steady flow of successful thrillers, prompted by the rise of Nazism. In The Thirty-Nine Steps (1935), he used the plot of John Buchan's pre-WW I novel of spies to warn of Germany again, while The Lady Vanishes (1938) deals with the disappearance of a train passenger due to sinister fascist intrigues in central Europe. In 1936, Margaret Mitchell (a pseudonym for Peggy Nash) had published a best-selling romantic novel, and within three years, MGM had turned it into a film that caught the popular imagination in a way that no film had done, and few have done since. Gone with the Wind (1939) remains visually splendid, and breathtaking in its depiction of war, but is really two films, only the first half dealing with the American civil war, the rest dealing with its aftermath, and is a test of audience stamina at 220 minutes.
The outbreak of WW II prompted a new wave of films depicting war, as studios became part of the war effort. A recent study has suggested there are 608 major feature films that feature WW II, made either during 1939-45 or since. The talkies of the thirties had encouraged a cinemagoing habit, and films were used to encourage enlistment, inform, or bolster morale. Despite earlier films, the British cinema industry came of age only during the war, although cinemas were initially closed in September 1939 for fear of air raids. Rex Harrison took the part of a British agent masquerading as a Nazi officer in Night Train to Munich (1940) which owed much to the plot of The Lady Vanishes. Leslie Howard returned from Hollywood to share in the war effort and starred in the life story of R. J. Mitchell, inventor of the Spitfire, in The First of the Few (1941). Continuing the flying theme, but more famous for its music (the Warsaw Concerto) than its plot, Dangerous Moonlight (1942) told the tale of a Polish pianist who loses his memory after flying in the battle of Britain. The ‘Boy's Own’ approach to war featured heavily in One of Our Aircraft Is Missing (1942), about the Dutch Resistance helping the crew of a British bomber. There were a great many films honouring one or other of the wartime services. Fires Were Started (1943) dealt with the National Fire Service, while Millions Like Us (1943) told of civilian life in the blitz, and We Dive at Dawn (1943) was a tribute to the submarine service. They—as many wartime films—were characterized by a grin-and-bear-it philosophy that seems scarcely credible today. The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp (1943) —its eponymous hero originating in a David Low cartoon—was more critical, suggesting that the British army was out of touch with reality: Churchill disapproved of it.
While these were primarily for home consumption, Ealing Studios' Went the Day Well? (1942), where a group of Nazis take over an English chocolate-box village and eventually are defeated by alert villagers, was aimed at the USA, with a ‘Britain-can-take-it’ subliminal message. So too were the three outstandingly successful British films of the era, one for each armed service. In Which We Serve (1942), which Noel Coward wrote, produced, and starred in, was based loosely on the real life experience of Mountbatten in a destroyer, where the crew of a torpedoed warship reflect with a classic stiff-upper-lip approach on the role of the navy in their lives. An equivalent film about army life was Carol Reed's The Way Ahead (1944), starring David Niven and Stanley Holloway, which takes the viewer through the sufferings of a platoon of raw recruits, from barrack room to North African battle. The Way to the Stars (1945), which came out just after the war's end, told a similar tale for the RAF. Written by Terrence Rattigan, with an excellent cast (Mills, Michael Redgrave, Holloway, Howard), it is a very successful, atmospheric film, even fifty years later, telling the story of the air war as seen by the guests of a small hotel near an RAF aerodrome. The last British war film was The True Glory (1945), a Ministry of Information production which told the story of the war through a newsreel compilation, with an excellent voice-over commentary.
Earlier wars were also invoked, notably by Laurence Olivier's portrayal of Henry V (1944), which was a clever piece of propaganda transposing the values of 1415 with 1944, and dedicated to the commandos and airborne troops. Kenneth Branagh's version (1989) had a good deal more mud than glory. But Eisenstein's Alexander Nevsky (1941) stands as the all-time classic, belatedly rallying Russian nationalism to the support of the Soviet state as war with the ancient enemy loomed.
Hollywood, conscious of its own cultural roots, went to war selling a chocolate-box England about to be invaded, Anglo-Saxon heroism, and transatlantic romance. When Mrs Miniver (1942) appeared, it won five Oscars, telling the story of an English housewife's view of 1940; her husband takes his boat to Dunkirk and she captures a German flyer in her garden. James Hilton (author of Goodbye, Mr Chips and Lost Horizons) had part-scripted Miniver, and co-wrote Random Harvest (1942), really a romance between Ronald Colman and Greer Garson, but where the hero is a WW I British officer, who suffers amnesia at the 1917 battle of Arras/Vimy Ridge. Looking back to an earlier war was Warner Brothers' Sergeant York (1941), the story of a US farmer (Gary Cooper) who becomes a battlefield hero. Also in the Anglophile vein was The White Cliffs of Dover (1944), inspired by the Dieppe raid of 1942. The most famous Hollywood war effort remains the Bogart-Bergman partnership in Warner Brothers' Casablanca (1942), which gained popularity only in the 1950s for another generation reaching back to an era safe from atomic oblivion. As with The Way to the Stars, it is the atmosphere that lingers and convinces, even 50 years on.
As in Britain, the US studios produced many ‘tribute’ propaganda films: They Were Expendable (1945) dealt with torpedo boats; The Cross of Lorraine (1943) told the story of the French Resistance; while Edge of Darkness (1943) depicted the Norwegian underground. Mission to Moscow (1943) viewed the Soviets as warm-hearted allies, but was bitterly regretted during the later McCarthyite era, and Corvette K 225 (1943) was Universal Pictures' attempt to imitate the success of In Which We Serve, depicting the battle of the Atlantic via life on a Canadian corvette. Another flag-waver was Wilson (1944), Darryl F. Zanuck's biography of the president who had led America into an earlier war. Also in this genre, among many, are Flying Tigers (1942), Bataan (1943), which was really a remake of The Lost Patrol, Guadalcanal Diary (1943), The Fighting Seabees (1944), and the swashbuckling out-of-place Errol Flynn in Objective Burma! (1945). Lewis Milestone announced his conversion from the pacifism of All Quiet on the Western Front with the patriotic The Purple Heart (1944) and A Walk in the Sun (1945), depicting flyers over Japan and GIs in Italy. William Wellman (director of Wings) reappeared with an anti-war movie, The Story of GI Joe (1945), which followed US troops in Italy, through the eyes of a war correspondent. Rossellini's Roma Città Aperta (Open City) (1945) included striking images showing clearly the ravages of war on the city.
After the war, it can be argued, the war movie came to rival the Western and police action/gangster movie as cinema's most-loved and profitable genre. The industry initially produced films that confirmed the public's moral certitude about the justness of the conflict, and the Germans and Japanese were all excessively nasty (as the Germans had been portrayed in the 1920s before All Quiet on the Western Front). There were the occasional aberrations, for example James Mason caused a sensation with his sympathetic portrayal of Rommel in Desert Fox (1951), and Alec Guinness's confused colonel in the Bridge over the River Kwai (1957) started to blur the clear-cut lines between friend and foe. There was also a continuation of celluloid homage to those who served, and their unflinching patriotism, selfless camaraderie, and stoic bravery were offered as values for another generation to aspire to, safe in the knowledge that these were qualities the enemy did not possess. In this genre were the archetypal The Sands of Iwo Jima (1949), and Gregory Peck's Twelve o'Clock High (1949). Similar productions, blending ‘Boys’ Own' heroism with the British stiff upper lip, include Odette (1950), The Wooden Horse (1950), Jack Hawkins' The Cruel Sea (1952), The Dambusters (1955), Reach for the Sky (1956), Yangtse Incident (1957), Ice Cold In Alex (1958), and North-West Frontier (1959), set in India. This formula lasted even into the 1960s with The Guns of Navarone (1961) and The Great Escape (1963).
As WW II and even Korea grew more distant, the human dimension was sacrificed for scale. Confidence and dollars flowed back into the military epics from throughout history ‘with a cast of thousands’, for example in Ben Hur (1959), Spartacus (1960), The Longest Day (1962), Zulu (1964), and The Battle of the Bulge (1965). Doctor Zhivago (1965), War and Peace (1967), The Battle of Britain (1969), and Waterloo (1970) are also of this genre, where war became a vast animated, historical tableau rather than an immediately personal drama.
Fear of communist invasion and nuclear war were public nightmares throughout the 1950s and 1960s. Gregory Peck led the cast in the adaptation of Nevil Shute's gloomy post-nuclear On the Beach (1959), while Stanley Kubrick and Peter Sellers brilliantly addressed the paranoia openly in Dr Strangelove, or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb (1963). Also pursuing the ‘what-if’ theme was the amateur It Happened Here (1963), exploring a Nazi-occupied Britain. Returning to another generation of epics, Tora! Tora! Tora! (1969) portrayed a subject highly emotive to the wartime generation of Americans (Pearl Harbor), but started to humanize the Japanese in a way unthinkable a generation earlier. In France, Lacombe, Lucien (1974) explored both sides of the occupation of France, sympathizing with a collaborator.
Perhaps the American debacle in Vietnam was also influential in rehabilitating the Asiatic nations, for John Wayne's The Green Berets (1968) flopped badly, proving that the transference of WW II values to Vietnam was not appropriate. Also relevant was another generation's questioning of authority, and Richard Attenborough's shameless distortion of WW I generalship in Oh What a Lovely War (1969) is a good example of this. Perhaps this questioning had started with Paths of Glory (1957), set in the trenches of WW I, but it certainly continues with the timeless M*A*S*H (1970), which achieves the aim much better, with some genuinely very funny moments. Peter Weir's revisionist Gallipoli (1981) was a throwback to this earlier anti-authority (and anti-colonial) genre. By then, arguably, some movie-makers had lost direction in their depiction of war, the gratuitously violent and ultimately pointless Dirty Dozen (1967), the highly amusing spoof Kelly's Heroes (1970), and the black comedy Catch-22 (1970) illustrating the point well. Biographical films escaped the worst of this trend and some excellent character studies emerged in David Lean's Lawrence of Arabia (1962), Francis Ford Coppola's Patton (1970), and Attenborough's Young Winston (1972).
By the time the Americans quit Saigon in 1975, the public had overdosed on war movies, and crusades against the Third Reich, Rising Sun, or Red Tide of Communism had lost their celluloid appeal. Perhaps television had a role in this, and The Eagle Has Landed (1976) —itself a throwback to the 1942 Went the Day Well?—Sam Peckinpah's Cross of Iron (1976), and the last great epic, Attenborough's story of Arnhem, A Bridge Too Far (1977) —all with star-studded casts—failed at the box office, whereas a decade earlier they would have done well. Neither were the veterans happy. Sir John Hackett spoke for many when observing that actors in war movies never ran out of ammunition. Yet within three years, a new genre appeared, intent on demonstrating that while individuals might be capable of heroism, war itself was corrupt and soul-destroying. The Deer Hunter (1978) was the first to hit back, followed by Coppola's exhausting Apocalypse Now (1979), Oliver Stone's Platoon (1986), Kubrick's Full Metal Jacket (1987), and Born on the Fourth of July (1989). Steven Spielberg has also shown the world that cinema can depict the less-than-glorious side of war, in Empire of the Sun (1987) and Schindler's List (1993). Along the way, gritty realism resurfaced in two movies of almost documentary accuracy. In Germany, Wolfgang Petersen's Das Boot (1981) recorded the Atlantic patrol of U-96, stressing the waste of war, while Memphis Belle (1990) was a loving remake of a 1944 information film. After the 1991 Gulf war, it seemed the Americans had finally laid to rest the ghost of Vietnam that had been haunting them for 20 years. Once done, it seemed that Hollywood had said all it could about war. Hollywood, full of surprises as ever, then unveiled Saving Private Ryan (1998), a saga of the Normandy campaign. Apart from the first ever attempt to portray realistically the noise, horror, and confusion of combat during the unforgettable first half-hour, where the viewer is cast up on Omaha Beach, what does Ryan offer? Arguably a sobering alternative to the cardboard super-heroes of Sylvester Stallone, Bruce Willis, and Arnold Schwarzenegger. Apart from the Gulf, no Americans have been to war since Vietnam, and a whole generation is curious to know what it is like. The cinema industry has therefore given them virtual combat.
Bibliography
- Shipman, David, The Story of Cinema,
2 vols. (London, 1982-4). - Halliwell, Leslie, Film Guide (London, numerous edns.)
— Peter Caddick-Adams
