War and The Military in Film: Feature Films

This entry is a subentry of War and The Military in Film.

A symbiotic relationship has existed between the United States military and the motion picture industry in the production of feature films, each institution exploiting and benefitting from the relationship with the other. The services want an attractive portrayal; the filmmakers, particularly the studios, want to use the military's equipment, personnel, and aura. Each service also seeks to build public support for its own particular needs.

During the decade before World War I, each of the services began developing its own approach to filmmakers through regulations governing assistance it might render on a particular production. The U.S. Navy, the first service to see the potential of this visual medium, sent pseudo‐documentaries portraying its activities to the 1904 World's Fair in St. Louis. Later, these were used to recruit farm‐boys in the Middle West. By 1916, when the navy loaned Syd Chaplin, Charlie's look‐alike brother, a submarine during the making of Submarine Pirate, the service was regularly providing men and equipment to productions it considered beneficial. On the other hand, it refused to loan a battleship during the making of Mary Pickford's Madame Butterfly (1915) because Secretary of the Navy Josephus Daniels felt the story did not reflect credit on the Naval Service.

The aviation branch led the army in exploring film's potential. Lt. Henry “Hap” Arnold flew one of the first military airplanes in front of a camera in the two‐reeler Military Scout (1911). Later, Arnold supported the Air Corps' cooperation with filmmakers in such major productions as Wings (1927), the first Best Picture Oscar winner, and Air Force (1943), a World War II epic flying film.

The Marine Corps, seeking to ensure its survival as a unique body of fighting men, cooperated with films that emphasized this, especially those featuring the rite of passage of young boys to mature men. Shortly before the United States entered World War I, the Marine Corps allowed filmmakers to shoot Star‐Spangled Banner at its barracks at Bremerton, Washington. After U.S. entry in April 1917, the service permitted the filmmakers to shoot the combat scenes on its base at Quantico, Virginia, providing the director with 1,000 Marines for his “over‐the‐top” sequence in The Unbeliever (1918). The service's public affairs office helped promote the film by sending news releases to newspapers in all the towns from which the Marine actors had come, explaining that the young men had now arrived in France and were helping to defeat the enemy.

As has happened after virtually every war, Hollywood lost interest in the military once hostilities ceased. Nevertheless, the connection between the two institutions remained. In trying to do for the American Revolution what he had done for the Civil War, D. W. Griffith again approached the army for assistance on America (1923). Secretary of War John Weeks ordered the army to give the director every reasonable help, ultimately including 1,000 cavalrymen and a military band. The army justified its cooperation by saying the filming allowed officers to study the Revolutionary War battles with a precision never before possible.

Hollywood ultimately turned to World War I combat to portray dramatic stories of men in combat. The first of these, The Big Parade (1925), set the standard. Director King Vidor said that he wanted to make “an honest war picture” showing hostilities from the viewpoint of ordinary soldiers and privates. With the army's help, Vidor was able to portray the spectacle of a large‐scale movement of troops and equipment to the front, “the big parade.” In the picture, two of the three doughboys die and the hero loses a leg, causing many people to perceive the film as an antiwar treatise, despite its happy ending. From the military's perspective, if the ending is upbeat, even the death of one or more of the characters remains secondary to the images of men and equipment performing valiantly in the nation's cause.

During the 1920s, each of the services formalized its regulations governing cooperation with filmmakers. Once the War Department or the Navy Department, of which the Marines remained a subordinate branch, had approved a script, the local commander assumed all responsibility for providing assistance. But, the amount he gave depended on the feelings the base commander or ship captain had toward film and the production company. Only rarely did a commander object strongly enough for headquarters to rescind its approval. More often, commanders went out of their way to provide the assistance a director needed, recognizing the public relations value of the completed film.

The making of Wings illustrated this symbiotic relationship during the interwar years. The Army Air Corps saw the story of American fliers in France as a way to boost its branch of the army, and many of the officers at the flying facilities around San Antonio knew director William Wellman from his flying days during World War I. As a result, the service provided him with a good portion of all the airplanes it owned, as well as the troops necessary to recreate the Battle of St. Mihiel. For its nine months of assistance, the Air Corps received a film that glorified army aviation.

Hollywood did make other combat stories featuring the U.S. military during the 1920s and 1930s, but most focused on life in the peacetime armed services. The Marines, for example, assisted on two movies portraying its aviation branch, Flight (1929) and Devil Dogs of the Air (1935).

Navy aviation, of course, reaped the reward of appearing in the film as well as several other stories set aboard aircraft carriers. However, the submarine service faced an inherent dilemma; to make an exciting movie, the submarine had to sink, which did little to aid recruitment for the silent service. The only resolution to the problem, whether in Frank Capra's Submarine (1928) or later in Gray Lady Down (1978), was for the navy to demonstrate its salvage capability. Despite the required love interest, Submarine D‐1 (1937) became little more than a pseudo‐documentary, showing how the service was preparing to deal with the sinking of submarines.

Navy aviation faced similar problems in overcoming the dangers of flight. The service sought to explain its efforts to protect men and equipment. Consequently, in the immediate prewar years, the navy in films such as Flight Command (1940), which detailed efforts to improve navigation equipment, and Dive Bomber (1941), which portrayed the research by Navy flight doctors to overcome pilot blackout.

Hollywood failed in general to deal with the Nazi threat until late in the 1930s, but by 1940 was turning out such pro‐interventionist films as Sergeant York, which depicted the heroic doughboy, Alvin York, of World War I. Isolationists in Congress and across the country accused Hollywood of making propaganda films to draw the United States into the war on the side of Britain. In a Senate hearing in September 1941, the heads of all the major studios denied the charges. While acknowledging that they opposed Adolf Hitler, they argued that they produced movies to entertain and make money.

The Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor rendered further hearings moot and freed Hollywood to produce vehemently anti‐German films as well as movies portraying the military in combat. Like the World War I‐era The Unbeliever (1918), which showed Marines in battle before they had actually reached Europe, the initial World War II movies, such as Bataan (1943), Crash Dive (1943), and Wing and a Prayer (1944) contained fanciful stories, usually implausible and lacking basis in fact. Air Force (1943), for example, made with the blessing of “Hap” Arnold (now a general), began with the historic reality that a flight of B‐17s had left San Francisco in the evening of 6 December, arriving in Hawaii in the midst of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. However, the subsequent adventures of the Mary Ann and her crew, culminating in the almost single‐handed destruction of a huge Japanese armada had no historic basis.

Sometimes, as in Wake Island (1942) and Destination Tokyo (1943), filmmakers combined known facts with fabrications. In reality, the last man off Wake Island before its capture had reported how a small band of Marines defended the island up to the day he left. Hollywood's portrayal of subsequent events remained at best an educated guess. An American submarine had sailed to within sight of Japan to report weather conditions for James Doolittle's raiders. However, Destination Tokyo portrayed the submarine entering Tokyo Bay, landing a team of meteorologists on Japanese soil, and later sinking a Japanese aircraft carrier, none of which happened.

By 1943, however, the war had produced dramatic stories, which served as the basis for relatively accurate accounts of American experiences in combat. In particular, MGM's Thirty Seconds Over Tokyo (1944), directed by Mervyn LeRoy and written by Dalton Trumbo, closely followed the story of one of the pilots on the Doolittle raid. Nevertheless, for political reasons, the film did not explain that the Chinese Communists had rescued most of the fliers. Whether or not the combat films made during the war contained more fact than fantasy, they did help the war effort by showing how the military carried the war to the enemy.

Each of the armed services had more important things to do than provide men and equipment to filmmakers, even if the assistance lent an authentic ambiance to the completed movie and showed how the military was winning the war. Still, each service did cooperate with Hollywood as much as possible. Due to General Arnold's long‐standing relationship with filmmakers, the Army Air Force loaned several B‐17s, a fighter, and other equipment for the filming of Air Force. Although the navy and the Air Corps could not recreate the launch of Doo‐little's planes off the deck of the USS Hornet, the Air Corps provided 16 B‐25s for the training sequences and trundled two bombers to the MGM studio for filming shipboard sequences.

Despite the popularity of such war stories, once victory loomed on the horizon, Hollywood began cutting back on the production of combat films, believing audiences would lose interest when the war was over. Two critically acclaimed films—They Were Expendable and A Walk in the Sun—both released in 1945 shortly after V‐J Day, failed at the box office.

Only in 1948 did the small‐scale Command Decision and Fighter Squadron appear in theaters. Relying on Army Air Force gun camera footage for their combat sequences, neither film enjoyed much success at the box office. However, in the next two years, four major World War II movies started a cycle of combat stories that lasted into the early 1960s. Battleground, Sands of Iwo Jima, Task Force, and Twelve O’Clock High received substantial military assistance and each presented a highly positive image of the service being portrayed.

Beyond their recreation of World War II, two of the films became important for their portrayals of leadership. As the tough father figure, Sergeant Stryker, in Sands of Iwo Jima (1949), John Wayne passes his knowledge of war to the next generation of Marines and dies having accomplished his mission. Despite his inglorious death from a sniper's bullet, Wayne's performance established him as the quintessential American fightingman and role model in the eyes of most Americans. In contrast, in Twelve O’Clock High (1949), General Savage, played by Gregory Peck, falls into the same trap as had the commander he replaced. After rebuilding the confidence and abilities of his bomber group through strict leadership and appropriate distance from his men, Savage begins to see them as human beings and friends. When they die in combat, Savage grieves, albeit internally, and ultimately suffers a mental breakdown. Probably the best film ever made about the U.S. Air Force, Twelve O’Clock High continues to be used in leadership seminars to illustrate the problems leaders face in commanding subordinates.

Most of the Pentagon's objections to scripts submitted during the 1950s focused on small matters—pilots drinking, rough treatment of recruits—and filmmakers readily acquiesced to requests for changes in order to receive the needed assistance, which gave their movies authentic military ambiance. Occasionally, however, major productions did create problems for one or another of the services that required long negotiations and compromises on both sides.

Hollywood wanted to make two popular novels, James Jones's From Here to Eternity and Herman Wouk's The Caine Mutiny, into motion pictures as quickly as possible. In the case of Jones's novel, the army did not deny the accuracy of the portrayals, but it saw little benefit in a story of an officer's abuse of power and the cruel treatment inflicted upon enlisted men in prewar Hawaii. Ultimately, the filmmakers agreed to tone down some of the brutality and have the offending officer resign rather than being promoted as in the novel; the army then allowed filming at Schofield Barracks, Hawaii, using real soldiers as extras.

Although Herman Wouk thought he had written a pro‐navy story based on his own experiences aboard a destroyer in World War II, the navy was opposed to the title—The Caine Mutiny—arguing (incorrectly) that there had never been a mutiny aboard a U.S. Navy ship. Producer Stanley Kramer refused the suggested title, The Caine Incident. After eighteen months of negotiation, both sides compromised on a script that put the blame for the takeover of the USS Caine on the civilian‐appointed turned wartime officers rather than on Captain Queeg, a regular navy officer.

Ironically, one of the films that the navy thought beneficial and assisted, The Bridges of Toko‐Ri (1954), based on James Michener's novel, contained some of Hollywood's strongest antiwar statements. The navy provided an extraordinary amount of assistance in this portrayal of carrier operations during the Korean War. Although the film contains a strong justification for the need to fight the Communists in Korea, the closing image of the downed pilot‐protagonist, shot dead in a muddy ditch by North Korean soldiers, did little to create enthusiasm for naval aviation or for war itself.

Only on very rare occasions did the Pentagon flatly refuse to provide assistance to a film during the peak of the Cold War in the 1950s. One example was Attack! (1956), in which an enlisted man shoots his incompetent officer. By the end of the 1960s, the interest in World War II had about run its course. Moreover, young, independent filmmakers, not beholden to Hollywood's comfortable relationship with the military establishment, had begun to take control of the industry. Things also changed within the Pentagon as a result of the controversies surrounding the making of The Longest Day (1962), the film that ended the golden age of World War II movies.

The army had, of course, few problems with providing assistance to a movie about the D‐Day landing in Normandy, its greatest moment in World War II. Producer Darryl Zanuck of 20th Century Fox received help in recreating the invasion of Normandy not only from the U.S. military but from the forces of the other three major participants in the battle, Britain, France, and Germany. But, when the American media focused attention on the amount of cooperation Zanuck was receiving, the Pentagon began reevaluating its long‐standing regulations on assistance. The producer did not help the inquiry when he shot a scene of American soldiers killing German soldiers who were trying to surrender, which he had agreed not to include, and then refused to delete it despite army demands that he do so.

Although the free and easy relationship between Hollywood and the military came to an end in the 1960s, the film industry was not immediately ready to produce movies openly critical of the armed services; but filmmakers were willing to use the atomic bomb as a focus for antiwar statements. In particular, Fail Safe (1964), Dr. Strangelove (1964), and The Bedford Incident (1965) each argued that the Pentagon did not have the control it claimed over the use of nuclear weapons and that an accident could lead to nuclear holocaust. The air force and navy refused to cooperate on any of these productions. And the navy would have nothing to do with The Americanization of Emily (1964), in which for the first time a Hollywood studio portrayed a U.S. military officer as a professed coward.

To be sure, filmmakers continued to produce traditional military stories with Pentagon assistance during the 1960s and early 1970s. These included PT‐109 (1963), In Harm's Way (1965), Bridge at Remagen (1969), Patton (1970), and Tora! Tora! Tora! (1970). Yet, even these films often contained negative images. Hollywood made one more pro‐air force, pro‐atomic bomb movie, Gathering of Eagles (1962), at the request of Curtis E. LeMay.

John Wayne was involved in an effort to glorify the U.S. military in Vietnam, using army assistance. Unfortunately, The Green Berets (1968) reeked of its propaganda message about an unpopular war. It became Hollywood's sole movie on the Vietnam War until the conflict ended in 1975. Thereafter, Hollywood set about to complete the savaging, begun by the media during the war, of the largely positive image of the U.S. military that American filmmakers had helped to create for more than seventy years.

When presented with the scripts of Go Tell the Spartans (1978), Coming Home (1978), The Deer Hunter (1978), and Apocalypse Now (1979), the Pentagon did not deny that many bad things had occurred in Vietnam. But public affairs officers in each of the services argued that the stories often lacked balance and portrayed events that simply had not occurred or had been aberrations.

In May 1975, the director Francis Ford Coppola visited the Pentagon to discuss his plans to make a film about the Vietnam War; Department of Defense officials wanted to avoid controversy with the Oscar‐winning director and they sought ways to provide him at least some assistance on Apocalypse Now. However, they contended that the army would never send one officer to “terminate” another officer and so could not assist on a film that used this as the springboard of its story.

In The Deer Hunter, director Michael Cimino turned the My Lai Massacre into a Viet Cong atrocity. However, the film's recreation of the American evacuation of Saigon bore no relation to historical events and the army pointed out that no American prisoners of war had ever been forced to play Russian roulette. The service declined to provide any assistance to Cimino's production.

Each service usually manifested far too much sensitivity in dealing with requests for even limited help on Vietnam War films. Go Tell the Spartans contained a relatively accurate portrayal of the activity of American advisers in the early 1960s. The filmmakers expressed a willingness to negotiate with the army to deal with service objections to the script, but they met with what they considered absolute intransigence from the public affairs office. Again, the Air Force refused to consider cooperation on Rolling Thunder (1977), claiming that there were no known cases of air force officers becoming schizophrenic “there is nothing beneficial for the Department of Defense in the dramatization of this situation.”

The army flatly refused to consider assistance on Hair (1979), equating the Vietnam antiwar movement message in the stage play with an entirely different screenplay. The army even refused to discuss the request with the Defense Department's public affairs office. Only after that office suggested that script contained a moral tale of one friend giving his life for another did the filmmakers receive some limited assistance from the National Guard.

The army did provide full assistance to one movie about combat during the 1970s cycle of Vietnam War movies. Hamburger Hill (1979) gives a highly positive portrayal of American courage in combat. Despite the heroism, however, the film contains a strongly antiwar statement: soldiers conquer an enemy‐held hill at high cost and then retreat, with no explanation of the reasons for either the battle or the withdrawal.

In 1979, the first wave of Vietnam movies came to an end. Ironically, despite the negative portrayals of the American fighting experience that these films had contained, Hollywood had concurrently been rehabilitating the image of the U.S. armed forces. Not so badly tarred by the war as the other services, the navy could serve as a viable subject for filmmakers who wished to create patriotic stories of men in uniform, particularly as the United States celebrated its bicentennial in 1976.

The navy had refused to provide even limited assistance to The Last Detail (1973) and Cinderella Liberty (1973), both set in the peacetime Navy, because its public affairs office believed the films reflected anti‐Vietnam War sentiment. In contrast, the navy embraced Midway (1976), which focused on the Battle of Midway, the first great U.S. naval victory of World War II. The service readily ignored the insipid fictional story that overlaid the documentarylike portrayal of the famous battle, recognizing that aerial combat footage would create high drama and an appreciation of the courage of the participants.

The success of the film, perhaps due to the nation's longing for a military success following the debacle of Vietnam, encouraged Hollywood to return to the navy as a locale for other stories including Gray Lady Down (1978), Raise the Titanic! (1980), and The Final Countdown (1980). Each showed naval officers and men doing their jobs in a competent, highly professional manner.

Paradoxically, the navy refused to become involved with An Officer and a Gentleman (1982), a traditional rite‐of‐passage love story, not at all different from the thirties Hollywood romances for which the service regularly provided men and ships. In this case, the Navy's public affairs office objected to the language, graphic sex, and suicide of an officer who flunked out of the Naval Aviation Officer program. The service recognized its mistake after the film became a box office hit and people assumed the navy had provided the ambiance. As a result, the navy readily agreed to lend the producers of Top Gun (1986) an aircraft carrier and planes, and gave access to the Top Gun school of naval aviators. The top‐grossing film of the year, it marked the final rehabilitation of the American military image.

Admittedly, such films as The Great Santini (1979) and Private Benjamin (1980) also contributed to the more positive portrayals of the armed services. Consequently, even the second wave of Vietnam stories including Oliver Stone's Platoon (1986), Stanley Kubrick's Full Metal Jacket (1988), and Brian De Palma's Casualties of War (1989), despite containing some of the most vivid images, real and imagined, about the American experience in Vietnam, did not seriously affect the nation's renewed confidence in the military establishment.

At the same time, filmmakers have shown less inclination to hide the armed services' deficiencies in their contemporary stories. As a result, the military has more readily refused to provide assistance to such films as Broken Arrow (1996), in which an air force pilot helps steal a nuclear weapon. The Hunt For Red October (1990), however, which was the last film of the Cold War and the first of the “New World Order,” received extensive assistance from the navy. The service did reject a request for assistance on Crimson Tide (1995), arguing that its portrayal of command and control of nuclear weapons aboard U.S. submarines had no basis in fact. Likewise, the army turned down a request for help on Courage Under Fire (1996) because this film about the Persian Gulf War showed some U.S. soldiers being cowardly under fire and lying about their actions.

In the post‐Cold War world, of course, filmmakers face the problem of deciding who poses a threat to U.S. national security. So far, Hollywood has had the armed services fight terrorists of the Irish Republican Army in Patriot Games (1994), Colombian drug dealers in Clear and Present Danger (1995), nuclear terrorists in True Lies (1995), and ultranationalist Russians in Air Force One (1997). To be sure, these enemies do not compare with the threat that Germany or Japan posed in World War II. Nevertheless, Hollywood has portrayed the cinematic sailors, soldiers, aviators, and Marines doing their jobs competently, and the armed services have willingly provided assistance as the symbiotic relationship between the film industry and the armed services continues.

[See also Film, War and the Military in: Newsfilms and Documentaries; News Media, War, and the Military; Photography, War and the Military in; Propaganda and Public Relations, Government.]

Bibliography

• Joe Morella, Edward Epstein, and John Griggs, The Films of World War II, 1973.
• Clyde Jeavons, A Pictorial History of War Films, 1974.
• Jack Shaheen, ed., Nuclear War Films, 1978.
• Lawrence Suid, Guts & Glory, 1978.
• Steven J. Rubin, Combat Films, 1945–1970, 1981.
• Lawrence Suid, ed., Air Force [introduction to and script of the film], 1983.
• Bernard Dick, The Star‐Spangled Screen, 1985.
• Jeanine Basinger, The World War II Combat Film: Anatomy of a Genre, 1986.
• Lawrence Suid, Sailing on the Silver Screen, 1996