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The Greatest War's Films
By Nick Dawson
At the start of Atonement, the prospect of World War II hangs over the characters like a dark cloud. When the film moves forward to 1943, we see a Europe ravaged by war, its soldiers and landscapes equally damaged by the brutality of conflict. In the film's most memorable sequence, Robbie (James McAvoy) and two of his fellow soldiers arrive on the beach at Dunkirk and see the scope and impact of the war all around them. Captured in a mesmeric long take, it is yet another attempt to encapsulate the horror and futility of World War II, a conflict which has been documented on film so much that it is fair to say that it has become a genre of its own.
When America entered the war after Pearl Harbor, Hollywood also joined the fight. Director Frank Capra contributed to the war effort with a series of highly influential propaganda films called Why We Fight. A seven-part series commissioned by the US government, its aim was to win the hearts and minds of Americans over to the war effort. This was not as easy as it sounds, due to the large German and Italian population in the country, and the prevailing anti-Soviet sentiment — itself created by the government. While these films had few actual fight sequences, their heavy use of graphics, and animation by Walt Disney Studios, provided one of the first and most powerful tools for Americans to conceptualize this global struggle. The first film, Prelude to War (1943), outlined for soldiers the reasons America had gone to war against fascist nations, and though it was primarily aimed at the forces actually at war it was also given a general release and won an Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature. The twin brothers Julius J. and Philip G. Epstein, who had recently collaborated on Casablanca, wrote six of the seven Why We Fight films between 1943 and 1945 and were integral in explaining why America no longer had the foreign policy expressed by Humphrey Bogart's Rick as "I stick out my neck for nobody."
Beyond those overt propaganda films, Hollywood picked up the rifle to fight in a number of major studio combat movies like Bataan (1943), Action in the North Atlantic (1943), The Fighting Seabees (1944). Made often in collaboration with United States Office of War Information, these pictures walked a tightrope by both providing a hungry homeland audience with a realistic sense of what war was — which was hell — and by providing hope through their stories of soldiers' undying spirit and courage. In MGM's Bataan, for example, all the action takes place in the midst of battle, with soldiers of all classes, ranks and races, dirty and desperate, fighting to the bitter end. For Americans, who were receiving news of the casualties on daily basis, these films gave a gritty reality to the heroism of their sons, brothers, and husbands.
Although not a war film per se, William Wyler's The Best Years of Our Lives (1946) encapsulated the problems of servicemen trying to return to normality after the traumas of war. The film struck a resonant chord with Americans: it not only became a huge critical and financial success but also won seven Academy Awards, including Best Picture, Best Director, Best Actor (Fredric March) and Best Adapted Screenplay (Robert E. Sherwood). However, Best Years was not indicative of the general treatment of World War II on screen; it was altogether too negative and questioning about a conflict that the Allies had, in fact, won.
As the war and its resulting problems receded from people's immediate consciousness, its events were increasingly used by Hollywood as a background for dramas of different timbres. There were films like the hawkishly patriotic The Sands of Iwo Jima (1949). This John Wayne vehicle about the 1945 Battle of Iwo Jima was very black-and-white in its depiction of the conflict between the Americans and the Japanese, persistently featured the rousing Marine Hymn as its soundtrack and was officially sanctioned by the U.S. Marine Corps itself. (It is interesting to compare this film with Clint Eastwood's 2006 movies Letters from Iwo Jima and Flags of Our Fathers, films which tell the story of the battle from the Japanese and American perspective respectively.) The same year, though, Twelve O'Clock High, a film backed by the U.S. Air Force and, like The Sands of Iwo Jima, featuring actual battle footage, focused more solidly on the human toll of the conflict than on lionizing the fighter pilots who were its central characters.
During the 1950s, while British cinema relived its doughty troops' and individuals' triumphs over the odds in The Dam Busters (1954), Reach for the Sky (1956) and Dunkirk (1958), American cinema showed a tendency to tell the wartime stories of lesser-known elements of the war. Decision Before Dawn (1951) was about intelligence gained from German POWs in the latter stages of the war, The Frogmen (1951) illustrated the role played by scuba divers in underwater demolition, and Go For Broke (1951) focused on a highly decorated army division of Nisei (second generation Japanese-Americans) who fought in Europe.
Possibly because of a broader perspective on the war that time had afforded coupled with a need to create epic movies in order to compete with television, the 1960s saw the emergence of a new breed of large-scale, star-studded WWII movies. The two most notable of these were The Longest Day (1962) and Battle of the Bulge (1965). Three hours long and seemingly starring every male star in Hollywood at the time, The Longest Day brought the D-Day landings to life, capturing both the small moments and huge battles, and daring to show the events from the Germans' perspective as well as the Allies'. Ken Annakin, co-director of The Longest Day, then took the reins single handedly on Battle of the Bulge, a film that aimed to repeat the major success of the first film ($50m in takings at the box office), but stumbled maybe because of its narrative was predominantly fictional rather than grounded in reality.
A national dissatisfaction with America's involvement in the Vietnam may have been a factor in a WWII movies' shift to an anti-war standpoint in the 1970s. The first year of the new decade saw the release of not only Mike Nichols' adaptation of Joseph Heller's satirical Catch-22 (about a WWII pilot who can't to quit the U.S. Air Force on the grounds of insanity because only a sane man wouldn't want to fight in the war) but also two other landmark films on the war, Tora! Tora! Tora! and Patton. The former told the story of the attack on Pearl Harbor and took the daring and unprecedented step of showing both sides of one of the nation's darkest days by it being a co-production shared between an American and a Japanese director. The latter was a warts-and-all profile of the WWII general (an Oscar-winning performance by George C. Scott) who loved war, and showed a picture of the conflict that was unsparing without being unnecessarily critical. (Patton's scriptwriter Francis Ford Coppola later seemed to draw on this flawed protagonist for Apocalypse Now's Colonel Kilgore, who famously declares "I love the smell of napalm in the morning!")
Later that decade, Richard Attenborough's A Bridge Too Far (1977) returned to the format of the epic, star-studded WWII movie, but this was not a tale of triumph but one of defeat, the failed attempt by the Allied forces and their paratroopers to take a series of bridges on the Rhine in 1944. One scene where French troops used the bodies of their dead to build a barricade to protect them from the Germans' advance encapsulated the tragedy and horror of war. That same year, maverick director Sam Peckinpah presented an even bleaker tale of the latter stages of WWII in Cross of Iron, whose central figure is a beleaguered German officer, Steiner (James Coburn), who is tired of the war and the cruel actions of his superior officers, men motivated only by self-interest. Despite Peckinpah's famous penchant for violence, the film (which was co-written by a now-aged Julius J. Epstein) was avowedly anti-war and brilliantly conveyed the dehumanizing and desensitizing effect of the war. No issue was made of Steiner's nationality (in the film he is more an apolitical soldier doing his duty rather than a Nazi), and there are parallels to be seen in Samuel Fuller's masterful The Big Red One (1980). Fuller's film features a similarly stoic and rugged leader, this time an American sergeant (Lee Marvin), trying to get his young troops through to the end of the war. Peckinpah and Fuller were both hard-boiled, old-fashioned men, WWII veterans who had seen the war in the raw themselves, and yet what is most notable in Cross of Iron and The Big Red One is their poignant, compassionate humanity and the underlying message that war destroys both the victors and the defeated.
While Hollywood focused squarely on a different war, Vietnam, during the 1980s, the 50th anniversary of the end of the war reignited interest in what some see as the last just war in which America has fought. After Schindler's List (1993), Steven Spielberg told another side of the war with Saving Private Ryan (1998), a film which brought the horror of the conflict into sharp focus with its startling reconstruction of the D-Day landings. The shocking immediacy of the sequence prompted New York Times critic Janet Maslin to say that Spielberg had brought back "passion and meaning to the [war film] with such whirlwind force that he seems to reimagine it entirely, dazzling with the breadth and intensity of that imagination. No received notions, dramatic or ideological, intrude on this achievement. This film simply looks at war as if war had not been looked at before."