Over Memorial Day weekend I saw a number of lists of “Greatest War Movies” while TCM and other stations showed a festival of war movies of varying quality. I was appalled at many of the “greatest” which I found heavily weighted to fairly lightweight fare, leaning heavily towards movies made in the last 10 years. Saving Private Ryan is without doubt a great picture and a great war movie, however, IMO it’s got 20 excellent minutes at the beginning and 20 excellent minutes at the hand sandwiched around a fairly tedious middle. Many really excellent war movies were completely absent from all but the largest lists.
So, for example, rarely does Hell’s Angels make anybody’s list of great war movies despite the fact that its aerial combat scenes stand up to this day and it was the picture that put Jean Harlow on the map.
Some of the movies that were on practically everybody’s list are arguably not war movies at all, for example, The Dirty Dozen. Is it really a war movie? I think it more closely resembles a caper picture.
Prison camp pictures are a genre of their own and they frequently have little in common with other war movies. Is Waterloo Bridge a war movie? Certainly WWI is central to the picture but I’m not convinced it’s a war movie. How about the many excellent home front pictures? Or The Best Years of Our Lives, IMO one of the best pictures ever made whatever genre it belongs to?
Rather than answering my question, I’ll just ask it again: what is a war movie?
I’ll save the “greatest” list for another post.
HBO’s Band of Brothers.
I think that’s a great question.
War movies tend to be……..almost documentary like…(Private Ryan or Sink the Bismark)……or capers and spoofs….(Where Eagles Dare; Dirty Dozen)……or simple boom and bang action thrillers..(Many, Like Red October)……or raw political statements..(Apocolypse Now) ……or rah-rah’s….(12 O’Clock High)……or intense character explorations…(Das Boat; Dear Hunter, also political)……..they’ve even been half love stories. (Many) And then the just plain pathetically stupid: JarHead
On the other hand, I guess that can be said about all movie genres.
By the way. My vote, hands down for “best?” Das Boat (both of them)
I once proposed Apocolypse Now as one of the best war movies on a milblog to some complaints. It’s not a war movie, it’s a bad remake of Heart of Darkness. Me: Yes, remade as a war movie. I think the problem was that it was an anti-war movie, so were Johnny Got His Gun, M*A*S*H, Deerhunter, . . . Certainly, an anti-war movie can be a war movie, can’t it?
Drew: “they’ve even been half love stories”
I’ll suggest Cassablanca, which I think is a war movie and a romance.
How does it go?
“I don’t think I can remember it, Sam.”
“You can play it for her, you can play it for me. Play it!!”
All Quiet on the Western Front is quite anti-war and it’s certainly one of the great war movies.
I love Casablanca. I can probably recite it. But I don’t think it’s a war movie. I think it’s a spy/intrigue-romance hybrid.
I think it’s a romance/espionage thriller/ war hybrid. There’s a significant motif dealing with America and isolationism and its responsibility to the world war that is very iconic. But I wouldn’t put in the best war movie category because that’s just the one thread.
Here’s my attempt: A “war movie” must have a war in the foreground of the action. For example, Casablanca is set against the backdrop of WWII, but the war never actually makes it to the forefront of the action.
What about biopics? My view is that movies about T.E. Lawrence, Churchill, Lincoln, and even Patton consitute a separate genre.
Prison camps tend to be isolated from combat and have story lines about incarceration and escape that you might find outside war time. But the Bridge on the River Kwai strike me as not bein so isolated or replicable.
I think that The Bridge on the River Kwai is sui generis. It really defies classification. War movie? Historical drama? Surreal drama?
Need I mention Black Hawk Down? It has the advantage of lacking any type of overly sentimental bullshit.