What about films like The Best Years of Our Lives. A film about being home after the war. It’s all about how the war affected them and it’s a great film.
What is wrong with Midway?
Nothing really wrong with it, its just not that good. It was filmed in "Sensurround’ perhaps the penultimate ‘gimmick’ theaters tried to get people in to see the movies before they just started making blockbusters. The Sensurround movies dropped most plot to get scene of noise on the screen.
Midway had no real budget. Its action scenes, with few exceptions, are WW2 stock footage or outright stolen from Tora Tora Tora. There are some exceptions, such as the attack on Midway island, and some of the damage controls scenes on the carriers. But not much.
The movie follows the battle with decent accuracy, but skips a lot that wasn’t crucial (such as the Midway bombers trying to bomb the Japanese Fleet.) Added to this was some melodrama of a pilot with an interred Japanese girlfriend and a few other ho-hum plot thingies doesn’t make for much. You basicly end up with a movie that is a lot of reaction shots of Robert Mitchum and Henry Fonda as they seem to look on Navy WW2 stock footage that the producers realized was actually in color when it was shown on ‘World at War’ a couple of years earlier.
I’d probably put Patton in my top five, The Longest Day in my top ten and The Big Red One in my top fifty.
Well, it’s on the list, at number 40. I don’t have a problem with that being included, even though it stretches the term “war movie” somewhat, but a few of the others…much as I like Notorious, sorry, that just ain’t a war movie. Or, if we’re gonna put that in, we’ll have to open up the list for flicks like The Spy Who Came in From the Cold.
Hunh, just thought of a couple of others debatable as candidates: what about The Sand Pebbles and Master and Commander?
The African Queen doesn’t belong on this list. It is only very incidentally a war movie.
Gallipoli, on the other hand, is a glaring omission. I believe I would also include A Midnight Clear.
A very recent film that deserves consideration is Rescue Dawn, a visually stunning, moving, and well-acted Vietnam POW film.
And if you’re going to include Henry V, I would have chosen Kenneth Branagh’s 1989 version.
I disagree with some of the other things you said but I’ll address this. I don’t see these as attempts at humor. Maybe observations on the absurdity of war but not comic relief.
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Ok you got me there. But it was a very brief moment in a long movie.
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Not a joke. All hell is breaking loose. Richard Burton has been shot down and is crippled. The greatest battle in history is going on around him but he is reduced to looking at the boots of a dead German. Not supposed to get a laugh. I believe the young American soldier he points it out to says, “huh”. Not a laugh.
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Actually happened. Not comic relief.
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Mitchum was playing Norman Cota. He was one heroic son of a bitch. The portrayal was right on. From his wiki page:
Zulu is only 22?
Huh.
This list would be an awesome thing to buy all the flicks here for the Penultimate War Collection.
Hmmm, my list would be:
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All Quiet on the Western Front - The acting ain’t great, but the production, with modern soundtracking, is incredible.
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The Longest Day - There are scenes that have never been matched. The Luftwaffe strafing scene or the French attack will never be duplicated. Its also fun to play ‘spot the UK actor who isn’t really famous yet’.
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Zulu - Tense and well made. When I first saw this movie I honestly didn’t know how it would end. At the time I knew little of Roarke’s Drift and though it would end like The Alamo.
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Saving Private Ryan - Yes, it has its problems, but the first 30 minutes are the closests 99.999% of us will ever come to experiencing WW2 combat.
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Pork Chop Hill - Well made, overlooked, and until the end looking like it will end like Bataan. This movie shows the ‘grind’ of Korean combat.
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Tora Tora Tora - Slow at times in building its tension, this movie is amazingly accurate and some of the attack scenes are incredible.
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Waterloo - Despite the cuisinart editing and Steiger’s hamming it up as Napoleon, this movie shows quite the battle.
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Glory - Even if you removed the racial issue, it would still be the best Civil War movie made.
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Alexander Nevsky - When you get away from the silly characters swinging their swords randomly in close-ups, this is some amazing (if historical inaccurate) medieval battle footage.
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Braveheart - I know, I know. But tell me, do you know of many movies before this that made mass martial Combat exciting? There were very few, and many that looked silly.
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Colonel Wolodyjowski - Yeah, you never heard of it. But its good, and very non-hollywood.
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Black Hawk Down - A running street fight. Probably the best movie about modern combat.
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Das Boot - Submarine movies tend to get the short shrift from me, but not this one.
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A Very Long Engagement - An improbable, but incredibly watchable tale with some impressive WW1 scenes interspersed.
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Henry V - Kenny’s version. Larry’s ultra-clean ‘Knights in Derricks’ version is just a silly wartime propaganda piece.
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Zulu Dawn _ Fair is fair. This movie isn’t as well made as ‘Zulu’ but it captures the ineptitude of that early colonial war.
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Spartacus - One wishes for some better direction on the battle scenes, however.
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A Bridge Too Far - Almost all the UK actors from Longest Day, except now they are famous! Overall a good movie, although with some abysmally costly casting decisions (Robert Redford? WTF!?)
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The Big Red One - Peckinpah does WW2! And drags Luke Skywalker with him!
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The Last of the Mohicans - Looks great, although one does get tired of the musket-ball proof, club-proof indians as bad guys.
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Sahara - Much overlook Bogart war film.
Now on the other side of the fence. Some of the WORST war movies ever made:
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The Fall of Berlin - Ugh! A complete Stalin stroke-fest with laughably inept battle scenes. This movie was all but destroyed during de-Stalinization, probably more for its embarassment factor than any propaganda value. The director is no Eisenstein, that is certain.
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Pearl Harbor - GAH! Just proves that tons of CGI can’t make up for shitty writing and dreary plotlines. Believe the song: Pearl Harbor really was a bad movie.
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The remake of Sahara with Jim Belushi in the Bogart role. Dear Hollywood producers: Cocaine is not inspiration.
What did you like about Sahara as a war movie? It’s a good Bogart movie, but there were no American units there, and the incident is fictional, is it not?
Of course, it has the great line, “When I get to Berlin, I’ll be drivin’ this tank.”
Peckinpah does WW2? IMDB doesn’t mention him having anything to do with The Big Red One. IIRC, Cross of Iron was the only film he made that was set in WW2. *The Wild Bunch * was set in the Mexican revolution, so maybe it qualifies as a war film. Perhaps you’re saying TBRO was filmed and edited in Peckinpah’s style?
Ben-Hur? Yeah, there’s a naval battle. But the Romans didn’t use “galley slaves.” Some of the other movies are only peripherally “war movies” but I might give them a pass for their excellence. (Notorious, for one.) But this is Ben Hur!
And why no Tora! Tora! Tora!?
The entire tank crew is American. Yes, it is fictional, but so what? It is one of the few films that if I catch it on TV I will end up watching until the end.
bah. I knew it was Fuller and typed out Pekinpah. My mind was on Cross of Iron I guess.
There were no Americans serving there before America entered the war. I thought accuracy was a prerequisite for war movies mentioned in a history magazine. It is a very good film. I was disappointed to find it on the schedule and see the remake instead. 
Hey, speaking of tank crews wandering the desert, just thought of another one for consideration: The Beast. Probably the only western film to look at the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan from their side, and, IMO, highly underrated.
I’d definitely strike Notorious and Foreign Correspondent because, as good as those Hitchcock films are, they’re about espionage/intrigue, not war per se.
I thought **Letters from Iwo ** was way overrated, lacking the sense of scale that the real battle must’ve had. One would never know from the film, which made it look like the island was defended by about 200 Japanese, that 26,000 Japanese soldiers were dug in. And that one CGI shot of the American Navy surrounding the island doesn’t make it, I’m afraid.
What would I include? Bravo Two Zero, a very gritty little British film about a small British SAS squad’s exploits (and sufferings) during Gulf War I; this unit would become the most-awarded British SAS unit in history. It sports some unique fight scenes, such as when the unit, armed with machine guns and maybe a couple of grenade launchers, manages to – in open desert terrain with no cover, armor, or vehicles – repulse a couple of Iraqi personnel carriers full of soldiers.
[just saw El Kabong’s post on The Beast] Oh yeah, that film’s great! All the more impressive for coming out at around the same time the actual war was winding up, with the Soviets’ exit from Afghanistan. Novel subject matter, terrific cinematography and scenery, and a series of well-staged action set pieces illustrating various aspects of the Soviet invasion and the mujahedeen’s resistance.
Well, I’d have Breaker Morant a hell of a lot more highly-ranked than on those lists (91 and 78, respectively), but otherwise things look about right. My personal favorites:
Breaker Morant
Black Hawk Down
Saving Private Ryan
Glory
Gallipoli
Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World
Apocalypse Now (the helicopter attack on the Vietnamese village is simply awesome)
Gettysburg (mostly for Jeff Daniels’s shoulda-been-Oscar-winning turn as the great Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain).
Would Fail-Safe count? Scary and well-acted.
I wish there was a good, relatively recent, big-budget American Revolution movie. A good screenwriter and director could do a lot with that.
How would each of you rank the late 60’s-70’s ‘Historical Epics’ (I count 4 - Longest Day, Bridge to Far, Midway, and Tora, Tora, Tora)?
For me, personally:
- A Bridge Too Far
- Tora, Tora, Tora
- Longest Day
- Midway
And my personal top ten war movies, in no particuliar order:
Patton
Glory
Kelly’s Heroes
The Great Escape
A Bridge Too Far
Tora, Tora, Tora
Saving Private Ryan
The Bridge On the River Kwai
The Guns of Navarone
Gallipoli
I personally despise The Thin Red Line more than any other movie I’ve ever seen, but that’s only because I watched it without being under chemical influence. Calling it “pretentious nonsense” would be too kind.
I like Three Kings more each time I see it. The interrogation scene is a bitter summarization of what’s wrong with mankind.
Sailboat