Here are my favorites, in no particular order. I’ll try to skip films already cited, but I’ll toss in a nod to Glory, A Walk in the Sun, The Longest Day, Zulu, and Aleksandr Nevsky. BTW, I got to see Aleksandr Nevsky in a big theater, with a freshly restored print, with a live full-orchestra performance of the score by Prokoffiev. You shoulda seen it.
Anyway, my weird list of great films:
Castle Keep. The most truly eccentric war movie I ever saw. You MUST see this film, I’ve never seen anything else that captured the insanity of war so vividly.
Kagemusha. Nobody can film battle scenes like Akira Kurosawa. This is a far better film than “Ran” but for some reason, is relatively obscure. It has recently been restored and digitally remastered.
Paths of Glory. One of the most vivid antiwar statements I’ve ever seen.
Spartacus. The battle scenes with the Romans could never be surpassed in sheer scale.
Dr. Strangelove. “You can’t fight in here, this is the War Room!” Kubrik gets a triple nod on my list.
The Horse Soldiers. John Ford, John Wayne, and William Holden do the Civil War. What more could you want?
Hell in the Pacific. John Boorman directs a cast of precisely two people, Lee Marvin and Torisho Mifune stranded on a desert island in WWII. Another truly eccentric film.
The Bedford Incident. An excellent cold war film, with every emotion stretched taut.
Shot Through the Heart. Released in 1998 on HBO, I don’t think it’s in general release on video or anything. A chilling tale of two childhood friends who ended up as snipers on opposite sides in Bosnia, and hunted each other.
I really like Samuel Fuller’s “The Big Red One.” Fuller took part in D-Day, as part of the U. S. Army’s First Infantry Division (which wore a big red “one” as a shoulder patch, hence the title). The 1st Army participated in all the major battles in Europe from North Africa onwards. The movie follows a Sergeant and four members of a squad as they fight their way through two continents, many countries and countless enemy soldiers. It’s got a good war-weary tone to it, and makes excellent use of Lee Marvin as the battle-toughened Sergeant leading his fresh-faced troops. It has a gripping D-Day sequence, but you have to keep in mind that the movie was made two decades before “Saving Private Ryan,” and is going to suffer in comparison as far as special effects are concerned.
Mark Hamill as one of the young recruits is better in this film than he was in any of his “Star Wars” appearances.
I can’t believe we got this deep into a topic, and no one’s mentioned <b>Patton</b>. More a character study than a war movie, but good lord, what a character. And it gives me an awe-struck feeling at what it meant to be a WWII general. I mean, would you be up to the task of ordering a million men across a continent? Kind of makes middle-management job crises seem a bit ridiculous.
MGibson: SPR, to me, showed war as being scary and deadly, but also as a noble sacrifice, a terrible necessity that takes in boys and makes them men. Three Kings showed war as a mortal, pointless farce, that takes in boys and makes them boys with guns, and then makes them corpses. It was funny, but that’s a far cry from glorifying war. Look at Dr. Strangelove, which ends with the iconic visual of Slim Pickens riding an A-bomb like a bronco. Funny as hell, but I don’t think anyone could say that Kubrick was glorifying nuclear war.
Paths of Glory. One of the most vivid antiwar statements I’ve ever seen.
I can’t believe it took so long for this to be mentioned. A superb movie. You can keep your Saving Private Ryan with its good guy bullets etc. If you remove the first 20 minutes you have a very ordinary jingoistic movie.
Cross of Iron is a good movie for a different perspective; as is Das Boot. More antiwar than war.
Labdad, it’s the First Infantry Division. The division patch is a red numeral one. Thus-The Big Red One. The First Division was orginized at the US’s entry into WWI. The division was put to gether from regular army units, and a brigade of Marines. The 28th Infantry regiment of the First Division was the first American unit to mount an offensive action in WWI, at Cantigny (can-ten-yah) in Northern France. From this action came the regiment’s battle cry and slogan,“Cantigny.” The division was in action in North Africa, Sicily, Italy and the Normandy Invasion (Omaha Beach) and all through the European theater during WWII. It was in Europe for Korea, and deployed from Europe and Fort Riley, KS, in 1965 for Viet Nam. In the Gulf Campaign the division breached the frontier barriers and other units passed through its lines to continue the attack. It was and is a good outfit. It is, however, merely a division, not an army.
I’ve been trying to think of a few more great films, and one came to mind: Hamburger Hill. IMHO, it is the best battle depiction on film of the Vietnam era. Much better than crap like Full Metal Jacket or Platoon.
The film is based on a real battle. Here’s an interesting site that analyzes the film’s historical accuracy, and fills in details from the real battle.
OK, here are some more obscure films I just dredged out of my memory. There might be a few more rattling around my subconscious that I can’t remember, but they’ll probably resurface.
Rogue Male. I’ve seen the original version and the modern remake with Peter O’Toole. O’Toole’s version is better. O’Toole is a proper British gentleman who decides to go on a hunting expedition… for Adolf Hitler.
Sergeant York. A more mainstream film but worth watching.
The Cockleshell Heroes. A rarely seen film, but worth watching if you can find it.
What everyone else said, plus Hamburger Hill and Iron Triangle. To me, there aren’t really any bad war movies. War movies are like westerns. Even the “bad” ones are still pretty enjoyable. Well, with the exception of To Hell and Back and Casualties of War. And I seem to be one of the few that couldn’t stand Thin Red Line.
I just went and saw Pearl Harbor. I thought it was an okay movie. I was prepared for it to be completely terrible, and it was definitely better than my expectations. I guess I need to see Tora! Tora! Tora! and compare it to that.
Full Metal Jacket seems like a comedy to me, the first half of it at least.
Yeah, it is a great film, isn’t it? Hey, now that I think about it, I’m calling dibs, I think I’ll change my handle to Rogue Male. But I’ll have to think about it first. Hands off this handle, for now!
Anyway, you should see the original B&W 1941 version, which I caught on the AMC channel once. I can’t see how this movie, which was a fairly mediocre jingoistic British war propaganda film, became such a bizzare psychodrama. I can’t even see how they decided to pick that film to remake.
I just recalled a film I saw that was probably the one film that affected me more than any other piece of film. Oddly, I saw it on public TV, in a series of cheaply produced 30 min films produced for highschool lit classes. They did a production of the Civil War story “Incident at Owl Creek Bridge” by Ambrose Bierce. I have never been able to track down this little piece of film. Boy I wish I could track down that series of short stories on film, they also did a production of my all-time favorite piece of American lit, The Man That Corrupted Hadleyburg by Mark Twain. I’ve never seen any other film of this great short story. But I’m getting off topic here…
IMHO, the Bierce story one of the greatest short stories in American literature. The story is fairly short, and well worth reading, so I’ll link to a free etext:
