Caseys historically haven’t gotten a break (or brake).
I’m not really thinking of a lot of good examples off the top of my head other than The Alamo, but it seems like there are a lot of war movies where the ‘good guys’ make a valiant last stand against an overwhelming enemy force, and are all wiped out by the end.
In Raiders of the Lost Ark, it’s been pointed out that Indiana Jones, for all his danger-defying adventures, never really does anything that affects the overall plot of the movie in any way. He loses in the sense that he wanted to find the Ark of the Covenant and get it to a museum, but it ends up boxed away and forgotten in a U.S. government warehouse.
Glory?
Depends if you think Custer was a good guy or not.
Well, as Rosa Luxemburg put it, " the working class will lose every battle until the last one"
The one and only time I saw it, I was probably 12 – it was one of the local TV stations’ late-Saturday-night films. I watched it until the end, and the entire film (not just the ending) was just extremely depressing, which I suppose was the intent. It was, clearly, enough of a downer that it stuck with me for 40+ years.
Looking at Wikipedia, I see that it got nine Academy Award nominations, so it was likely a well-done film, but not one that I’d want to see again.
They also discover in the novel they have nothing in common, although the film alters that.
A Few Good Men
The defendants’ sole goal was to stay in the Marines and although they beat the more serious charge, they were still convicted of a lesser charge and dishonorably discharged.
Network. What IS it with the 70s? Howard Beale gets assassinated on live TV, Max Schumacher loses his job and his wife, Diana Christensen loses her soul, and we lose everything, as the over the top absurdity of the film has become our reality. UBS is Fox.
Didn’t you grow up in WI? It was probably the same station I saw it on.
Think of Stephen King reminded me of The Long Walk. Man, when King decides to actually finish a story (instead of just stop telling the story or maybe have everybody fuck) he’s a real downer.
I did. It would have been on WFRV (channel 5) in Green Bay.
The first thing that comes to mind:
The Alamo (1960)
Then there’s:
Corregidor (1942)
13 Rue Madeleine (1946)
D. O. A. (1949)
That was Richard Bachman. 
The movie “First Blood” ends with Rambo surrendering to the police (and subsequently going to prison).
Yep, I was planning on posting that, but you beat me to it.
STILL ticks me off that Driving Miss Daisy won the Best Picture Oscar over Glory that year.
Rocky won. No, he didn’t win the boxing match, but he got the victory he was looking for.
At some point in the movie, Rocky comes to the realization that Apollo Creed is too good and he can’t possibly win. But what he could do is go the distance which he did. Rocky attained the victory he was looking for.
Another 1970s dystopian film which just came to mind: Silent Running.
In the future, the Earth’s forests have died off, except for a small population of trees being kept alive in “bio-domes” on spaceships.
When the corporate owners of the spaceships decide to end the program, destroy the bio-domes, and return the ships to profitable, commercial service, one of the crew members (played by Bruce Dern), who is an ecologist, kills off his crewmates, and steals the ship, which only has one remaining bio-dome.
At the end, he’s only able to save that one dome’s worth of trees, sending it off into deep space with electric lighting and a single drone (robot) to tend the trees, before blowing up his ship, and killing himself, to avoid being captured.
I always took the ending to mean Pink recovered from his self-induced isolation. At the end he is sifting through the rubble of his wall. The movie implies with the molotov cocktail that the cycle may begin again, and the album implies it is a circle by the “Is this where…” that ends the album and the “…we came in” that starts it.
I’d like to think he recovered. OTOH, I don’t think Waters ever got over it.
Similar to this is Arlington Road, in which the anti-government militia not only gets away with their bombing, they trick the hero into being an unwitting mule to drive their bomb into the target garage, so that postmortem, he ends up being blamed for everything, so there’s no chance the militia will ever be held responsible.