I haven’t seen many films set in WWI. I saw All Quiet On The Western Front once a long time ago, but I don’t remember much of it. (I’ve really got to see it again.) There’s The Blue Max, which I liked because of the flying; Wings, a classic film and a great story; and Peter Weir’s excellent Gallipoli. And of course, Blackadder Goes Forth. But it seems I’m lacking on having seen many WWI films.
While channel surfing one day I came upon a show that looked like it was from the '90s that, in my brief glimpse, seemd to portray the Germans as ‘evil’. Sort of a toned down sterotype of the Nazis. Now, I grew up watching WWII films and casually studying WWII history. But AFAICR WWI was about empires seeing an opportunity to increase their holdings, treaty obligations, ethnic grievances (in the Balkans), and 19th Century thinking, as opposed to the Nazi’s goal of domination.
First: What are other films set in WWI? Second: How were ‘The Hun’ portrayed? Evil Proto-Nazis? Nasty aristocrats? Chivalrous aristocrats? Just plain evil? Patriots?
After the US entered the war in 1917, Hollywood used the mountain of British propaganda as a three-year backlog of material for movies such as Hearts of the World, where D.W. Griffith substituted dirty, horny Huns for the marauding Blacks of Birth of a Nation
Although the Germans didn’t play catch with Belgian babies on their bayonets, they did sumarily execute Belgian and French civillians. The also shot English nurse Edith Cavell, for assisting British POW’s escape into Holland.
La Grande Illusion has French POWs held by the Germans. The Germans are mostly sympathetic, the commandant feels kinship with a fellow aristocrat POW, albeit a little classist against the “common” prisoners.
Oh! What a Lovely War! (more an antiwar fantasy than an actual WWI flick, though). Germans were portrayed as idiots, as were the British. King of Hearts – Germans not really shown all that much (though there’s an amusing reference to Hitler), but I’m sure they were portrayed as being insane.
As Slithy Tove pointed out, silent films during the war years portrayed the Germans as sadistic killers. It was partly to done as a way to make the movies more respectable, especially once the US entered the war.
That’s one of my favorite WWI films. The classicism was the whole point, the illusion referred to in the title. Your country and my country may be at war, but if you’re in the upper crust like I am, then there’s no need to be uncivil to each other. An ultimate Good Ol’ Boy system. This came out in 1937, before Hitler really started gearing up, so there was not yet a strong German-as-devil theme.
Yeah. And that’s one of the most riveting scenes in all of war movies.
That movie also is fascinating to watch, with the spacious sumptious accomodations made by the nattily attired upper crust sending the troops off to war, in cramped, muddy trenches. But Kubrick was good with stuff like that.
And the young lady would later become (and is to this day) Mrs. Stanly Kubrick.
Joyeux Noel from 2005 is about the well known Christmas Day truce in 1914. It shows French, Scots and German soldiers without making any claims of moral superiority for anyone.
The story of “the Lost Battalion” has been filmed twice
A 1919 documentary/re-enactment starring the survivors of the actual event.
I have not seen it.
A 2001 TV movie starring Rick Schroder as Major Whittlesey.
I enjoyed it. The Germans were not particularly evil, although they were quite eager to win the battle. There was a bit of class strife, aristocratic German Officers vs working-class American enlisted men, though it was a pretty minor plot element. The British and French generals were depicted as far worse than the Germans.
I think most of the movies that would have portrayed the Germans as evil incarnate would have been silent, so unless you’re a silent movie buff, you wouldn’t have seen them. By the late 20s, attitudes about WWI had changed dramatically, and no one wanted to be seen as a warmonger.
