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That one’s a toss-up for me – I can’t decide if it’s more boring than The Man in the High Castle (the book – I’ve never seen the show), or vice versa.
Similar to my inability to decide which is worse – baseball or basketball.
Apocalypse Now is probably my favorite movie ever, but it’s probably not my favorite war movie. I know that sounds like a contradiction but sometimes war is just a way of creating extreme situations that stimulate extreme (and revealing) behavior in the characters. A “proper” war film is one where human behavior and decisions collectively determine the outcome of a historical event.
That sort of brings up a related thought- it seems to me that maybe there are really 3 categories of movies at work in the thread- “war movies”, where the fighting is a major catalyst of the story, “wartime movies” which are set in wartime, but don’t necessarily have any portrayals of fighting, “military movies” which are about military people/events, but not during wartime.
There’s clearly overlap, but for example, Stripes and Private Benjamin are military movies, but not war movies. Something like a Saving Private Ryan is clearly a war movie. Something like Mrs Miniver is a wartime movie.
And FYI, I HATED Fury. Mostly because it was historically inaccurate to the point of absurdity. During April 1945, the Germans were completely on their heels- the US had figured out the logistical struggles that had caused the earlier pauses in the advance across France and western Germany after D-Day, and had overwhelming superiority in men and equipment versus the Germans. There was no situation at that point in the war where an untrained typist would end up an assistant driver in a M4 tank- there would have been plenty of trained replacements by that point, and plenty of tanks for that matter. The US forces were NOT at the end of their rope- they were likely better supplied and reinforced than at most times since D-Day.
And any SS battalion trying to march to a crossroads and hold it would have been absolutely wrecked by combined arms, especially air power at that point. The Allies were advancing something like 20 miles a day by then- nothing the Germans had left in the West would have slowed them down in the least bit, not that the Germans were even trying- they wanted the Western Allies to conquer as much of Germany as they possibly could; they knew that a post-war Germany under the US, France and Germany would be much better off than under the Russians. That’s why they fought like demons in the East, and much less so in the West.
Had the crew of Fury chosen to do what they did in real life, it was essentially a deliberate suicidal choice. Which would have been fine in the context of the movie, with the original crew members having been changed so much by the war that they were unsuited for civilian life. But if that was the story choice, why lessen it by making it out as if the US forces were in desperate straits? Why not hammer it home by pointing out that US forces were absolutely dominant at this point?
Generation War is excellent.
I also have a sneaky liking for some of the 1940s propaganda films made by the USA and the UK. Yes, they can be hokey, underfunded and hurriedly produced.
Mrs Miniver
Went the Day Well
Destination Tokyo
In Which We Serve
Lots of good ones already. WIth a very loose definition of war movie, i’ll add
Ice Station Zebra (cold war)
Empire Strikes Back (very cold war)
Slaughterhouse-Five (Dresden fire bombing)
Henry V (Agincourt)
Aliens (game over)
Edge of Tomorrow (die, rinse, repeat)
War of the Worlds (Cruise version)
John Carpenter’s “The Thing” (attempted genocide)
Battle of Algiers
La Commune (all 345 minutes
The War Game
Fury is a bad film because it feels like the script was written in the 1980’s and was just never updated.
Notably it contains a bunch of weird historical falsehoods that by 2014 most people who study history already knew were bullshit. The whole “American tanks are inferior to the German tanks!” is the most notable, as that’s the entire theme of the movie but that whole idea has been disputed in modern academic literature since the 90’s. There’s also like you said the bizarre “Throwing random people into American tanks because American tankers were taking obscene losses” which is also related to the former, the idea that American tanks were such deathtraps nobody wanted to be in them.
Old thread of mine. Did not reread.
Did anyone mention The Cranes Are Flying? Ashes and Diamonds?
You’d think so based on his TV show performances, but he was awarded a Bronze Star for rescuing Marines under heavy enemy fire during the invasion of Tarawa in WWII.
It’s just bad; they could have written the same basic story and set it during the Battle of the Bulge, and had it be heroic, historically accurate, and interesting.
Yes, you wouldn’t have had the whole subtext of Collier and the crew of Fury being war-weary and unsuited to anything post-war, but I felt like that was kind of lame anyway, relative to the whole Ellison coming-of-age story.
Yes to both.
Khartoum is great.
A great choice- but The Longest Day might be a little better.
Trivia time- IRL the only dudes who made it all the way out were two Norwegians, and a Dutch Pilot. No Brits and there were no Yanks in that camp at that time.
Some of the scenes were straight from The Longest Day- the book.
That may be the case, but it’s a work of fiction. “Here is a scene based on this thing that might have happened in real life” doesn’t change the fictional nature of the story. I mean, it’s WWII. Pretty much anything you can imagine happened to someone.
I’m not sure what the theme of the movie was, or was the story was. Everything eventually gets us to the battle at the crossroads, which was ridiculous, but it’s not really a STORY. It’s just a sequence of ugly scenes.
No love for Windtalkers (2002)?
The Guns of Fort Petticoat (1957) is pretty good, mainly thanks to Audie Murphy’s experience with drilling raw Texas National Guard recruits. Murphy’s character, a fictional lieutenant serving under Col. John Chivington, recognizes the harm that attacking the settlement at Sand Creek would do and goes AWOL to warn his hometown of reprisal from the natives. Virtually all of the men in the Texas town are off fighting the Civil War and the women they left behind are highly suspicious of Lt. Hewitt, due to his joining the US Calvary instead of the rebels. After one of the women turns up as being killed in a Cheyenne raid, Hewitt convinces the rest of the women to hole up in a nearby mission and drills them in defending themselves.
Of course, the film takes some liberties with the real history, notably Chivington’s fate.
The Germans loved Shermans. They called them “Tommy cookers.”
Best war movie? I’d say ‘12 O’clock High’. It is concisely structured around a pivotal event, avoids exaggeration and gratuitous gore, skillfully incorporates combat footage. And, the B17Ds are accurate for the time period.
‘King Rat’ is a close second.
‘Bridge Over the River Kwai’ is flawed, racist propaganda, but it is mostly entertaining flawed, racist propaganda.
You know, if somebody was going to like The Cranes Are Flying…
Agreed, and they need to be paired. But, the treatment is not as great as the events. The battle of Isandlwana could be as epic as ‘The Longest Day’.
Nitpick: I’m pretty sure the B-17s used in the movie were the F model, not the D. IIRC, the D model was just an upgrade of the C and didn’t have the sweeping tail fin. I think it lacked a ball turret and a tail gun as well.
The F model differed from the E mainly in having a smooth pexiglass nose, instead of one with a metal frame. It was the E model in which the first 8th AF raids were conducted in 1942.
The G model had a chin turret, and the waist guns were staggered in some examples.
I’m sure you are correct. They had the dorsal fin, ball turret and lacked the chin cannon. I thought the chin gun was E so assumed they were Ds. In any case I was impressed with the lack of inappropriate footage.
The one distraction was repeated use of the partial closeup of a P47 attacking the bombers.
Thanks!