There was a film I saw a long time ago called Freedom Radio that was very good. It was a propaganda film made by the British early in the war but set prior to the start of the war. It was about a small resistance group led by a doctor who served the Nazi hierachy. He witnessed his fraternity of intellectuals that at the start of the 1930s thrived, only to dwindle in size by the end as the Gestapo suppressed academic vigour and made dissenters dissappear. He was vehemently opposed to the ideology so with the help of a few others he orchestrated a hijacking of state propaganda radio to inform and warn the citizens of the Nazi plans. This caused panic in a cat and mouse game where the Nazis were being humiliated and weakened so a full throttle search for the broadcasters was undertaken.
Both were pretty gritty and realistic, which I enjoyed.
The Hurt Locker was already mentioned, but my $0.02? It was a three-years’ worth of “worst calls” condensed into 120 minutes. Kinda realistic, kinda not. Restrepo was another one I started to watch, but didn’t finish.
Some cold war favorites: Red Dawn (I know . . . I know. . .) Amerika . . . which I remember seeing as a young kid, but haven’t since. I’d like to re-watch it.
There was also another “nuclear warfare” movie that Reagan watched, and horrified him–I’d like to watch that too, but I cannot remember the name of it.
The United States has never been ‘occupied’ which is something necessary to consider for the citizens of a nation with a history of aggressive foreign policy. I guess Reconstruction would fit but I can’t think of a movie covering it other than Gone With The Wind
The Man in The High Castle does some of this, the book I mean, never watched the series.
I don’t believe it’s been mentioned but I feel Fury is an underrated movie. It’s one of the few war movies that deals with the subject of how combat affects men.
I see 1917 has been mentioned a couple of times. For me it is totally undermined (ha!) by the utter weakness of the plot. A big body of men are about to attack the Germans, despite all communications having been broken. So the top brass don’t send out dozens of wire repairmen; just two soldiers who have to cross an implausibly large bit of no-man’s land that holds an implausible number of German snipers. At the end the surviving soldier reaches his destination by random accident, having been washed down a river.
Twelve O’Clock High and Command Decision. The effects of war on the “brass” that have to send the soldiers out.
The BBC series Danger UXB follows the live of members of a WWII bomb disarmament/disposal team. Think of “The Hurt Locker” but with a British stiff-upper-lip.
The silent film The Big Parade by King Vidor. War as an adventure, then disillusionment and horror, further disillusionment at home, and finally redemption.
I tried watching Ameяika when I was prepping for graduate school. The whole premise was so absurd, I tuned out somewhere in the middle of the second installment. (And Sam Niell’s mangling of the Russian language was even worse than in The Hunt for Red October.)
I think it was the only program in television history that was counterprogrammed by its own network, probably out of embarrassment. (Ted Koppel did a number of concurrent Nightlines on Gorbachev and the USSR.)
Did anyone mention Braveheart? I don’t think it’s the best war movie, but it is very entertaining and provides a perspective on the actual battlefields of the time. Not necessarily a historically accurate perspective, but good movie making that gets us on the into the midst of the battles.