I have seen the first , and Burgess Meredith does a pretty good job. Pyle Oked him, and they talked.
Well, it could be not centered around a White man, and told entirely from the NA perspective.
It’s been a while since I saw the movie, but wasn’t Dustin Hoffman the sole Indian scout who managed to get away?
If you’re interested, there’s a thorough description of the battle and the hours leading up to it in John Keegan’s Fields of Battle: The Wars for North America.
Dustin Hoffman was playing a White man.
Those were a fun read, but any hard-headed Hollywood shot-caller would point to the disappointing results of the one attempt at a Flashman movie, and kill any ventures of its perceived imitators.
The Union occupation of Northern Alabama sounds like some pretty wild stuff… started out with the intention of being benevolent conquerors restoring order, and devolved into a vicious guerilla war with sabotage, terrorism, family-on-family conflict.
Also quite consequential… it convinced Sherman that the south couldn’t be defeated by normal conquest, it would require total war. He actually mustered a military unit from that area, assembled it with his other forces, and marched them through Georgia where he applied the hard lessons he’d learnt in Alabama.
IDK. I think there could be a strong, even prescient message in the story of a young white soldier, joined up with the Army due to circumstances, being mislead to his fate by other, more well-off white men seeking greater glory and power for themselves. Too late, the young soldier realizes the error of his ways, and is cut down along with his commanding officer in righteous retribution for what they have all done in the service of an ignoble cause.
One might draw inspiration from the castle siege in Ran, arrows flying every which way, fire all around, the atmosphere punctuated by volleys of gun fire as a lingering number of defenders realize how truly hopeless their position is, one of them uttering the words, “We truly are in hell.”
No, thanks, I’d prefer a depiction of what the Native Americans were thinking and feeling, rather than Dances With The Last Samurai II: BigHorn Boogaloo.
In particular, a baby born during the Potato Famine shot full of arrows in Montana 27 years later.
I understand why you might have that point of view. But I would rather see emphasis placed on defeat than victory. “The paths of glory lead but to the grave,” and all that.
That’d do it. And the theme song could be Garry Owen. Not the March used by the 7th cavalry, but the folk song of the same name.
That’s a tough sell unless the Battle of the Little Big Horn is just presented as a small part of the bigger story. In isolation, the battle is just brutal revenge against a scared and outnumbered attacker. It’s going to be real hard for the audience to sympathize with anybody.
That depends entirely on how monstrously you depict the losers. If they’re not painted as sympathetic, there won’t be any sympathy for them.
I think the story of Lettow-Vorbeck is ripe for Hollywoodization. Maybe because all the action would take place in the first half, you might start off with his support for far-right politics in the immediate post-Armistice period with him reminiscing about his exploits with flashbacks. Then continue to do so when he turns down the Nazis, and Hollywoodize it by flashing back to his good relations and understanding of his colonial troops, implying that there is some connection, even if untrue, between this and the fact that he has some empathy for people not like him. And then toward the end, show the end of the story for everyone involved, both the end of the WW1 campaign, his death, and the final granting of pensions to the surviving askaris.
I think I’d like to see an 8th Air Force movie or miniseries about the strategic bombing of Germany that focuses on the toughest part of the war- the summer 1943-early 1944 stretch when the USAAF started mounting large-scale raids into Germany without fighter cover. There were so many lost bombers and crews that they actually had to suspend missions for a while to recover.
Prior to then, the USAAF hadn’t mounted raids into Germany itself, and after that stretch, they had P-51 fighter cover all the way to the target and back. But from the Summer of 1943 through January or so of 1944, it was only the bombers, by the hundreds, going into the teeth of German flak and fighters to bomb German targets during the daytime. All of the horrifically bloody missions of the war were during that time frame- Ploesti, Schweinfurt-Regensburg, 2nd Schweinfurt (bloodiest mission of the war), Munster,
I think there’s a lot of fertile ground there for a good war movie or miniseries with the relentless casualties and the weird contrast between being in England and on the raids, it seems like there’s plenty of room for action and character development there.
Definitely a mini-series, with a running body count not unlike the remake of Battlestar Galactica. End with any survivors going on the first mission with escort and living to fly again.
Excellent choice. With the exception of “River Kwai” and one propaganda Errol Flynn movie, this entire theater of WW2 of was has been ignored. It’s also relevant, given the horrors and the loss of democracy in Myanmar today.
Sam Fuller made a Merrill’s Marauders about the CBI Theater. Not a great war film (I always thought Fuller somewhat cartoonish, despite all the praise heaped upon him by the indie crowd). Adding injury to insult, Jeff Chandler broke his back while filming and later died on the operating table. Adding insult to injury, this allowed Ester Williams to outlive him and attack his reputation by claiming he was a transvestite, without collaboration from anyone else who knew him intimately.
I have high hopes for Masters of the Air, which is apparently the final third of Spielberg and Hanks’ WWII trilogy, with Band of Brothers and The Pacific being the other thirds.
(full disclosure; my grandfather was a B-17 flight engineer/gunner in the 8th AF in 1943, so I’m intensely curious about his experiences)
There’s The Long and The Short and the Tall, some 50s British films, a whole lot of Chinese films and some Indian ones.
Those hadn’t been broadcast by me. Also, besides the British there were American units fighting there. I can’t think of a movie made about them, even when Hollywood remakes the same 10 movies 3x over each.