War film

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The war film is a film genre concerned with warfare, usually about naval, air or land battles, sometimes focusing instead on prisoners of war, covert operations, military training or other related subjects. Sometimes they focus on daily military or civilian life in wartime without depicting battles. Their stories may be fiction, based on history, docudrama or occasionally biographical.

The term anti-war film is sometimes used to describe films which bring to the viewer the pain and horror of war.

1 History
2 The military and the film industry
3 See also
4 External links

[edit] History

[edit] 1920s and 1930s

Films made in the years following World War I tended to emphasise the horror or futility of warfare, most notably The Big Parade (1925), All Quiet on the Western Front (1930) and Grand Illusion (1937), while others focused on the drama inherent in the new technology and fading chivalry of aerial combat in films such as Wings (1927), Hell's Angels (1930) and The Dawn Patrol (1930 and 1938 versions).

[edit] 1940s

The first popular war films during the Second World War came from Britain and Germany and were often documentary or semi-documentary in nature. Examples include The Lion Has Wings and Target for Tonight (British) and Sieg im Westen (German).

By the early 1940s, the British film industry began to combine documentary techniques with fictional stories in films like In Which We Serve (1942), Millions Like Us (1943) and The Way Ahead (1944). Others used the medium of the fiction film to carry a propaganda message; about the need for vigilance (Went the Day Well?) or to avoid "careless talk" (The Next of Kin).

After the United States entered the war in 1941 Hollywood began to mass-produce war films. Many of the American dramatic war films in the early 1940s were designed to celebrate American unity and demonize "the enemy." One of the conventions of the genre that developed during the period was of a cross-section of the American people who come together with a common purpose for the good of the country, i.e. the need for mobilization. The American industry also produced films designed to extol the heroics of America's allies, such as Mrs Miniver (about a British family on the home front), Edge of Darkness (Norwegian resistance fighters) and The North Star (the Soviet Union). Towards the end of the war popular books became the source of films of higher quality and more serious tone, extoling more long-term values, including Thirty Seconds Over Tokyo (1944) and They Were Expendable (1945).

[edit] 1950s

The years after World War II brought a large number of mostly patriotic war films, which used the war as a backdrop for dramas and adventure stories. Many films made in Britain drew on true stories, such as The Dam Busters (1954), Dunkirk (1958), Reach for the Sky (1956) and Sink the Bismarck! (1960). The immediate aftermath of the war in Hollywood avoided the action film and delved into problems experienced by the returning veterans, turning out a number of high quality movies that included The Best Years of Our Lives (1946), Battleground (1949), Home of the Brave (1949), Command Decision (1948), and Twelve O'Clock High (1949). The latter two examined the psychological effects of combat and the stresses of command.

Hollywood films in the 1950s and 1960s were often inclined towards spectacular heroics or self-sacrifice in films like Sands of Iwo Jima (1949), Halls of Montezuma (1950) or D-Day the Sixth of June (1956). They also tended to toward stereotyping: typically, a small group of ethnically diverse men would come together but would not be developed much beyond their ethnicity; the senior officer would often be unreasonable and unyielding; almost anyone sharing personal information - especially plans for returning home - would die shortly thereafter and anyone acting in a cowardly or unpatriotic manner would convert to heroism or die (or both, in quick succession). Twentieth-Century Fox made a succession of war movies realistically-filmed in black-and-white in the early 1950s that highlighted little-known aspects of World War II, among them The Frogmen, Go For Broke!, You're in the Navy Now, and Decision Before Dawn.

Another large group of films emerged from the plethora of popular war novels penned after the war. Their quality was largely dependent on their faithfulness to the plot or theme of the original, casting, direction,and production values. Much of their appeal for the American public was that they covered virtually every branch of the service involved in the war. These include: The Young Lions (1958), The Naked and the Dead (1958), Battle Cry (1955), Run Silent, Run Deep (1958), Captain Newman, M.D. (1963), The Caine Mutiny (1954), Away All Boats (1956), From Here to Eternity (1953), Kings Go Forth (1958), Never So Few (1959), The Mountain Road (1960), and In Harm's Way (1965).

[edit] POW films

A popular sub-genre of war films in the 1950s and '60s was the prisoner of war film. This was a form popularised in Britain and recounted stories of real escapes from (usually German) P.O.W. camps in World War II. Examples include The Wooden Horse (1950), Albert R.N. (1953) and The Colditz Story (1955). Hollywood also made its own contribution to the genre with The Great Escape (1963) and the fictional Stalag 17 (1953). Other fictional P.O.W. films include The Captive Heart (1947), Bridge on the River Kwai (1957), King Rat (1965), Danger Within (1958), The Secret War of Harry Frigg (1968) and Hart's War (2002). Unusually, the British industry also produced a film based on German escaper Franz von Werra, The One That Got Away in (1957).

[edit] 1960s

By the early 1960s, films based on commando missions like The Gift Horse (1952) (based on the St. Nazaire raid) and Ill Met by Moonlight (1956) had begun to inspire fictional adventure films such as; The Guns of Navarone (1961), The Dirty Dozen (1967) and Where Eagles Dare (1968), which used the war as the backdrop for spectacular action films.

The late 1950s and 1960s also brought some more thoughtful big war films like Andrei Tarkovsky's Ivan's Childhood (1962), David Lean's Bridge on the River Kwai (1957), and Lawrence of Arabia (1962) as well as a fashion for all-star epics based on battles which were often quasi-documentary in style. This trend was started by Darryl F. Zanuck's production The Longest Day in 1962, based on the first day of the 1944 D-Day landings. Other examples included Battle of the Bulge (1965), Battle of Britain (1969), Waterloo (1970), Tora! Tora! Tora! (1970) (based on the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor), Midway (1976) and A Bridge Too Far (1977). A more recent example is the American Civil War film Gettysburg which was based on events during the battle, including the defense of Little Round Top by Colonel Joshua Chamberlain.

[edit] Post-Vietnam films

The effects of the Vietnam War tended to diminish the appetite for fictional war films by the turn of the 1970s. American war films produced during and just after the Vietnam War often reflected the disillusion of the American public towards the war. Most films made after the Vietnam War delved more deeply into the horrors of war than movies made before it. (This is not to say that there were no such films before the Vietnam War; Paths of Glory is a notable critique of war from 1957, the beginning of the Vietnam War era.) Later war films like Catch-22 (set in WWII) and the black comedy M*A*S*H (set in Korea), reflected some of these attitudes. One of the later films of what can be called the pre-Vietnam style is The Green Berets.

In the late 1970s and 1980s, the American industry produced war films critical of American involvement in Vietnam, including Apocalypse Now, Platoon, Hamburger Hill, Full Metal Jacket and Casualties of War.

The success of Steven Spielberg's visceral Saving Private Ryan in 1998, helped to usher in a revival of interest in World War II films. A number of these, such as Pearl Harbor, Enemy at the Gates and The Thin Red Line were aimed fairly squarely at the blockbuster market, while others, like Enigma, Captain Corelli's Mandolin and Charlotte Gray were more nostalgic in tone.

[edit] The military and the film industry

Many war films have been produced with the cooperation of a nation's military forces. The United States Navy has been very cooperative since World War II in providing ships and technical guidance; Top Gun is the most famous example. The U.S. Air Force provided considerable verisimilitude for The Big Lift, Strategic Air Command and A Gathering of Eagles, filmed on Air Force bases and using Air Force personnel in many roles.

Typically, the military will not assist filmmakers if the film is critical of them. Sometimes the military demands some editorial control in exchange for their cooperation, which can bias the result. The German Ministry of Propaganda, making the epic war film Kolberg in January 1945, used several divisions of soldiers as extras. Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels believed the impact of the film would offset the tactical disadvantages of the missing soldiers.

If the home nation's military will not cooperate, or if filming in the home nation is too expensive, another country's may assist. Many 1950s and 1960s war movies, including the Oscar-winning film Patton, were shot in Spain, which had large supplies of both Allied and Axis equipment. The Napoleonic epic Waterloo was shot in Ukraine (then part of the Soviet Union), using Soviet soldiers. The D-Day scenes in Saving Private Ryan were shot with the cooperation of the Irish army.