Movies about WWII

World War II has been the subject of a very large number of movies. I’ve seen a lot of the and have a few favorites. There are of course many other good films out there, but these are some that come to mind.

David Lean’s In Which We Serve, Michael Anderson’s The Dam Busters, and Ronald Neame’s The Man Who Never Was are my favorites among the British made movies from the war. I’ve heard The Cruel Sea is also good, but I haven’t seen it.  William Wellman’s Battleground and Raoul Walsh’s Battle Cry are two good depictions, one in the ETO and one in the Pacific, of a war fought by American  citizen soldiers. Some criticize these films for following a clichéd formula by populating their combat units with neatly diverse cross sections of the population, but in fact  the war did throw men from all sorts of backgrounds and origins together, often into units very similar to those depicted in these films. At least the characters in these films are mainly recognizably 1940’s people, and not, as is so often the way these days in “historical” movies, present day people projecting  present day attitudes, mannerisms, clichés,  and prejudices back in time.  I have seen only part of Wellman’s The Story of GI Joe, but it seems to compare well with the other  two. Fred Zinnemann’s From Here to Eternity is a pretty good film, but is really more a pre-war movie than a war movie.  Otto Preminger’s In Harm’s Way  is a very good movie about the naval war in the Pacific from Pearl Harbor  through a fictionalized version of the Solomons campaign. Its only real flaw is a silly soap opera subplot about a son  resenting his father (which is not in the novel the movie is based on). Dick Powell’s The Enemy Below is a good film about the naval war with German submarines in the Atlantic. Mark Sandrich’s So Proudly We Hail, Tay Garnett’s Bataan,  and Edward Dmytryk’s Back to Bataan are good movies about America’s defeat in the Philippines and  its aftermath, with Sandrich’s being my favorite of the group. John Milius’s Farwell to the King is quite odd, but a fairly good movie. Tora! Tora! Tora!  and The Longest Day  are my favorites among the semi-documentary dramatizations of the war’s major events. Finally there are my two favorite movies about the war - John Sturges’ The Great Escape  and John Ford’s They Were Expendable, which is the only really great movie about the war that I have seen. It is a wonderful movie, touching, strong and one of Ford’s best.  Its only really false note is a too generous treatment of Douglas MacArthur, but that flaw is both minor and quite understandable given the times.

I have also seen a number of bad or overrated movies about the war.  Some that come to mind are The Dirty Dozen and its epigones, The Guns of Navarone, which is not awful but is so vulgarly Hollywood hokey compared to the fine novel it is based on, Stalag 17, which is one of the few movies by Billy Wilder that I don’t like, and The Bridge on the River Kwai.  I have not sat through all of Saving Private Ryan, but have seen enough to think that I would see it as being about as overrated as  the other films  by the C. B. DeMille of our time.