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Part 1 |
Some war films do balance the soul-searching, tragic consequences and inner turmoil of combatants or characters with action-packed, dramatic spectacles, enthusiastically illustrating the excitement and turmoil of warfare. And some 'war' films concentrate on the homefront rather than on the conflict at the military war-front. But many of them provide decisive criticism of senseless warfare.
War films can also make political statements - unpopular wars (such as the Vietnam War and the Iraq War), have generated both supportive and critical films about the conflict (i.e., Robert Altman's M*A*S*H (1970), Kenneth Branagh's Henry V (1989), and Michael Moore's documentary Fahrenheit 9/11 (2004)). War films are often paired with other genres, such as romance, comedy (black), and suspense-thrillers. A number of war films are actually historical epics, authentic attempts to recreate the experience of war on screen, rather than pure war films. Some are actually westerns masquerading as war films. This genre has existed since the earliest years of cinematic production in the silent era. Film-makers have been provided ample opportunities for material from American history, stretching from the French and Indian Wars to the Vietnam War. In particular, the many wars of the 20th century (primarily the First and Second World Wars, but also subsequent wars) have provided rich material for film makers. War films as a major film genre emerged after the outbreak of World War I. Earliest War Films: The first war film to be documented was a one-reel, 90-second propagandist effort - the Vitagraph Company's fictitious Tearing Down the Spanish Flag (1898), produced in the year of the Spanish-American War. It portrayed a faked, reconstructed version of the seizure of a Spanish government installation in Havana by U.S. Army troops, the removal of the foreign flag, and its replacement by the Stars and Stripes. One of the first to show the necessity for preparedness during the Great War's European conflict, thereby demonstrating the propagandistic power of the new medium, was Vitagraph's silent film drama The Battle Cry of Peace (1915) with Norma Talmadge. It proposed the idea of what would happen if America was invaded on its own soil by a hostile European power and taken over, with an invasion of New York City. In 1918 in particular, many films documented the momentous sinking of the Lusitania in May of 1915 by a German U-boat and argued for US entrance into the war, such as Vitagraph's Over the Top (1918) (with its hero James Owen joining the British army after the Lusitania's sinking) and Winsor McKay's short animated film The Sinking of the Lusitania (1918).
A few major films argued for pacifism, such as producer Thomas Ince's preachy epic film Civilization (1916), in which the character of Christ himself toured the Emperor through the devastating results of war and preached a message of Love (not War). D. W. Griffith's 4-strand epic Intolerance (1916) was deliberately designed to show man's inhumanity to man and the horrors of war so that audiences would reject war. The film ended with divine intervention interrupting the conflict. One of the most popular hit songs of 1915 reflected the pacifistic mood: "I Didn't Raise My Boy to Be A Soldier," and President Wilson narrowly won a second term on a campaign promise to keep the US out of the European conflict. [Although American Civil War war films are scarce, they include: Gone with the Wind (1939), the westerns Shenandoah (1965) and The Outlaw Josey Wales (1976), Glory (1989), Gettysburg (1993) and its prequel Gods and Generals (2003).] World War I (The Great War) Era Films:
Hollywood director D. W. Griffith's Hearts of the World (1918) was a sentimental, propagandistic film to encourage US entry into the European conflict of the first world war - it included actual battle footage filmed on location in 1917 on the outskirts of the war itself (with the cooperation of the British War Office and the French Government). Griffith's film expressed the effects of the war on a recruit, and displayed the viciousness of the Germans in the person of actor/director Erich von Stroheim, who played the part of a ruthless, cold-blooded, hateful officer - a "beastly Hun." The semi-documentary My Four Years in Germany (1918), the first real hit for Warner Bros' Studios, was presented as fact - it presumed to show the first-hand experiences of James Gerard, the American ambassador to Germany from 1913-1917, including his witnessing of innumerable and cruel German "atrocities" that were greatly exaggerated in re-enactments, although they appeared true when mixed with actual footage. After the Armistice ending World War I in 1918, war films ceased for the most part. European film-making centers were in ruins, giving Hollywood the boost it needed. Hollywood was now responsible for 80% of US film production and New York controlled world film distribution. The anti-war film that made Rudolf Valentino a star was Rex Ingram's very successful The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse (1921) - it used WWI as a backdrop for its story of illicit love. Appearing around the same era to express the freedoms of American democracy was Griffith's epic America (1924), a melodramatic account of the American Revolution with innumerable set-pieces (the ride of Paul Revere, Wintering at Valley Forge, etc.). A Revival of War Films in the Mid-1920s:
Director Raoul Walsh's pacifistic What Price Glory? (1926), Fox's answer to Vidor's film, was very different -- it told of two Marines - Captain Flagg and Sgt. Quirt (Victor McLaglen and Edmund Lowe), who were fighting in WWI in France against the enemy in authentic-looking trench warfare. It also showed the two comrades as rivals among themselves vying for the affection of a French village girl named Charmaine (Dolores Del Rio) - in many semi-comic scenes, they would obviously be swearing and using profanities toward each other (decipherable if one could read lips), but the title cards reflected more dignified talk: ("Thank you, Captain Flagg! Personally, I'd as soon find a skunk in my sleeping bag.") [John Ford remade the film in 1952 with James Cagney and Dan Dailey.]
War Films at the Start of the Talkies:
One of the earliest anti-war films to effectively denounce the horrors of war was director Lewis Milestone's stirring, impassionate All Quiet on the Western Front (1930), made in both silent and sound versions. Possibly the greatest anti-war film ever made, it was based upon the novel by Erich Maria Remarque that viewed the Great War from the German point of view. All of the young idealistic German youths who have gone to the front to voluntarily serve the Fatherland become disillusioned and end up victims of the struggle. It portrayed soldiers as human beings who were ravaged by their experiences. The film ended simplistically on the day of Armistice -- young soldier Paul's (Lew Ayres) death to the sound of the whine of a French sniper's bullet as his hand reached out to touch a beautiful butterfly from the shell-hole trench. The film's final images were composed of ghostly soldiers marching away, while superimposed over a dark, battle-scarred hillside covered with a sea of white crosses. A similar, accurate account of the war was German film-maker/director G. W. Pabst's first talkie Westfront 1918 (1930) (aka Comrades of 1918), an anti-war film about the futility of trench warfare for German and French soldiers on the Western Front in WWI. Howard Hawks' melodramatic anti-war film The Road to Glory (1936) portrayed the futility of WWI trench warfare of the French, starring Fredric March and Warner Baxter as officers of a weary regiment of French soldiers. Pre-WWII War Films: When the war in Europe commenced in 1939, British film directors tried to alert Americans about the looming German and Italian Fascist threat. Alfred Hitchcock's political/war-time thriller Foreign Correspondent (1940), his second American film, concluded with a plea to the American public to enter the war ("It's as if the lights were all out everywhere, except in America. Keep those lights burning there! Cover them with steel! Ring them with guns! Build a canopy of battleships and bombing planes around them! Hello, America! Hang on to your lights. They're the only lights left in the world..") A realistic portrayal of the demands of career military life just before US involvement in WWII was examined in Fred Zinnemann's multi-awarded, Best Picture-winning From Here to Eternity (1953), based on James Jones' novel. It starred Burt Lancaster as a tough sergeant, Montgomery Clift as a bugler/private, Deborah Kerr as a commander's unfulfilled wife, and Donna Reed as a local prostitute.
British War Films After the US Entrance into WW II:
A British version of the homefront struggle illustrating UK resolve against Nazi aggression was told in a sentimental story of an English middle-class family during the early years of WW II (including the Dunkirk evacuation and the blitz) in William Wyler's multi-award-winning Mrs. Miniver (1942), the Best Picture of its year. The film ended with a memorable speech by the Vicar (Henry Wilcoxon) preaching in a bombed out church: "This is the people's war. It is our war. We are the fighters. Fight it, then. Fight it with all that is in us, and may God defend the right." President FDR had the speech printed and air-dropped over the war-torn European continent. Another UK war/thriller, Went the Day Well? (1942) expressed characteristic British reserve and strength among villagers who thwarted a take-over by Nazi paratroopers posing as British soldiers. |
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