Favorite WW2 movies
The Big One on the big screen:Writer’s Top Ten WWII flicks
By Bill Lindau
The amazing thing about the start of Americans summers is how two days memorializing the deeds of our fighting men and women: Memorial Day and the anniversary of the D-Day invasion.
Ted Turner and other TV stations really pick up that, too, showing old war movies all week, especially the ones set in World War Two.
I haven’t been that thrilled about some of the military actions of my lifetime, but I have always appreciated the Second World War. I have read hundreds of accounts and seen hundreds of movies, and even though a lot of the films are hokey and unrealistic, every once in awhile somebody will make one that really hit’s the mark, such as “Saving Private Ryan.“ I have never heard so many veterans -- especially the folks who went through the real thing -- praise any effort by Hollywood. They said the opening scene, of the soldiers hitting the beach, was the most realistic battle scene they remember.
As an avid moviegoer, I have come up with a list of my own all-time favorite films about The Big One. I’ve tried to base my list on some people’s choices, but when I asked a few people what their favorite WWII film was, they each said, “I can’t say, I’ve seen so many of them.“
I thought “Saving Private Ryan” was the best WWII movie in the past 20 years, at least. Like these people I talked to, I can’t really pick out a best one. I have one problem with “Saving Private Ryan”, however, and so did the British: The movie didn’t have a single character from the United Kingdom.
The movie makes it look as if the Americans took Normandy single-handedly. Wrong! There were British, Irish, Canadians, Australians and New Zealanders and refugees from other countries. An earlier movie about the D-Day invasion, “The Longest Day” (1960) bears that in mind. John Wayne in that movie shared the spotlight with the late Richard Burton as a Royal Air Force fighter pilot; Sean Connery has a small part in it, too.
Here’s my own Top Ten list of other favorite World War II flicks, an alphabetical order. This does not include any I know about but have never seen completely. I know a lot of people won‘t agree with all of my picks, and that‘s fine. If anybody wants to tell me his/her own choices, I‘d be glad to hear them. If you know a good one I haven‘t seen, please tell me:
* “Battle of Britain” (English, 1969). Harry Salzman, who helped produce the early James Bond movies, had a hand in this account of the RAF’s famous David-and-Goliath battle with Hermann Goering’s Luftwaffe. It includes an all-British star cast, including Lawrence Olivier and Michael Caine, but it also shows the Germans’ side of the fight, including a blustering Goering and characters based on the more famous German fliers. The makers had hundreds of Spitfires, Hurricanes and other old war birds restored for the astounding aerial combat scenes. The film flops when it goes into the pilots’ personal lives, and I have a gripe similar to that of “Saving Private Ryan”: Even though plenty of American pilots flew in the RAF before we got into the war, the movie didn’t have a single Yank character
* “The Boat” (German, 1981). See the war from the enemy’s side, from viewpoint of one of the once-dreaded U-Boats. This award-winning nail biter depicts its crew as a handful of callow youths, scared out of their wits on a routine patrol of the Mediterranean. Most of these young men don’t give a hoot about the Nazi party, and they live in such wretched conditions that you actually feel sorry for them. The film and the book on which it was based take place before the U.S. entered the war; I think the writers did that to make it more salable to American audiences
* “The Dirty Dozen” (1967). Grown men cried when Jim Brown got killed, and we all laughed at Donald Sutherland playing as a dimwitted Army convict in this truly offbeat war flick. Lee Marvin plays a major who has run afoul of the brass. They assign him to train 12 military criminals and lead them on a dangerous commando raid. It has the most comic relief of all the films on this list. It also raises a lot of moral questions, however. Some of these men carry out their orders by doing something much worse than the crimes they went to prison for -- incinerating people alive, including female civilians (one of the generals tells Marvin early on that the target has no military value). We wonder if some of the brass were any better than the convicted murderers, thieves and rapists being called to put their lives on the line.
* “From Here to Eternity” (1953). This film deals more with life at a Hawaii Army base just before the Pearl Harbor attack than the war itself. The illicit love scene on the beach between Burt Lancaster and Deborah Kerr was pretty racy for its time. Reports of some of Frank Sinatra’s mafia friends strong-arming the filmmaker into giving him the role of Pvt. Angelo Maggio have tainted the memory of this otherwise fine and entertaining film (“The Godfather“ feature a scene based on this incident). Lancaster’s great as a two-fisted but fatherly sergeant romancing his commanding officer’s wife (Kerr). Donna Reed has a good supporting role as Montgomery Clift’s prostitute girlfriend
* “The Guns of Navarone” (English, 1961). Based loosely on one of the many formula suspense novels by the late Alistair MacLean. One of the late Gregory Peck’s greatest action films as the leader of a group of Allied commandos who fight each other almost as much as they do the Germans. David Niven’s entertaining to see as a wisecracking demolitions expert. Anthony Quinn plays a Greek partisan leader who blames Peck for the death of his family. The film features nonstop action scenes without sacrificing character development. Keep an eye out for a little known character actor. Walter Gotell, playing a German officer, later had recurring roles as a Soviet general in Roger Moore’s James Bond films. A sequel titled “Force 10 From Navarone” stank as both a book and a movie
* “Is Paris Burning?” (1967). One of the last black-and-white films, this movie is more history than entertainment. Gert Frobe, best known for the title role of “Goldfinger”, ends up playing one of the good guys, as a German general whom Hitler orders to burn Paris to the ground rather than surrender it to the allies. The film deals with the capture of Paris and the German officer’s struggle between his conscience and Hitler’s order.
* “The Longest Day” (1960). Based on the account by noted WWII historian by Cornelius Ryan. Filmed in black and white. It doesn’t have the special effects and horrifically realistic combat scenes of “Saving Private Ryan”, but it shows the invasion of Normandy from several different points of view, including both the Americans and British, the French resistance fighters and one of the nicer Germans in the cast, an officer who enjoys playing fetch with his dog on the beach. This is the only film on this list that stars John Wayne.
* “Saving Private Ryan” (1998). I like this one for the reasons stated above. A friend of mine in the Reserves said it had one inaccuracy: He said American officers did not wear their insignia on their helmets, as Tom Hanks does; that would have made them too much of a target for enemy snipers. That’s a minor detail, though. The opening scene was impeccable, and the film received endless praise for its realism throughout. Steven Spielberg’s best film since “Schindler’s List”.
* “Twelve O’clock High” (1949). Nominated for Best Picture and Best Leading Actor, by Gregory Peck in one of his earlier films. It won two Academy Awards for Best Supporting Actor (Dean Jagger) and Best Sound, Recording. Peck plays the commanding officer of a bomber group in England. He’s a hard-nosed but compassionate, but the strain of both command and the missions take their toll on the general.
* “Where Eagles Dare” (English, 1969). If films received Academy Awards for single action scenes, this would have definitely been a winner: A fight between Richard Burton and two Nazi spies on top of an ice-caked cable car about 200 feet above the earth. Maybe a stretch of the imagination; the 45-year-old Burton looked way too old for his role and his character had just taken a bullet in the hand, but still a nail-biter and a half. A younger, leaner Clint Eastwood co-stars as an American Army ranger. Another film based on one of Alistair MacLean’s novels, it’s about Allied commandos who parachute into the Alps to rescue a bogus American general from the Germans. Burton’s mission is really to smoke out several traitors in British intelligence, but it’s too complicated to explain here. The film features another really good scene in which Burton, in a German officer’s uniform, goes into a tavern, acts as if he’s drunk, pretends to get frisky with a serving girl who’s really a spy and gets her to slap in in the face. When a real German officer complains about his conduct, Burton tells him he’s Heinrich Himmler’s brother. You’ll have to see this campy film to figure out why he does that.
Those aren’t the only WWII films I like. Here are some of my best of the rest (but still not all):
“The Caine Mutiny“ (1954) -- Humphrey Bogart had one of the best roles in the last few years of his life as the mentally unbalanced Captain Queeg; “Catch-22“ (1971) -- Based on the novel by the late Joseph Heller, with a strong antiwar message; “The Devil‘s Brigade“ (1968) -- Holden, Cliff Robertson and Claude Akins star in a fictionalized account of the origin of the Special Forces; “Hell in the Pacific” (1969) -- Lee Marvin and Japanese superstar Toshiro Mifune (“Shogun”) have the only two roles, as a Marine and an officer alone on a desert island in this unorthodox but unforgettable film; “King Rat“ (1962) -- Based on “Shogun” author James Clavell‘s first novel, with George Segal in the title role as a shady inmate in a Japanese POW camp; “Patton” (1970) -- George C. Scott in the title role of the efficient but hotheaded general. One critic said hawks and doves alike should see it; “Stalag 17“ (1954) -- William Holden stars in this drama about POWs in a German camp; “The Train” (1962) -- Burt Lancaster as a French resistance fighter attempts to stop a train from carrying valuable paintings to Germany; and “Von Ryan‘s Express“ (1965) -- Frank Sinatra as a downed fighter pilot tries to lead a handful of liberated POWs out of Italy.
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Contact reporter Bill Lindau at blindau52@yahoo.com or (910) 582-6610.
posted by Bill Lindau @ 11:27 PM
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