These days, war is swell — at least for
the Motion Picture Academy members who choose the Oscar nominees. Of the
10 films on the not-so-short list for Best Picture, two prime
contenders, The Hurt Locker and Inglourious Basterds, find their
grittiest kicks in the spectacle of men at war: the suicidal heroism
they display trying to defuse a Baghdad bomb, the patriotic sadism some
American Jewish soldiers show as they scalp men in the Army of the Third
Reich. You could say that Avatar is not just a war movie but a call to
insurgency against the U.S. military; the long final act of James
Cameron’s epic prods audiences to cheer for the bloody victory of
Pandorans over American mercenaries. The South African sci-fi adventure
District 9 takes the side of illegal aliens — grotty extraterrestrials,
that is — against the white humans who have herded them into camps.
11 photos1. Napoléon (1927, Abel Gance) — the Napoleonic wars
For the most powerful military figure in
French history, filmmaker Abel Gance conceived the grandest of all
silent-movie dreams: six features chronicling Napoléon’s extraordinary
life. He ran out of money and sponsors after just one film, but it’s a
beaut, whose restored versions run between 4 and 5½ hrs. Beginning with a
snow fight involving the child Bonaparte (war by softer means),
embracing his love for Josephine and his irresistible rise through the
tumult of the French Revolution, and reaching its climax with the
victorious Italian Campaign, Gance’s biopic is as heroic and driven as
its subject. The writer-director-producer used wildly swinging cameras
to mime the milling chaos of revolutionary life and death, and for the
final battle scenes, he sprayed the action across three screens —
Cinerama and CinemaScope a quarter-century before their time. Over the
years, Napoléon was recut, mutilated and all but lost; film historian
Kevin Brownlow devoted decades to reviving it at its original epic
length and scope. Francis Ford Coppola showed one version in 1980, with a
new score by his father Carmine, and Napoléon triumphed again. That it
is not available on DVD in the U.S. is a crime against cinema genius.
2. The Birth of a Nation (1915, D.W. Griffith) — U.S. Civil War
So many superlatives for one picture:
the first great feature film, the movie that established the Confederacy
as the collective hero of any Civil War film, the biggest box-office
hit before Gone With the Wind — and, in its demeaning depiction of
American blacks, a racist screed of appalling ignorance and influence.
(The film, originally titled The Clansman, helped spur the rebirth of
the Ku Klux Klan and led to a horrid spike in lynchings.) Put this
asterisk next to Griffith’s tainted masterpiece: it was the first great
war film. Inventing the epic genre’s visual vocabulary on the fly, he
filled the screen with great, brutal battles, intercutting the galloping
charges of the two armies for thrilling impact. The Birth of a Nation
instructed generations of ambitious directors on the rules for splashing
history onto celluloid. Griffith’s achievement can be no more easily
forgotten than his racial insensitivity can be forgiven.
3. All Quiet on the Western Front (1930, Lewis Milestone) — World War I
The aura of nobility — of collegiality
among enemies, of jaunty salutes from one aerial ace to his rival on the
other side — suffused many of the memorable films about the Great War.
Recall the courtly relationship between a German officer and his French
prisoners in Jean Renoir’s La grande illusion. In the more realistic, or
bitter, movies, the “war to end all wars” simply taught its survivors
how to kill millions of young men more effectively the next time. Erich
Maria Remarque’s famed novel, filmed by Lewis Milestone, follows a group
of young Germans who are seduced by their teacher into enlisting for
the patriotism and glamour. Instantly they learn that the hell of war is
paved with wretched ambiguities. The main character, Paul (Lew Ayres),
shoots a French soldier, then tries desperately, weepingly, to save the
man’s life. Paul’s will end — in one of the signature final shots in
movie history — as his hand reaches outside a trench to capture a
butterfly. Only the butterfly lives.
4. Paths of Glory (1957, Stanley Kubrick)
World War I
Thirty
years before his half-brilliant Vietnam film Full Metal Jacket, the
28-year-old Kubrick made this most merciless and clinical of antiwar war
movies. It details a suicide mission concocted by the ruthless French
General Broulard (Adolphe Menjou): his soldiers must storm a German
“anthill” with little hope of taking it and all their lives in jeopardy.
When the botched plan fails, enlisted men must pay for the general’s
blunders. Three are chosen at random and condemned to death, with a
principled colonel (Kirk Douglas) as their only advocate. As commanding
officers move troops across a battlefield like toys that can be replaced
when they break, so Dax and Broulard debate the fate of the doomed
soldiers. Working from Humphrey Cobb’s 1935 novel and a screenplay by
two other novelists (sensitive Calder Willingham and hard-boiled Jim
Thompson), Kubrick sends his camera tracking briskly through the
trenches during the ramp-up to battle, then confines the viewer in
closeups with the three condemned men — most notably the weeping,
groveling Private Ferod, played by the Method madman Timothy Carey. In
the equally insane rules of war, the men must prove their worth by dying
for a general’s arrogant stupidity. The road to the firing squad is
their path of glory.
5. Das Boot (1981, Wolfgang Peterson) — World War II
Some war movies are admirable for
dressing WW II clichés in a new uniform. Das Boot takes another plunge
into the black pool of memory and finds — surprise! — flinty nobility.
Actually, no surprise for anyone who feasted on the submarine movies of
the 1950s. Here is the dogged captain (Jurgen Prochnow), navigating the
straits of political bureaucracy and a bungling high command. Here is
the wild-eyed wraith of the engine room (Erwin Leder), who “cracks”
during one crisis, then performs heroically in the next. Here are the
hide-and-seek battles, the claustrophobic tensions, the respect for a
valiant enemy. The novelty here is getting the inside German view. Das
Boot has thrills aplenty; it moves full speed ahead through its 2½-hr.
running time. Of the 40,000 U-boat men in World War II, 28,000 were
killed, and the film is careful to emphasize the fatal futility of all
this derring-do. Still, the movie holds a lesson for American audiences
raised on movies about the beastly Germans. It shows that some of the
bad guys were good guys too.
6. Saving Private Ryan (1998, Steven Spielberg) — World War II
From Richard Schickel’s TIME review:
“The D-Day landing on Omaha: seasick soldiers massacred the minute the
ramps on their landing boats are lowered; other men clambering over the
sides trying to avoid the fire, only to drown under the weight of their
packs; the surf turning red with the blood of the slaughtered; some who
make it to the narrow beach huddling immobilized yet pathetically
vulnerable behind what little cover they can find … It makes no
difference. Whether you live or die here is entirely a matter of chance,
not survival tactics. Spielberg’s handheld cameras thrust us into this
maelstrom, and his superb editing creates from these bits and pieces a
mosaic of terror. We see as the soldiers see, from belly level, in
flashes and fragments, none more vivid than the shot, rendered almost
casually, of a soldier staggering along, carrying his severed arm — the
struggle against mortality encapsulated in what amounts to a sidelong
glance. It is quite possibly the greatest combat sequence ever made, in
part because it is so fanatically detailed, in part because the action
is so compressed — all that panic in such a tight spot — in part because
the horror is so long sustained, for more than 20 relentless minutes.”
7. The Steel Helmet (1951, Samuel Fuller) — Korean conflict
The forgotten American stalemate, which
was to U.S. foreign adventures what Pluto is to planets, the Korean
conflict didn’t even get the respect of being called a war; officially,
it was a United Nations “police action.” Yet more American soldiers went
MIA in that 2½-year siege than in the 3½ years of World War II. Sam
Fuller, a WW II veteran who later apotheosized his own regiment in
1980′s The Big Red One, made this first-ever Korean War film on the
cheap: in 10 days, shooting in Los Angeles’ Griffith Park, using 25
extras whom he choreographed to look like swarming hundreds. Peppering
his script with wisecracks about identifying the enemy (“He’s South
Korean when he’s running with you. He’s North Korean when he’s running
after you”) and bitter jokes about a late officer (“He’s fertilizing a
rice paddy with the rest of the patrol”), Fuller took official flak for a
scene in which a U.S. officer kills an unarmed prisoner; he was
denounced as a communist and investigated by the FBI. That’s a heavy
price to pay for a $100,000 movie with million-dollar battle scenes and a
cynical worldview that’s … priceless.
8. The Battle of Algiers (1966, Gillo Pontecorvo) — French-Algerian war
An occupying army will always be
outnumbered by a civilian population. When the locals decide that
subjugation is a death sentence and that freedom’s just another word for
nothing left to lose, they can make enough mischief to drive the
colonials out. This faux-doc report of the 1954-57 Algerian resistance
by the National Liberation Front, and the popular insurgency it stoked
against the occupying French, had the revelatory force of a cinematic
IED when it opened during America’s Vietnam turmoil. Made by an Italian
team but produced by FLN leader Saadi Yacef (and based on his prison
autobiography), the film borrows its panoramic narrative and churning
style from an earlier reconstruction of an urban uprising, Nanny Loy’s
1962 Four Days of Naples. A canny propagandist, Pontecorvo knew what
Hollywood knew: to win an audience�s sympathy for an underclass people,
make them beautiful. The Battle of Algiers wins the battle of ideas with
Algerian faces that are artfully sculpted and wide, imploring eyes
meant to haunt the viewer. The movie certainly left its mark on
generations of American officials. Carter adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski
called it a must-see for policymakers, and in the summer of 2003, as the
Iraq insurgency started exploding, the Pentagon’s special-ops office
held a screening of the film. Those in attendance apparently didn’t take
its message to heart, and the Bush Administration found that the
occupation of Baghdad was a much longer, costlier, deadlier battle of
Algiers.
9. Apocalypse Now (1979, Francis Ford Coppola) — Vietnam
The 1970s were the decade of ornery,
realistic movies, when filmmakers dared to address topics like
government conspiracies, racial animosity and big cities’ fetid decay.
Odd, then, that no American in the ’70s made a movie about the war in
Vietnam until after it ended. (M*A*S*H doesn’t count; it was set in
Korea.) Coppola, fresh off his two Godfather epics and The
Conversation, decided to film a John Milius script roughly based on
Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, about an Army captain (Martin Sheen)
cruising through hostile territory into the lair of mad Colonel Kurtz
(Marlon Brando at his most grotesque and gnomic). On location in the
Philippines, the crew endured every possible calamity, from monsoons to
the leading man’s heart attack. (Sheen recovered.) Presenting an
unfinished cut of the film at Cannes, Coppola said he had endured his
own private Vietnam. Not that any movie is worth such sacrifice, but
Apocalypse Now nailed the madness of Americans lost in a jungle of
misguided motives and foreign-policy screwups. Turning Norman Mailer’s
question, “Why are we in Vietnam?,” into psychodrama, the film says that
only the deranged survive — like Robert Duvall’s macho surfer,
proclaiming, “I love the smell of napalm in the morning … It smelled
like … victory.”
10. Black Hawk Down (2001, Ridley Scott) — Somalian mission
Most war movies use battle scenes the
way musicals use production numbers: several are sprinkled throughout
the picture to stir the viewer’s pulse. Not so with Black Hawk Down.
After a brief introduction of the main characters, the picture is all
fighting, all the time. It’s a 2-hour-plus gunfight at the O.K. Corral,
except that the weapons are blazing on the streets of Mogadishu, where
all lives are expendable. (President Clinton quickly ended the mission,
which was more or less humanitarian.) Scott was criticized for focusing
on the white Americans, for turning the Africans into an
indistinguishable blur of grenade fodder and for allowing the
implication that the deaths of 18 U.S. soldiers held greater import than
the 300,000 Somalians who died at the regime’s hand before the military
arrived. But if you want to feel the heat and stink of war, to know how
desperation kindles gallantry and barbarism, see Black Hawk Down.
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