HONORABLE MENTION
300 (2007)
Even relatively anti-war films like Platoon acknowledge the fierce camaraderie and euphoric adrenalin rush of warriors in combat, but this surrealistic adaptation of Frank Miller’s graphic novel about a legendary phalanx of Spartans taking on a zillion enemy warriors is all bloodlust, all the time. Yet, while historically suspect (since modern researchers are pretty sure the power-mad Persian king Xerxes didn’t really command a legion of trolls, orcs and giants from the darkest reaches of Middle Earth), and hardly on par with more serious evocations of combat (like, say, Apocalypse Now or Full Metal Jacket), 300 is notable, like many of the best war films, as a reflection of its time. Some critics detected jingoistic echoes of George W. Bush’s “bring ‘em on” foreign policy in the refusal of Spartan badass King Leonidas (Gerard Butler) to negotiate with foreign powers, going it alone with his own Coalition of the Willing when other nations (and a cowardly Congress...er, Spartan Council) refuse to authorize war against an imminent Persian threat to democracy and freedom. Just as Nixon reportedly watched Patton over and over again before sending troops into Cambodia, it’s easy to imagine Bush viewing 300 to make himself feel better about sending American troops into combat without sufficient body armor: after all, Leonidas and his 299 BFFs take down half Xerxes’ army bare-chested! Framed as a tale of indeterminate tallness relayed by a warrior to inspire his fellow troops on the verge of combat, the fetishized fairy tale unreality of 300’s violence, tone and (xenophobic) politics, its conflicted homophobic/homoerotic ideal of manliness, its complete surrender to (and celebration of) CGI fakery and its wild popularity and seductive guilty pleasure craftsmanship all combine into a fascinating time capsule of an age when troops compare combat to video games and the line between fact and fiction, has never seemed quite so blurry.
JOHNNY GOT HIS GUN (1971)
Some antiwar films spin their message with subtlety, some with humor, some with grace and some with a quiet sense of loss. Not Dalton Trumbo’s Johnny Got His Gun: it cuffs you to your chair and spends the next two hours beating you over the head with its message that war is nothing more than a huge grinding machine designed to destroy bodies and minds. Based on his own novel – which had the misfortune to appear on the eve of the Second World War, thus assuring its brutal message would be completely drowned out – Johnny Got His Gun was directed and written by Trumbo himself, following a thirty-year quest to bring the story to the screen. It’s not a particularly accomplished movie; Trumbo was a first-time director, and it shows. But the sheer horror it conveys through the portrayal of young Joe Bonham, a WWI veteran who has been rendered more or less a human paperweight by an enemy shell, and the sheer contempt it shows for a social order in which hundreds of thousands of lives are destroyed as if that were an acceptable way to solve problems, makes for a devastating viewing experience, and one which found a much more receptive audience at the height of the Vietnam War. (Many viewers later became familiar with Johnny Got His Gun due to its being heavily excerpted in Metallica’s video for “One”; the band had encountered so many difficulties in licensing individual scenes that they eventually just bought the entire move outright.)
THE GENERAL (1927)
Buster Keaton's Civil War comedy starring a train is probably the greatest war comedy of the silent era, unless you want to count The Birth of a Nation as history's little joke on D. W. Griffith's reputation. In the big battle scene, the Union army was played by five hundred members of the Oregon National Guard, and the Confederates were played by the same five hundred members of the Oregon National Guard, after a quick costume change. Apparently Keaton had some doubts about the acting ability of the guy playing the Northern general who sees the train tumbling into a river as the bridge it's crossing is dynamited, since legend has it that he didn't tell the fellow that the bridge he was facing was about to be blown up while the train was crossing it; certainly the man's expression of surprise is Oscar-worthy. After the location shooting was done, Keaton and his crew went back to Hollywood without bothering to clean up after themselves, and the wreckage of the train remained where it had fallen. The locals turned it into a tourist attraction until the scrap metal was needed during World War II.
MEN IN WAR (1957)
This diamond-hard Korean War drama was directed by Anthony Mann, a once-neglected action master who's now best remembered for his Westerns with James Stewart. Though little known, this movie is up there with the best of those. The superb cast is headed by Robert Ryan as a lieutenant in charge of a platoon lost behind enemy lines. As they inch their way along in search of safe ground, they're joined by a couple of strays: blunt, bullying Aldo Ray and Robert Keith -- gaunt and aged-looking, with huge hands and haunted eyes -- as a mute, shell-shocked Colonel who Ray treats as protectively as an especially mean seeing eye watching out for its master. The flat simplicity of the movie's title summons up echoes of early Hemingway, and its best scenes would do Papa proud.
Click Here for Part One, Part Two, Part Three, Part Four, Part Five & Part Six
Contributors: Andrew Osborne, Leonard Pierce, Phil Nugent