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Greatest War Films |
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James Clive Matthews is the author of two books of film criticism, a reviewer for the Times Literary Supplement and blog editor for the BBC's Pocket Films site. Here he picks five classic war films every home should have. Click to view Top 5 Greatest War Films.
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Overview - War and Films |
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 The very first feature film back in 1915 was a war movie, and Hollywood’s been churning them out with gusto ever since. From patriotic propaganda to depressing pacifist tracts, wild comedies through documentary realism, the range and style of war films are as varied as war itself, and an essential part of cinema. |
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Perhaps it's something to do with cinema having come of age during a century with more than its fair share of military conflict. Perhaps it's thanks to mankind's ongoing fascination with killing itself in as many new and inventive ways as possible. Perhaps it's simply because explosions and death are cool - as long as they're happening to other people. Either way, the war film has been one of the most successful and recurrent genres in film history, and seems unlikely to go away any time soon.
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| From Wars of the Past ... |
| Of course, there are as many different types of war film as there are wars. You can have the ancient Greek and Roman epics, with red-plumed helmets gleaming in the Mediterranean sun, or the grimy jungles and uncertainty of Vietnam. There are the claustrophobic submarine flicks and the wide expanses of desert warfare, heroic Allies liberating Second World War Europe, and morally ambiguous anti-heroes doing what needs to be done to get through alive. |
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 On top of that, of course, you have the pacifist flicks and satires that lampoon our ongoing love of conflict, and the glossy, sanitised versions of warfare that seem so popular in the sci fi genre. Historical accuracy, of course, has always been tricky - not least because so often war itself is not a black and white affair, and both sides are usually in the wrong. The Battle of Algiers is a rare example of a non-partisan war film, despite having been made within only a few years of the event it portrays, and based largely on real events. The polar opposite, in many ways, is The Guns of Navarone - seen by many as the classic Second World War tale of fictional heroism against the odds. Yet it, too, has its morally ambiguous moments, hidden amidst the rugged jawlines of its stars.
And then there's the horror of war - the chaos, uncertainty and confusion, so wonderfully evoked in two very different films - the light-hearted take on nuclear Armageddon that is Dr Strangelove, filmed at the height of the Cold War, and the dark madness of Apocalypse Now, shot just a few short years after America finally realised the futility of Vietnam.
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| ... To Wars Yet to Come |
 So ingrained into our consciousness have war films become, that they have given rise to any number of spoofs. We all know the clichés of the good-looking heroes and the disgustingly evil villains, the winning against the odds, and the gung-ho patriotism. We could all name any number of great war comedies that highlight these cliches yet further. But satire is often best done with a straight face, and in that the much-maligned, often misunderstood Starship Troopers will always come out on top.
Of course, we are currently in the midst of another war - one which has yet to create its own subgenre. But rest assured, give it a few years and we are bound to see the Iraq war film emerge, just as have films about all the wars in which America has been involved. And, as with all those other wars, at least some of these inevitable upcoming contributions to the genre are bound to stake a claim to be included on any longer list of the greatest war films, adding still further to the classics in a genre that has provided much of the film industry's most memorable output. |
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