Hello everyone, and welcome to Ministry of Cinema’s web series Film Genres and Hollywood.
I’m Bradley Weatherholt, and I’ll be your host on this exploration into genre filmmaking.
In this episode, we venture into Hollywood’s treatment of the War film genre.
Themes and plot elements from war films vary dramatically, almost diametrically, depending
on the overall political opinion of the film.
Essentially, there are two camps: the first focuses on the nobility of the army and the
value of American ideals;
the second deconstructs American foreign policy, highlighting its imperialistic tendencies,
and the senseless waste of war.
At its worst, the first category hypes American patriotism, ultimately amounting to a flag-waving
jingoistic propaganda piece.
The second, at its lowest, provides a heavy-handed bias and marginalizes the potential good stemming
from American international causes.
Generally, though not always, the trend goes that during times of war the films are of
the patriotic type, so as to rally the nation toward wartime causes.
It is in the down time between wars, when the social costs of war are felt, that Hollywood
war films often provide a criticism for military action.
To see this in action, it’s important to track the history of War films.
Now, it's convenient to categorize the periods of the genre’s history by the predominant
war during that time.
Before the World Wars, the genre had a small industrial presence.
The first war film, Vitagraph’s Tearing Down the Spanish Flag, was a 90-second propaganda
piece made during the Spanish-American War.
Hardly a film by today’s standards, it was more a symbolic commercial for the war.
It wasn’t until the first world war that the war film became a clearly defined genre.
In 1918, D.W. Griffith’s Hearts of the World lead a series of early propaganda films enticing
Americans to further participate in the European conflict.
In 1927, Paramount’s Wings released to great success.
Becoming the first film to win the Academy Award for Best Picture, the movie was lauded
for its realistic battle sequences involving two young pilots in the air force.
The film was shockingly progressive, even by today’s standards, showing nudity and male kissing.
Though Wings made some arguments against the atrocities of war, one of the earliest films
to comprehensively denounce the war was the Lewis Milestone’s All Quiet on the Western Front.
Released with a silent and sound version, and based on the popular novel, the film tells
the story of young, misguided volunteers from the German army.
After witnessing the horrors of battle, the soldiers quickly lose their illusions of the war.
The film was a landmark of the time, and still provides one of the best critiques of war.
Following the success of All Quiet on the Western Front, the remainder of the 1930’s
showcased fewer and fewer war films.
This attitude all change with the sudden rise of World War II.
For Hollywood, WWII remains an easy go-to since it provides a so clearly defined conflict
between the Allies and the Axis powers.
Before America’s direct military involvement in the war, the majority of Hollywood war
pictures were light adventure films, promoting American ideals at the expense of one-sided
portrayals of Germans and the Japanese.
A widely popular example of this, Sergeant York, used the setting of WWI to reiterate
American exceptionalism.
After Pearl Harbor, Hollywood filmmaking expectedly changed.
Perhaps the most notable propaganda picture in the early days of the war was the musical
Yankee Doodle Dandy.
Flag-waving at its finest, the film is carried by James Cagney in a role far from his usual
typecast as a gangster.
Other notable films of the time include Destination Tokyo, Lifeboat, and The Fighting Sullivans
, which highlighted the plight of a band of brothers who die from a naval conflict.
Alongside combat films, the Hollywood marketed homefront melodramas during the war, including
Hollywood’s classic Casablanca.
After WWII, the Korean War soon followed.
Given the gravity of the massive global catastrophe of two world wars, the Korean War, understandably,
received little attention in comparison.
Rather than focus on the war of that time, the 1950’s saw a renewed interest in WWI
highlighted by John Huston’s adventurous The African Queen and Stanley Kubrick’s
tragic Paths of Glory.
Likewise, the interest in WWII continued throughout the 50’s, exemplified by David Lean’s
masterpiece character study The Bridge on the River Kwai.
With the coming of the 60’s, the industry now had a new political conflict to stage
the war genre.
With the exception of WWII, the Vietnam War, is America’s most discussed war in the 20th century.
When placed side-by-side, films concerning WWII and the Vietnam War
provide an interesting comparison.
Where as films involving WWII are largely pro-war, or in the very least, pro-America,
the films involving Vietnam films are primarily anti-war, anti-America.
The Vietnam War provided only one notable picture with a pro-American tone, the universally
deplored film The Green Berets.
Shamelessly distorting facts, the jingoistic, single-sided propaganda piece starred John
Wayne, the uber-patriotic Colonel who leads a noble band of Special Forces to overcome
the Viet Cong.
In stark contrast to The Green Berets, Michael Cimino’s controversial masterpiece The Deer Hunter
studied the characters of three patriotic youths from Pennsylvania who experience the
devastation of Vietnam.
The film was praised for its bold treatment of the conflict and went on to win the Academy
Award for Best Picture.
Soon after The Deer Hunter, Francis Ford Coppola’s Apocalypse Now shook the public with its haunting
depiction of the war’s horrors.
Based loosely on Joseph Conrad’s novel The Heart of Darkness, the film involves the epic
quest to find and assassinate the crazed and insane genius Colonel Kurtz.
The film is an innovative masterpiece, leading the pack of brilliant Vietnam War films, and
perhaps standing as the greatest war film of all time.
In the 1980s, war films continued to draw upon the Vietnam War for inspiration.
1984’s The Killing Fields showcased the fall of Cambodia and the nightmares involved.
Three years later, Stanley Kubrick’s Full Metal Jacket brilliantly focused on the recruitment
and training of young Marines during their dehumanizing tenure of boot-camp under the
abusive tutelage of Gunnery Sergeant Hartman.
In 1986, writer/director Oliver Stone produced the critically-acclaimed Platoon, the first
of a loosely tied trilogy on the Vietnam War followed by progressively less spectacular
installments Born on the Fourth of July and 1993’s Heaven & Earth.
Stone’s realistic, personal perspective stunned critics and audiences, providing the
war’s sharpest critique, and went on to garner a number of Academy Awards.
During the Vietnam War, as well as after, the United States underwent an entirely different
type of “war.”
The Cold War, an ideological war, was unlike any other conflict in the 21st century.
It is only understandable that the war’s most lauded film, Dr. Strangelove: or How
I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb (1964), would be equally atypical.
Directed by Stanley Kubrick, Strangelove exaggerates the fervor of the two opposing ideologies
of capitalism and communism.
The farce approaches the material with a blend of black comedy and sharp sarcasm that continues
to amuse even today.
With the fall of the Berlin Wall came the end of the Cold War, ushering in a relatively
conflictless decade.
Despite no major wars, the 1990’s are remembered as one of the war genre’s finest decades
as it witnessed a renaissance in WWII pictures.
Steven Spielberg’s Holocaust epic Schindler’s List tells the deeply moving narrative of
Oskar Schindler, the war profiteer who devises an unlikely to save hundreds of Jewish lives.
Based on real life events, the film portrays the miraculous success and tragedy of an unlikely hero.
Later, Roman Polanski’s The Pianist followed the tone and gravity of Schindler’s List,
joining the canon of Holocaust films, a major subgenre of the war film.
Spielberg’s subsequent WWII picture, Saving Private Ryan, took a more traditional approach
of the war genre.
With a startling realism, the film highlights major battles in the war, particularly the
famous invasion of Normandy.
In the same year as Saving Private Ryan, arthouse auteur Terrence Mallick released The Thin Red Line,
a uniquely impressionistic take on WWII similar in style to the director’s
previous films.
As if a death knell, Michael Bay’s special-effects laden Pearl Harbor notes a decline in WWII
filmmaking, coming at a time where the nature of war changed.
With 9/11, America took a different course in war.
The War on Terror, as well as the intermingled Iraq War, mark a turning point in Hollywood’s
production of war films.
Besides Katheryn Bigelow’s The Hurt Locker, a powerful character study on a bomb-defuser
in the Iraq War, and her less remarkable Zero Dark Thirty, Hollywood’s appears to focus
less attention on these wars than would appear proportional.
Instead, the modern war genre continues to rehash WWII narratives with less and less success.
Except for Quentin Tarantino’s idiosyncratic Inglorious Basterds, a light-hearted and exaggerated
yarn of an unforgettable Nazi and a band of bloodthirsty Nazi hunters, Hollywood has recently
produced a string of lackluster pictures.
Despite the modern absence of war masterpieces that populated previous decades, it is unlikely
one of Hollywood’s favorite genres is in a state of permanent decline.
Like the Cold War, the War on Terrorism is a unique conflict and not as obviously defined
as the World Wars or Vietnam.
The confused War of Terror, with its unclear objectives, is still ongoing.
Once the war ends, perhaps a clear social narrative will arise--one that Hollywood will
almost certainly adapt into a string of pictures.
The American film industry will continue in the 21st century with the tradition it established
in the previous one
As new war films are released, they will necessarily take one of the two political positions that
define the genre--either hyping American exceptionalism or sharply
criticizing the horrifying waste of war.