war movies

Movies to See Right Now

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Andrew Garfield in HACKSAW RIDGE
Andrew Garfield in HACKSAW RIDGE

It’s Memorial Day weekend.  Scroll down for my recommendations of current and classic movies on video and television that honor military service.

Recommended movies to see in theaters this week:

  • Opening this weekend, The Commune, looks like comedy of errors, but it’s a family drama with a searing performance by Trine Dyrholm.
  • The Lost City of Z, a thoughtful and beautifully cinematic revival of the adventure epic genre.
  • In Norman: The Moderate Rise and Tragic Fall of a New York Fixer, writer-director Joseph Cedar and his star Richard Gere combine to create the unforgettable character of Norman Oppenheimer, a Jewish Willy Loman who finally gets his chance to sit with the Movers and Shakers. This may be Gere’s best movie performance ever.

My DVD/Stream of the Week is last year’s Oscar-winning Hacksaw Ridge, about American Army Medic Desmond T. Doss, who single-handedly rescued 75 fellow soldiers at the Battle of Okinawa and became the first Conscientious Objector in American history to be awarded the Congressional Medal of Honor. You can rent Hacksaw Ridge on DVD from Netflix and Redbox or stream it from Amazon, iTunes, Vudu, YouTube and Google Play and DirecTV. If you’re going to see one war movie this year, make it this one.

Yesterday I wrote about Turner Classic Movies’ uncommon slate of thoughtful Korean War movies airing Saturday, including Men in War, The Steel Helmet, The Rack and The Hook.

On Sunday May 28, TCM will present the definitive Pearl Harbor movie, Tora! Tora! Tora! from 1970. Featuring great American and Japanese casts, Tora! Tora! Tora! tells the story from both American and Japanese perspectives. It’s a suspenseful minute-by-minute countdown. Tora! Tora! Tora! is one of the very best movies ever made about a well-known historical event.  And on Monday, May 29, TCM will broadcast the fine WW II submarine warfare movie The Enemy Below, which I wrote about last month (scroll down.

TORA! TORA! TORA!
TORA! TORA! TORA!

coming up on TV: a Korean War movie sampler

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Gene Evans in THE STEEL HELMET
Gene Evans in THE STEEL HELMET

Turner Classic Movies usually serves up war movies on the Memorial Day weekend, and, on May 27, TCM will present an uncommon slate of Korean War movies.  Most of the featured films were made between 1951 and 1957 – more or less contemporaneously with the conflict.  If you want to survey this subgenre, here’s your chance.

The best two are:

  • Men in War (1957): An infantry lieutenant (Robert Ryan) must lead his platoon out of a desperate situation, and he encounters a cynical and insubordinate sergeant (Aldo Ray) loyally driving a jeep with his PTSD-addled colonel (Robert Keith). In conflict with each other, they must navigate through enemy units to safety. Director Anthony Mann is known for exploring the psychology of edgy characters, and that’s the case with Men in War.
  • The Steel Helmet (1951) is a gritty classic by the great writer-director Sam Fuller, a WWII combat vet who brooked no sentimentality about war. Gene Evans, a favorite of the two Sams (Fuller and Peckinpah), is especially good as the sergeant. American war movies of the period tended toward to idealize the war effort, but Fuller relished making war movies with no “recruitment flavor”.  Although the Korean War had only been going on for a few months when Fuller wrote the screenplay, he was able to capture the feelings of futility that later pervaded American attitudes about the Korean War.

And these two are unusually thoughtful “message” films:

  • The Rack (1956):  A returning US army captain (Paul Newman) is court-martialed for collaborating with the enemy while a POW.  He was tortured, and The Rack explores what can be realistically expected of a prisoner under duress.  It’s a pretty good movie, and Wendell Corey and Walter Pidgeon co-star.
  • The Hook (1963):  A small unit of GIs is ordered to kill a North Korean prisoner, and this stagey screenplay explores the morality of following – or resisting – orders that violate civilized standards.  Kirk Douglas gives one of his testosterone-laden performances.

On the same day, TCM is also airing One Minute to Zero (1952), Target Zero (1955) and Battle Hymn (1957).

This time around, TCM is not showing the three most well-known Korean War movies:   The Manchurian Candidate, Pork Chop Hill and M*A*S*H.   The precursor to M*A*S*H*, of course, was  Battle Circus, a 1953 Humphrey Bogart film about a camp full of rowdy army surgeons.

And here’s a curiosity among Korean War movies: War Hunt,  a 1962 film about a rookie (Robert Redford) joining a Korean War unit as a new replacement with John Saxon as the platoon’s psycho killer.  Along with Redford, Sidney Pollack and Francis Ford Coppola are in the cast, making War Hunt the only film with three Oscar-winning directors as actors.   Don’t blink, or you’ll miss Coppola as an uncredited convoy truck driver.

Robert Keith and Aldo Ray in MEN IN WAR
Robert Keith and Aldo Ray in MEN IN WAR

Peter van Eyck: the Nazi who wasn’t

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Peter van Eyck in THE WAGES OF FEAR
Peter van Eyck (left) in THE WAGES OF FEAR

During World War II, Hollywood looked for cruel-visaged actors to play Nazi characters that were cruel-looking and who could accomplish evil with chilling efficiency.  With his Aryan poster boy looks and German accent, Peter van Eyck became Hollywood’s favorite on-screen Nazi.  The irony is that, in real life, the German-born van Eyck was a fervent anti-fascist who had fled just before Hitler took power.

Van Eyck bobbed around the world doing odd jobs until he landed in New York and befriended Aaron Copland, Irving Berlin and, finally, Billy Wilder.  Van Eyck’s first attention-grabbing performance was in Wilder’s Five Graves to Cairo, which airs tomorrow night on Turner Classic Movies.

His role as Lt. Schwegler in Five Graves to Cairo is embedded in a sequence of nine straight German soldier movie roles during 1943-44.  Sometimes his roles didn’t even have names – “German officer”, “SS Captain”, “Gestapo”.

Back to real life – van Eyck served as a film officer in the US Army’s occupation of post-Germany.  Returning to Hollywood, his roles diversified to the point that he was only playing a German officer about half the time.  He ended up with 94 screen credits on IMDb, including high-ranking Wehrmacht officers in The Longest Day (1962) and The Bridge at Remagen (his final film in 1969).  One of Van Eyck’s most notable roles is as one of the drivers in Henri-Georges Clouzot’s hyper-suspenseful The Wages of Fear.

It is said that acting is pretending.  Typecast by looks and accent, van Eyck was a refugee who happened into a prolific acting career – playing exactly what he wasn’t.

the young Peter van Eyck (center rear) in FIVE GRAVES TO CAIRO
the young Peter van Eyck (center rear) in FIVE GRAVES TO CAIRO
a more mature van Eyck in THE LONGEST DAY
a more mature van Eyck in THE LONGEST DAY

TESTAMENT OF YOUTH: the tragedy of war

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Alicia Viksander in TESTAMENT OF YOUTH
Alicia Viksander bids farewell to Kit Harington in TESTAMENT OF YOUTH

In Testament of Youth, Alicia Viksander plays Vera, a gifted and determined young British woman who overcomes the conventions of the day and the objections of her father to attend Oxford in the 1910s. In 1914, Vera’s brother, fiance and closest male friends all enlist in Britain’s WW I army. No one at the time could have imagined the industrialized carnage that WW I would become, and it’s poignant when the young men say that the war will probably be over before they’ve completed their basic training. The war is, of course, an unspeakable horror. We don’t expect the young men to fare well in the War, and they don’t. Vera suspends her Oxford education to work as a nurse, first in Britain and later at the front. She is in position to observe the effects of war both at the front and on the home front, where her parents are especially impacted.

Testament of Youth is based on Vera Brittain’s popular and influential 1933 memoir of the same name, which is also an icon of feminist literature. Brittain became a pacifist leader.

This story follows a familiar arc, and I often ask “why did someone feel the need to make this movie?”. Testament of Youth, however, is fairly compelling. Credit goes to Viksander and to director James Kent, who somehow prevent the film from slipping into an unwatchable slog of grimness.

The most impressive element of Testament of Youth is the performance of Alicia Viksander as Vera Brittain. Viksander is onscreen in every scene, often in close-up and she carries the film with a flawless performance.  As good as she is here, Viksander is even better in this year’s sci-fi hit Ex Machina, where she plays a machine embedded with artificial intelligence. (Ex Machina is the best American movie of the year so far.)

With Ex Machina, Viksander is exploding into cinema as a major star.  Most Americans first saw the 26-year-old Swede in two 2012 movies.  She played a key supporting role in Anna Karenina and a lead in the Mads Mikkelsen period drama A Royal Affair. Although I thought it too long, A Royal Affair won the Silver Bear at the Berlin Film Festival.  Now she has five films completed or in post-production, including upcoming Derek Cianfrance film The Light Between the Oscars, co-starring Michael Fassbender, who she ihas been dating.  She also has the top credit in the upcoming The Man from U.N.C.L.E., which looks wretched from the trailer.  Plus, she slated to co-star with Matt Damon in the next Bourne movie.  It’s quite a career trajectory, and from what I’ve seen, richly deserved.

Americans will find this odd, but the Swedish Viksander reportedly had to struggle to learn Danish for A Royal Affair.  It seems especially odd, given that she speaks English with a perfect American accent in Ex Machina and perfect middle class British accent in Testament of Youth.

Back to Last Testament of Youth – it’s not a Must See, but it is a well-made and evocative treatment of the tragedy of war.

Zero Dark Thirty: a great director’s enthralling tale

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Zero Dark Thirty is director Kathryn Bigelow’s inspired telling of the hunt for Bin Laden.  Bigelow, who won the directorial Oscar for The Hurt Locker, once again demonstrates an uncommon ability to enthrall.  She chose to tell the story of the frustrating, wearying and dangerous ten-year man hunt, not just the exciting raid in Abbottabad.

We should all be grateful that this movie was made with Bigelow’s directorial choices.  She is content to invest half of her screen time on false leads and wasted efforts – and makes them utterly gripping.  She neither lingers on the violence nor shies away from it.   In a scene where a CIA operative is looking for a man talking on a cell phone,  the camera pulls back to reveal that he is on a chaotic Pakistani street with hundreds of men on cell phones – perfectly conveying the needle-in-a-haystack aspect of the search.  As  the Navy Seal team returns from the successful raid, the music is deeply thoughtful and reflective, not the triumphalist anthem that many directors would have used.

Zero Dark Thirty contains realistic and non-gratuitous depictions of war, terrorism and torture. The movie is, to my sensibilities, not too uncomfortable for most viewers.   (Tomorrow I will comment on the torture controversy surrounding this movie.)

Jessica Chastain brilliantly plays the CIA analyst who doggedly and passionately pursues an unlikely lead that finally pays off after a ten-year grind.  I’ve already rhapsodized several times about Chastain’s sudden emergence as perhaps our best current screen actress.  She is profoundly gifted and can do anything.   Let’s just say that, as good as Zero Dark Thirty is, she carries it.

The rest of the fine cast includes Jason Clarke (Lawless), Joel Edgerton (Animal Kingdom), Jennifer Ehle (The Ides of March, The King’s Speech), Kyle Chandler (Friday Night Lights), Fares Fares (Safe House), Jeremy Strong (The Guard),  Mark Duplass and James Gandolfini.

I’ve added Zero Dark Thirty to my list of Best Films of 2012.

Let There Be Light: groundbreaking look at those who have endured too much

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Let There Be Light is an extraordinary documentary about WW II soldiers being treated for psychological war wounds.  Made in 1946 by fabled director John Huston, Let There Be Light was suppressed by the US military until 1980 and had since been available only in a grainy, almost unintelligible version.  Thankfully, it was restored by the National Film Preservation Foundation in 2011, and now can be viewed for free on its website.

Huston followed a group of soldiers as they entered a hospital and engaged in treatment until their release from the service eight weeks later.  Huston shot 70 hours of film, which he winnowed down to this one-hour documentary.  We see the doctors use individual talk therapy, group therapy, hypnosis and sodium pentathol.  We know the condition as Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD).  At the time, it was popularly known as “shell-shock” or “combat fatigue” and termed “psychoneurosis” or “neuropsychosis” by the doctors.

Modern therapists will find the treatment primitive and the movie too optimistic (there’s a sense that everybody is OK after eight weeks in the hospital), but that shouldn’t obscure the compassion of the doctors and the heartbreaking stories of the men.  This was a moment in medical history when the public still needed to learn that this was a psychiatric condition, not cowardice or weakness – and that the condition was treatable.  The narrator (Huston’s father Walter) repeatedly emphasizes that these men have endured more than any human could be expected to bear.

Watch Let There Be Light HERE.

Coming up on TV: M*A*S*H*’s precursor

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Turner Classic Movies is broadcasting Battle Circus (1955) on October 7.  It’s not a great movie, but Baby Boomers will recognize many similarities to 1970’s MASH.   Battle Circus stars Humphrey Bogart as a doctor in a US Army mobile hospital unit in the Korean War. As in MASH, there’s plenty of casualty-laden helicopters, smart ass humor, partying and nurse-chasing.

Of course, Battle Circus‘ story came directly out of the then-contemporary Korean War. MASH was adapted from the 1968 novel by Richard Hooker, who had served in such a unit 15 years before.  And, of course, Robert Altman framed MASH so that, although it was set in the Korean War, it was really about the Vietnam War.

(By the way, the novel and the 1970 movie were titled MASH, and the epic TV series was titled M*A*S*H*. )

 

Coming Up on TV and DVD: The Battle of Algiers

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On July 28, Turner Classic Movies will broadcast The Battle of Algiers, the story of 1950s French colonialists struggling to suppress the guerrilla uprising of Algerian independence fighters.  Although it looks like a documentary, it is not.  Instead, filmmaker Gillo Pontecorvo recreated the actual events so realistically that we believe that we are watching strategy councils of each side.  Urban insurgency and counter-insurgency are nasty, brutal and not very short – and we see some horrifically inhumane butchering by both sides.

Among the great war films, it may be the best film on counter-insurgency.  In 2003, the Pentagon screened the film for its special operations commanders.

In addition, Criterion is about to release The Battle of Algiers in one of its magnificent DVDs.

Coming Up on TV: The two best Civil War films

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Jeff Daniels (center) in Gettysburg

The Civil War began 150 years ago this month, and TCM is broadcasting the two best Civil War movies on April 25.

Ron Maxwell’s 1994 Gettysburg is the gold standard of Civil War films.  It follows Michael Shaara’s superb historical novel The Killer Angels and depicts the decisive three day battle.  It was filmed on the actual battlefield with re-enactors.  Maxwell took great care in maintaining historical accuracy.  Civil War buffs will recognize many lines of dialogue as historical, as well as shots that recall famous photographs.  In addition, Gettysburg is especially well-acted, especially by Jeff Daniels, Tom Berenger, Stephen Lang, Sam Elliott and Brian Mallon.

The other very best Civil War movie is the 1989 Glory, which tells the real-life story of an all-black unit in the Union Army.  Glory has tremendous performances by Denzel Washington, Andre Braugher, Morgan Freeman and Jihmi Kennedy.

Coming up on TV: An Anti-war Masterpiece

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James Coburn and James Garner in The Americanization of Emily

Turner Classic Movies is broadcasting the 1964 The Americanization of Emily on April 7.    Set in England just before the D-Day invasion, The Americanization of Emily is a biting satire and one of the great anti-war movies. James Garner plays an admiral’s staff officer charged with locating luxury goods and willing English women for the brass.  Julie Andrews plays an English driver who has lost her husband and other male family members in the War.  She resists emotional entanglements with other servicemen whose lives may be put at risk, but falls for Garner’s “practicing coward”, a man who is under no illusions about the glory of war and is determined to stay as far from combat as possible.

Unfortunately, Garner’s boss (Melvyn Douglas) has fits of derangement and becomes obsessed with the hope that the first American killed on the beach at D-Day be from the Navy.   Accordingly, he orders Garner to lead a suicide mission to land ahead of the D-Day landing, ostensibly to film it.  Fellow officer James Coburn must guarantee Garner’s martyrdom.

It’s a brilliant screenplay from Paddy Chayefsky, who won screenwriting Oscars for Marty, The Hospital and Network.

Today, Americanization holds up as least as well as its contemporary Dr. Strangelove and much better than Failsafe.

Reportedly, both Andrews and Garner have tagged this as their favorite film.

One of the “Three Nameless Broads” bedded by the Coburn character is played by Judy Carne, later of Rowan and Martin’s Laugh-In.