War Movies

War movies have always been my genre. It probably started, I'm sure, with my pre-adolescent fascination with military stuff - planes, tanks, rifles, ships, you name it. As I got through high school and began reading some of the more detailed accounts of life at war, the fascination turned from the tools to the people. What made people do that - march or slither or fly or sail toward an enemy that is trying to kill you?

The books - some famous, like All Quiet on the Western Front or Bill Mauldin's Army, some virtually unknown today, like GI - the Anvil of Victory or the British Two Jacks and the B'Nai B'Rith's Black Book - hammered the human cost of war home to me at a fairly tender age. And the movies - the good ones, anyway?

There are really five different kinds of war movies:

• Jingoistic propaganda pieces. This isn't always a bad thing; Casablanca and Aleksandr Nevski are both propaganda exercises, and both are magnificent in very different ways;
• History lessons. The good ones - Patton, A Bridge Too Far - put huge events and people in a context that makes sense. The bad ones - Midway, Gods and Generals - make you wish a war would break out right about now, to halt the bombardment of factoids.
• Anti-war propaganda pieces. Again, not always bad; All Quiet On The Western Front and Dr. Strangelove both qualify. Platoon, too - I don't share many consevatives' hatred of this movie, which at least told a story Oliver Stone didn't have to substantiate.
• Works of Art. Usually anti-war, but the message - whatever message - is eaten up by the artist's theme and vision. I usually have very little patience with these movies - Full Metal Jacket and Thin Blue Line and The Naked And The Dead and Every Man a King all made me grit my teeth at the shrill pomposity of artists like Kubrick and MacNally and Mailer and Uri Zohar. My friends all loved Peckinpah's Cross of Iron, I could barely watch it - it was about Peckinpah, not the German and Russian soldiers that populated his movie without ever quite starring in it.
• Depictions of the lives of soldiers. The bad ones - Hamburger Hill springs to mind - are action movies with cartoon characters. The great ones - The Big Red One, Private Ryan, Europa Europa, A Midnight Clear- can't pretend to give you an idea of what a soldier's life is about, but they manage to combine real people's humanity with a cinematic treatment of hellishness that manages to deflate any residual notion of battle as a glorious thing.

Lileks' bleat today touches on We Were Soldiers Once, Mel Gibson's much-undeservedly-maligned adaptation of the great book.

It's a great bleat, and hard to pick a money quote - but here's the part I loved - about the dialogue, which some critics panned:

It was a movie about soldiers in a battle, and now I understand some critic’s chagrin: it took the soldiers’ side. I remember reading reviews that slammed the movie for its jingo factor, for shameless retreads of old war-movie clichés. One of the scenes depicted the hero’s penultimate night with his family; he’s reading to his little girl, and she interrupts the story to ask “what is a war, daddy?” This subsequent conversation doesn’t just tug at the heartstrings, it ties them to a piano and pushes the piano out a 30-story window. (Gibson is very good with the children in the movie - as befits a man blessed with many of his own, he doesn’t have to find his motivation when asked to play the father to a half-dozen offspring.) Then there’s the dying words of some soldiers, which are straight out of a black-comedy skit about war-movie clichés. But what if they actually said those words? What if they believed them? When you think of it, there’s not a single heartfelt sentiment that couldn’t come from a comedy skit nowadays. The more unvarnished and elemental the emotion, the more likely we glib sophisticates will roll our eyes: oh, please. Either die screaming as you stuff your guts back in, or keep still and trust the director to let Samuel Barber speak on your behalf.

Someone tell the critics - soldiers don't have scriptwriters. They speak with the same ratio of banality to profundity that everyone else does.

Read the whole thing - he also talks about our mutual radio alma mater, KSTP-AM, and The Babys "Isn't It Time?", the most gloriously overwrought piece of pop treacle in a decade that was swamped with it, and the song that still makes me ask "How can you associate John Waitt with "Missing You"?

Posted by Mitch at March 10, 2003 08:05 AM