The top 10 greatest war films - The Times
http://www.thetimes.co.uk/tto/life/article4237844.ece
Courage, humanity - great uniforms: these are ten of the best war movies. Click on the tab above the picture to watch clips (phone app users go to thetimes.co.uk/arts)
War is hell, but it is superb cinema. Adventure, romance, violence, heroism, horror, cruelty and terrific uniforms. War is the ideal backdrop for cinematic drama and the best war films all ask the same essential moral questions: what would you, an ordinary person, do in circumstances of extreme danger outside your control? What is courage? How do you keep your humanity while all around are losing theirs?
The best war films are also, in many cases, simply the greatest films. The Godfather films, Lord of the Rings, even Harry Potter - all, in a way, are war films, depicting the struggle for survival, virtue and meaning in the midst of dehumanising conflict.
Liam Neeson in Schindler’s List
October 16 2014 Rex Features
Schindler’s List (1993): An odd example in that the war takes place almost entirely offstage. The story of Oskar Schindler brought out the horror and moral confusion of the Holocaust more powerfully than any other modern work of art. Schindler was a man who was not in any conventional sense “good”, but who found himself unable to abandon an innate compulsion to do the right thing.
Where Eagles Dare (1968): Alistair MacLean’s screenplay of his own novel rejected the clichés of the postwar war film - square-jawed black and white heroes charging the beaches - and created a taut, twisting, dark plot that still feels fresh. Clint Eastwood mows down more evildoers in this mountain-top epic than in any of his other films. The tailoring of the Wehrmacht outfits is superb.
Rome, Open City (1945): Roberto Rossellini’s harrowing neorealist triumph depicts the Nazi occupation of Rome, the courage of the resistance and the dazed wreckage of a great city at the mercy of history. Shot in the ruins, it has a newsreel feel that gives it an emotional punch unlike any other war film. Martin Scorsese called it “the most precious moment of film history”.
A scene from Apocalypse Now
October 16 2014 Channel 4
Apocalypse Now (1979): Francis Ford Coppola’s adaptation of Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness brings out the hallucinatory, bizarre madness of war, a vision of foetid moral and mental decay that has entered the language. Watch Robert Duvall declaring “I love the smell of napalm in the morning” as US helicopters strafe a Vietnamese village to the sound of Wagner and feel the simultaneous thrill and dread of warfare.
Bruno Ganz in Downfall
October 16 2014 Momentum Pictures
Downfall (2004): Bruno Ganz’s depiction of Hitler’s last days is mesmerising, claustrophobic and one of the very few war films in which an instantly recognisable historical figure is rendered entirely believable. Set in the Führer’s bunker as the Third Reich disintegrates overhead and based on the recollections of Hitler’s secretary Traudl Junge, it is a remarkably brave piece of film-making in which Hitler is depicted as neither mad nor simply evil but as human, sentimental, perverse, splenetic and doomed.
Tom Hanks, Matt Damon and Edward Burns in Saving Private Ryan
October 16 2014 Rex Features
Saving Private Ryan (1998): The long (25-minute) opening scene on Omaha Beach remains the most powerful and realistic battle scene shot, an unflinching, unsentimental portrait of desperation and courage and the fusion between the two. It has its imperfections, but few films bring out the ordinariness of human resilience with such emotional power. Tom Hanks is Everyman, Everysoldier; exhausted, reluctant, but persevering.
The Great Escape (1963): Yes, it creaks a little, but far less than The Dam Busters or The Man Who Never Was. Yes, it is stuffed with historical inaccuracies. Yes, it has been spoofed by everyone from Monty Python to Chicken Run, but like an old soldier there is something quietly, proudly resilient and timeless about this film: it does not offer psychological depth, emotional catharsis, sex or salvation. If ever a film was shot with a stiff upper lip it is this, and it is all the better for that.
Das Boot (1981): Wolfgang Petersen’s classic depicts the excitement, monotony, bravery and fear of war from inside the metal shell of U-96. Petersen wanted to take audiences on “a journey to the edge of the mind” and succeeds magnificently. Tense, sweaty, blackly funny, the tale of 42 German submariners trying to sink Allied shipping while retaining their sanity captures the bleak, nerve-wracking reality of that horrendous underwater conflict.
All Quiet on the Western Front (1930): Based on the novel by Erich Maria Remarque, this is the first great anti-war film, a black and white epic told in a series of vignettes portraying the lives of young German soldiers before the war, on the battlefield, and after the killing; a brilliantly brooding threnody on the pointless futility of war. More than eight decades later it remains as moving and resonant as ever. It was banned by the Nazi government, denounced for what was seen as its unpatriotic, anti-military message - and that, perhaps, is accolade enough.
Robert De Niro in The Deer Hunter
October 16 2014 Rex Features
The Deer Hunter (1978): Michael Cimino’s movie reveals a war that rips up the lives and minds of working-class Americans from a Pennsylvania mining town. The sudden switch in tone from Clairton, near Pittsburgh, into the wild brutality of the Vietnam jungle is one of the best cuts in film history. The Russian roulette scenes may be fictional, but a destroyed man holding a revolver to his head and spinning the chamber remains an enduringly powerful metaphor not just for that war, but for all war.
Courage, humanity - great uniforms: these are ten of the best war movies. Click on the tab above the picture to watch clips (phone app users go to thetimes.co.uk/arts)
War is hell, but it is superb cinema. Adventure, romance, violence, heroism, horror, cruelty and terrific uniforms. War is the ideal backdrop for cinematic drama and the best war films all ask the same essential moral questions: what would you, an ordinary person, do in circumstances of extreme danger outside your control? What is courage? How do you keep your humanity while all around are losing theirs?
The best war films are also, in many cases, simply the greatest films. The Godfather films, Lord of the Rings, even Harry Potter - all, in a way, are war films, depicting the struggle for survival, virtue and meaning in the midst of dehumanising conflict.
Liam Neeson in Schindler’s List
October 16 2014 Rex Features
Schindler’s List (1993): An odd example in that the war takes place almost entirely offstage. The story of Oskar Schindler brought out the horror and moral confusion of the Holocaust more powerfully than any other modern work of art. Schindler was a man who was not in any conventional sense “good”, but who found himself unable to abandon an innate compulsion to do the right thing.
Where Eagles Dare (1968): Alistair MacLean’s screenplay of his own novel rejected the clichés of the postwar war film - square-jawed black and white heroes charging the beaches - and created a taut, twisting, dark plot that still feels fresh. Clint Eastwood mows down more evildoers in this mountain-top epic than in any of his other films. The tailoring of the Wehrmacht outfits is superb.
Rome, Open City (1945): Roberto Rossellini’s harrowing neorealist triumph depicts the Nazi occupation of Rome, the courage of the resistance and the dazed wreckage of a great city at the mercy of history. Shot in the ruins, it has a newsreel feel that gives it an emotional punch unlike any other war film. Martin Scorsese called it “the most precious moment of film history”.
A scene from Apocalypse Now
October 16 2014 Channel 4
Apocalypse Now (1979): Francis Ford Coppola’s adaptation of Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness brings out the hallucinatory, bizarre madness of war, a vision of foetid moral and mental decay that has entered the language. Watch Robert Duvall declaring “I love the smell of napalm in the morning” as US helicopters strafe a Vietnamese village to the sound of Wagner and feel the simultaneous thrill and dread of warfare.
Bruno Ganz in Downfall
October 16 2014 Momentum Pictures
Downfall (2004): Bruno Ganz’s depiction of Hitler’s last days is mesmerising, claustrophobic and one of the very few war films in which an instantly recognisable historical figure is rendered entirely believable. Set in the Führer’s bunker as the Third Reich disintegrates overhead and based on the recollections of Hitler’s secretary Traudl Junge, it is a remarkably brave piece of film-making in which Hitler is depicted as neither mad nor simply evil but as human, sentimental, perverse, splenetic and doomed.
Tom Hanks, Matt Damon and Edward Burns in Saving Private Ryan
October 16 2014 Rex Features
Saving Private Ryan (1998): The long (25-minute) opening scene on Omaha Beach remains the most powerful and realistic battle scene shot, an unflinching, unsentimental portrait of desperation and courage and the fusion between the two. It has its imperfections, but few films bring out the ordinariness of human resilience with such emotional power. Tom Hanks is Everyman, Everysoldier; exhausted, reluctant, but persevering.
The Great Escape (1963): Yes, it creaks a little, but far less than The Dam Busters or The Man Who Never Was. Yes, it is stuffed with historical inaccuracies. Yes, it has been spoofed by everyone from Monty Python to Chicken Run, but like an old soldier there is something quietly, proudly resilient and timeless about this film: it does not offer psychological depth, emotional catharsis, sex or salvation. If ever a film was shot with a stiff upper lip it is this, and it is all the better for that.
Das Boot (1981): Wolfgang Petersen’s classic depicts the excitement, monotony, bravery and fear of war from inside the metal shell of U-96. Petersen wanted to take audiences on “a journey to the edge of the mind” and succeeds magnificently. Tense, sweaty, blackly funny, the tale of 42 German submariners trying to sink Allied shipping while retaining their sanity captures the bleak, nerve-wracking reality of that horrendous underwater conflict.
All Quiet on the Western Front (1930): Based on the novel by Erich Maria Remarque, this is the first great anti-war film, a black and white epic told in a series of vignettes portraying the lives of young German soldiers before the war, on the battlefield, and after the killing; a brilliantly brooding threnody on the pointless futility of war. More than eight decades later it remains as moving and resonant as ever. It was banned by the Nazi government, denounced for what was seen as its unpatriotic, anti-military message - and that, perhaps, is accolade enough.
Robert De Niro in The Deer Hunter
October 16 2014 Rex Features
The Deer Hunter (1978): Michael Cimino’s movie reveals a war that rips up the lives and minds of working-class Americans from a Pennsylvania mining town. The sudden switch in tone from Clairton, near Pittsburgh, into the wild brutality of the Vietnam jungle is one of the best cuts in film history. The Russian roulette scenes may be fictional, but a destroyed man holding a revolver to his head and spinning the chamber remains an enduringly powerful metaphor not just for that war, but for all war.