World War 2 Movies

Remembering the war on film

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Among my earliest memories is watching "Bridge On the River Kwai" on TV; it was broadcast once a year, and my family gathered around the tube to watch Alec Guinness and his men, to the catchy tune of "Colonel Boogie March," work on the famed bridge. Another favorite of the era was "The Great Escape," with the unforgettable scenes of Steve McQueen on his motorcycle trying to jump the barbed wire, and James Garner asking Donald Pleasance if he can see. In the Fifties and Sixties, the movies were filmed in color, but the viewpoints were black-and-white. There was no ambiguity in "The Longest Day," with John Wayne as the paratrooper colonel ("Cut him down, I said!" and "Saddle up.").

In more recent decades, World War Two remains the subject of great movies, but they offer considerably more to think about: the gruesome D-Day landings in "Saving Private Ryan" just would not have fit in the earlier, simplistic films of John Wayne. And "Schindler's List" was another milestone in the world's continuing struggle to come to grips with the Holocaust.

Thirteen More Memorable WWII Movies

1. Casablanca - Great quotes that have entered popular culture: "I'm shocked, positively shocked to find out there is gambling going on here. ... Play it again, Sam. (although Bogart never said those precise words in that order) ... I think this is the beginning of a beautiful friendship. ...We'll always have Paris."
2. Kelly's Heroes - While not an anti-war film, this was one of the first to view the war as less than totally heroic. The guys were behind German lines stealing for themselves. "Again with the negative vibes, man."
3. The Dirty Dozen - One critic called it 'an anti-Nazi slaughterfest.'
4. Tora! Tora! Tora! / Midway - Is this one movie or two movies? I loved it/them. Very well done semi-documentaries of the war in the Pacific.
5. A Bridge Too Far - Not a great movie, but if you assemble enough stars and enough equipment and have a big budget, you get an entertaining war movie. I liked it, even with Sean Connery's redundant line, "the general consensus of opinion."
6. Battle of the Bulge / Battle of Britain / Sink the Bismarck - One movie or three? All were mid-Sixties semi-documentaries of great battles of the WW2.
7. Catch-22 - a landmark in the evolution of how Hollywood looked at the war. The first anti-war movie about WW2.
8. Patton - Wow.
9. Twelve O'Clock High - Gregory Peck whips the crew of the Leper Colony into shape.
10. Das Boot - War in the Atlantic, from the perspective of the German U-boat crew.
11. They Were Expendable - John Wayne as a PT-boat captain in the early days of the war.
12. Night of the Generals - the July 20 plot
13. 36 Hours - The Germans try to hoodwink James Garner into thinking that the war is over, and it's ten years later, so that he will tell them when and where D-Day took place.

You can also read my review of some Japanese WW2 movies. While not exactly WW2, but made in the immediate postwar period in Japan, the film Rashomon might be the best movie ever made. Read my review here. Also a discussion of structure of the Kurosawa movie, Throne of Blood. And a list of the greatest Japanese movies of all-time.

I also have an All Time Greatest Movies list.