General Sherman was undoubtedly right: war
is hell. War, however, also used to provide the makings of great cinema. Now
the half-hearted praise for Dunkirk
and Darkest Hour has dissipated, and
we can admit how relentlessly lugubrious those films were, we should ask why
war and cinema have parted company.
Now, leaving aside the twenty hectic,
bloody minutes when Saving Private Ryan (Steven
Spielberg) hits Omaha beach, war red in tooth and claw has been shunted off to
one side of the cinema screen. Some films (like Glory) spend inordinate time preparing for battle, a few (Three Kings) teeter around the edges,
while others - Land of Mine (Martin
Pieter Zandvliet) and The Hurt Locker (Kathryn
Bigelow) - concern themselves with the conundrums and dangers of cleaning
up war debris. The French still regularly portray their historical battles, but
only in period dramas long on fussy costumes and full cleavages. Swords and
sandals war epics continue to be made, but not seriously; those films are the
tumultuous, all-singing-and-dancing tear-jerkers in Bollywood.
Moreover, film directors could now deploy
an abundance of special effects, CGI, to depict a battle in progress. Many have
chosen to look elsewhere, especially to science fiction. A fight with light
sabres can be staged with a lightness of touch, earning a softer rating for the
film, than carnage committed with cavalry sabres. A ray-gun seems more modern
but more innocuous than a real gun. Buckets of blood and gore are ladled out in
noir detective films, not for war stories. CGI is too often wasted on comic-book
clashes of titans (those in Lord of the
Rings (Peter Jackson), for instance) or other imaginary, benignly alien
worlds - that of Avatar (James
Cameron). Special effects are tossed around in disaster movies, instead of
films which depict the real disasters we have inflicted on ourselves.
Perhaps some segments of the film industry
do not want gratuitously to offend past enemies? Surely that cannot be the case;
Germans are as unsparing in forensically dissecting the Nazi past as anyone
else. For all civilised viewers, Nazis comprised the platonic form of evil and
fighting them was the classic illustration of a just war. In the same vein, the
Confederates in films like The Horse
Soldiers were fighting for a heinously vile cause. As Mr Lincoln noted: “if
slavery is not wrong, then nothing is wrong”.
Fur audiences pining for a dollop of war, two
correctives are to hand. One contains no battles, only a handful of deaths, but
a compelling justification of why people should fight. That is Casablanca (Michael Curtiz), which
trumps La Grande Illusion (Jean
Renoir). The second is the six series of
Un Village Français, intricately woven television in which the characters are presented
with exquisitely troubling dilemmas before the opening credits roll. What
happens in the village is not just emotionally wrenching but morally
consequent. Rick and Captain Renaud, Marie and Mayor Larcher, all stand ready
for the re-start of a beautiful friendship.
For cinephile like me who has had an on-going interest in films related to the subject of war ( I was a child of WWII) you seem almost to be acting as devil's advocate in the writing your comment around these four war chosen epics from 50s and 60s Hollywood. I think war is too broad a subject to be treated as a genre. It breaks down into at least a number of categories such as espionage, homefront, pow, anti-war and especially combat (on land sea and air) as well as the changing nature of combat through history. In place of the films from the Hollywood you have selected I would nominate "GI" films like Attack! Men in War, Hell is for Heroes and The Big Red One as get ting closer to the nature of combat. Which is not to say that The Horse Soldiers and The Vikings in particular don't have their merits in this context. CGI is allowing the much more explicit portrayal of the physical horrors -Hacksaw Ridge for example. The Iraq war has produced films exploring wider implications by concentrating on the specifics of guerrilla combat. Much more could be said but to finish I think the two best books on the American combat film have been written by women - Kathryn Kane and Jeanine Basinger. The most recent book that I know of on the broader subject of war is by Daniel Binns - The Hollywood War Film- from WWII to Iraq. Thanks Mark for raising an important subject. One thing seems certain war will continue to be an integral part of human history and with us in some shape of form to the end of history and hence will continue to be portrayed on the screen.
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