1FF's Favourite War Films of All Time

[Craig]

"We have guided missiles and misguided men." Martin Luther King Jr

Joint 25th - 7th on one list.


The Kremlin Letter (1970)

During the Cold War a Naval Intelligence officer endowed with a powerful photographic memory is transferred to the CIA to participate in a covert operation in Moscow.


The Green Berets (1968)

Col. Mike Kirby picks two teams of crack Green Berets for a mission in South Vietnam. First off is to build and control a camp that is trying to be taken by the enemy the second mission is to kidnap a North Vietnamese General.


City of Life and Death (2009)

The battle of Nanking and subsequent massacre from the point of view of both the Chinese victims and the Japanese perpetrators.

 

[Martino Knockavelli]

"
Destination Tokyo (1943)

In order to provide information for the first air raid over Tokyo, a U.S. submarine sneaks into Tokyo Bay and places a spy team ashore.

Spoiler: mine

Archetypal submarine film and high point (however one might want to spin that) of the patriotic war-effort movie. Familiar, motley group of types sent off on a borderline suicide mission to the shores of Japan to scout ahead of an aerial attack, led by Cary Grant as the unironic embodiment of selfless courage and humanity.

V interesting in several ways. As a prototypical Hollywood studio movie of the era, which switches between high drama, low comedy and scenes of heart string pulling tragedy and derring-do without any of it ever feeling incongruous. As a very good submarine movie with all the usual stuff that entails (as a low level claustrophobe who would drown within 10 seconds if deposited in the middle of a large body of open water all that malarkey never fails to make me shit a brick). And as a v impressive directorial bow by Delmer Daves, with great atmosphere and some tremendous miniature effects (which I am a total sucker for).

But also interesting as propaganda, which the movie never lets you forget for more than 5 minutes at a time. Several mucho on the nose speeches (one decries the godless Japs as totalitarian loons because they don't let their workers have unions, which I'm guessing is a line they'll leave out of the Trump Studios remake made to encourage people to enlist for WWIII....). Obv there a loads of these sorts of pictures from both sides of the Atlantic, but my generational proclivities are such that I think first of the 60s and 70s and onwards when it comes to War movies, so the gleeful "eat shit Nip scum!" vibe still catches me by surprise.

Compelling big screen drama and a fascinating historical/cultural document.

 

[SALTIRE]

Of course. But "M" was already a non-silent movie. Fritz Lang was such a blessed director and Peter Lorre was awesome. Such a loss for the German Film that both (had to) emigrated to Hollywood like many other actors and directors before the evil reigned in Germany for 12 years.



I remember we talked about DD Lewis here (somewhere) a few weeks ago and there you mentioned the "overacting", too.



That's why I wrote "Thanks for the tip" because it was mentioned in the trailer that this classic was digitally remastered just shortly. I just saw that the Blu-Ray is already available (although actually 27,99 brit pounds (or in the german amazon store for 25,69 Euro) isn't cheap.

Yeah I mentioned M just with you referring to the superb Metropolis by Langley and wondered if you'd see it too.

I'll find a stream to watch Napoleon one of these days whenever I have time to watch it.

 

[SALTIRE]

Will need to check out Destination Tokyo as I've never heard of it and love sub dramas, and Cary Grant is in my top ten screen actors of them all, so this is going to be one I'll be looking out for soon!

Interesting you think The Pianist is Polanski's best Craig, I know he's a controversial director, but I've yet to see a truly bad film he's done and imo is one of the top directors in history.

 

[Dirk]

Yeah I mentioned M just with you referring to the superb Metropolis by Langley and wondered if you'd see it too.

Langley? Freudian Slip? Did you watch recently something about the CIA? (SCNR)

I'll find a stream to watch Napoleon one of these days whenever I have time to watch it.

I think I'll buy the Blu-Ray. Some classics, especially when digitally remastered and with some extras on it, I want to have at home and not only watching a stream. Old fashioned, I know, but I am willing to pay for good ones.

City of Live and Death? That's one I always missed to watch (don't know why). But now I have it on my (long) list of films that I want to watch in 2017
(btw: I missed "The Killing fields", too. Damn, seems I could make another list with all those films that slipped my mind the first time. I should've waited a bit longer to send you my list)

 

[SALTIRE]

I'm on my phone this morning damn autocorrect!

 

[Dirk]

I'm on my phone this morning damn autocorrect!

Thought so! I had sometimes the same problems when it corrects english words with german ones. That's why I have to edit my posts here sometimes when I am aware of this "correction" the phone made
"Autocorrect" is sometimes the wrong word for it when it corrects Lang to Langley...unless you're working for the Scottish branch of the CIA of course....you're a spy?

 

[Pagnell]

Always loved Where Eagles Dare myself. No doubt Carel will say it's shite.

 

[Dirk]

Who gives a fuck how others rate the film when you like it? (btw Was on my list at #14. And had another Clint Eastwood film on my list (Kelly's Heroes)).

edit: Where Eagles dare wasn't listed yet.

 

[Martino Knockavelli]

Dirk

Unfortunately Pagnell is obsessed with me and devotes his sad little excuse for a life to stalking me around this forum and making sarcastic comments, hoping that one day he will finally bully me sufficiently into losing my cool, lashing out and possibly killing myself. It really is a shame.

 

[Pagnell]

Who gives a fuck how others rate the film when you like it?

It wasn't serious, more a tongue-in-cheek reference to him being my own little forum stalker.

 

[Stevencc]

I'd like to nominate Vitriolic Keystrokes - The Carel and Pagnell Story as my favourite war film.

 

[Cheese & Biscuits]

I can't believe I was the only one to pick Schindler's List. Had that down as a top ten finish.

 

[SALTIRE]

I can't believe I was the only one to pick Schindler's List. Had that down as a top ten finish.

I had it as well.

 

[Cheese & Biscuits]

I had it as well.

Craig's post said 8th on one list.

 

[Martino Knockavelli]

Another Creg list project descends into farce.

 

[Craig]

Schindler's List was only nominated by Cheese & Biscuits.

 

[Stevencc]

What a strange thing for Saltire to lie about, he must have some kind of mental condition.

 

[Craig]

I did wonder what he was on about when he said he'd nominated a different holocaust film to The Pianist.

 

[Cheese & Biscuits]

Never trust a Scotsman

 

[Craig]

“I know not with what weapons World War III will be fought, but World War IV will be fought with sticks and stones.” Albert Einstein

Joint 24th - 15 points from 1 list unless stated.


Battle of Britain (1969) - 2 lists

In 1940, the British Royal Air Force fights a desperate battle to prevent the Luftwaffe from gaining air superiority over the English Channel as a prelude to a possible Axis invasion of the UK.


Elephant (1989)

Graphic depiction of a series of murders in Northern Ireland with no explanation to who the victims or perpetrators are.


300 (2006)

Zack Snyder's stylistic take on the battle of Thermopylae apdapted from Frank Miller's best selling graphic novel.


Pan's Labyrinth (2006)

In the Falangist Spain of 1944, the bookish young stepdaughter of a sadistic army officer escapes into an eerie but captivating fantasy world.

 

[SALTIRE]

Schindler's List was only nominated by Cheese & Biscuits.

Beg your pardon Craig, I remember adding it to my list late on, must've took it out again shortly afterwards. Looking at my list now, can't believe I didn't put Schindler's List in or The Pianist - oh dear!

 

[SALTIRE]

What a strange thing for Saltire to lie about, he must have some kind of mental condition.

I'm all over the place this week, been out of sorts every day, and I forgot to put up the matchday threads!

 

[Martino Knockavelli]

"
The Steel Helmet (1951)

WWII veteran Samuel Fuller's Korean War drama follows a band of American soldiers fighting off a larger force of communist forces in an abandoned Buddhist temple.

Spoiler: mine

Film-makers with first hand experience of war were common around this time, but few of them remind you of it more viscerally than Sam Fuller. The great kinofist pulp master of his (or really any other) era, this was his first hit and typical of his style... cheaply made and with a tabloid sort of brashnness and directness... rough hewn men doing rough hewn manly things, the sledgehammer symbolism of a temple setting; direct, down the barrel discussion of race... the sort of material that could easily be hackneyed or turn to cheese in other hands, but not with Fuller. He balances grittiness and warmth, cynicism and humanity. He made several war movies, at least 3 or 4 of which are very good. Obv he shoulda just stuck to one cos he's ended up splitting his vote here.

 

[Martino Knockavelli]

Napoleon (1927)

A film about the French Field Marshal's youth and early military career.

Spoiler: mine

Silent epic with a capital E. A quantum leap forward in cinematic grammar - if the war film is often taken to be synonymous with action and big screen spectacle then is where a lot of that starts - dynamic camera movements, rapid editing, multi-camera set-ups, split screens, subjective/POV shots, lots of close-ups. It's a remarkably contemporary feeling film in a lot of ways, culminating in a truly spectacular finale in which the image expands into a barmy proto-widescreen triptych extravaganza.

There's a book to be written about the history of this movie, from its making, via Francis Ford Coppola's dubious interventions, to Kevin Brownlow's years of work to produce the version we can see now.

I've only seen this on my tele, and it's clearly the kind of thing that demands to be watched on the biggest possible screen, but still. Be warned that it is VERY VERY FUCKING LONG though. If you can make it through it one sitting then you are made of tougher stuff than me.

 

[Martino Knockavelli]

Le Silence de la Mer (1949)

Under Nazi occupation, an elderly Frenchman and his niece must board a German officer. As a form of resistance, they enter pact of silence when the officer is present. But as time passes, they realise he far differs from their expectations.

Spoiler: mine

Another film-maker who knew wot he was on about from first hand experience. A picture about occupation and resistance made whilst those experiences were still livid in the memory. Not a piece of searing agitprop though, or an angry exorcising of demons, but minimalist and restrained, full of the quiet eloquence of small gestures, and more interested in that which unites us than that which divides us.

 

[Martino Knockavelli]

Ivan's Childhood (1962)

In WWII, twelve year old Soviet orphan Ivan Bondarev works for the Soviet army as a scout behind the German lines and strikes a friendship with three sympathetic Soviet officers.

Spoiler: mine

Super impressive debut features seems to be a recurring theme on my list here. This is not quite the grand masterpiece that most of Tarkovsky's later films are, but the germinal forms of his style and motifs are present, and in a way it works to the film's advantage, as a (relatively) smaller, simpler tale of a child during war.

Tarkvosky was great at landscape and rarely better than here... austere, snow-covered terrain, the expressionism of jagged ruins... a nightmare/dream-scape. It oscillates between nature and barbarity, realism and fantasy,...

 

[Martino Knockavelli]

“
Elephant (1989)

Graphic depiction of a series of murders in Northern Ireland with no explanation to who the victims or perpetrators are.

Spoiler: mine

Most movies concerned with murder are interested in the Art of Killing. Its stylisation, its aestheticisation, its mythification. This is the opposite... murder unvarnished, barely mediated, repetitious, abattoirial.

18 killings, generally alike, short sequences shot in a realist, deadpan style. It produces an effect akin to minimalist music... small differences assume great significance, slight modulation feels like sea change. Stripping it all back produces a horrible dread and suspense. It's not always immediately clear whether the camera is following the killer or the victim. One knows how each sequence will end but we don't know when, or how.

Basically plotless and dialogue free, so we are never furnished with a Why. It was made about Northern Ireland but the lack of character and narrative fosters a sense of universality, especially when watching it at this temporal remove. This is basically avant-garde film-making (tho I'm sure Clarke would've disdained such a designation), and belies the idea that such things have to be opaque or difficult or dry... a work of immediate power and visceral impact, a primal scream.

 

[Dirk]

 

[Craig]

I voted Prisoner of the Mountains. Two Russian soldiers are held captive in a remote village in the Caucasus mountains by an old man hoping to trade them for his son who is being held by the Russians. There's been conflict between the Russian government and the inhabitants of these areas for centuries and this is a snapshot into that clash of cultures based on a story written by Leo Tolstoy and based on his own experiences in that region in the 19th century. It's an interesting character study into the mindset of two opposing sides of a conflict with very different outlooks on war and death but at the same time similar outlooks on life and love.

Johnny Mad Dog. Horrific peek into a conflict in Africa fought primarily by children. In between watching them commit terrible acts of murder and rape under the influence of drugs and alcohol they have been plied with by their adult commanding officers we see them act out the normal activities of children their age. A damning indictment into the situation in these countries that the western world has played a massive part in creating.

City of Life and Death. There has been many Chinese made films regarding the Japanese invasion in the 1930's but no others I have seen have presented it other than an orgy of rape and murder on a mass scale (which to be fair it largely was). Lu Chuan manages to break that trend set by films such as Men Behind the Sun and Black Sun and his epic is all the better for it. Told from both a Chinese and Japanese perspective it doesn't shy away from the aforementioned horrors from the point of view of the Chinese soldiers and civilians but at the same time shows us them from the view of a Japanese soldier named Kadokawa. We see him slowly descend into madness by the shame of it all. Lu Chuan received death threats for this sympathetic arc but it is this aspect of the film that is the most shocking as we are forced to face the fact that the human beings carrying out this atrocity were just that.

Scene.

Spoiler

The most terrifying scene of the film is not the child being thrown from a second story window for hitting a Japanese officer, the raping to death of Chinese women or the Chinese soldiers being burnt alive. It is the Japanese victory parade that follows all this and the moment Kadokawa finally loses his shit after calmly and compliantly participating in all that preceded.

Not long after he escorts two Chinese prisoners to the city limit where he has been ordered to execute them. Instead he releases them and turns the gun on himself in Japanese honour suicide fashion.