1FF's Favourite War Films of All Time

[Craig]

"All war is a symptom of man's failure as a thinking animal" John Steinbeck

Joint 23rd - 16 points from 1 list.

Fail Safe (1964)

American planes are sent to deliver a nuclear attack on Moscow, but it's a mistake due to an electrical malfunction. Can all-out war be averted?


Top Gun (1986)

As students at the United States Navy's elite fighter weapons school compete to be best in the class, one daring young pilot learns a few things from a civilian instructor that are not taught in the classroom.


The Great Dictator (1940)

Dictator Adenoid Hynkel tries to expand his empire while a poor Jewish barber tries to avoid persecution from Hynkel's regime.


Waterloo (1970)

Facing the decline of everything he has worked to obtain, conqueror Napoleon Bonaparte and his army confront the British at the Battle of Waterloo.

 

[SALTIRE]

Fail Safe is a hell of a tense film, greatly acted particularly on Fonda trying to make the right call or else start World War III.

I realised I'd missed Waterloo once I handed my list in; its a tremendous film and seeing all those thousands of extras move in formation is a real sight to behold. Steiger gives a tour-de-force performance as Napoleon also.

Not seen The Great Dictator in years either. One of Chaplin's finest, full of great fun, sadness and pathos; the scene where he dances with the globe is reminiscent of the games Putin and Trump are playing right now; and that speech at the end, though slightly grandstanding, is relevant to this very day.

 

[Dirk]

I realised I'd missed Waterloo once I handed my list in; its a tremendous film and seeing all those thousands of extras move in formation is a real sight to behold. Steiger gives a tour-de-force performance as Napoleon also.

I had it on #5 hence the 16 points. A pity that you missed to put it on your list because I am a bit "embarrassed" that this movie has now the same standing here as Top Gun

 

[Craig]

"War is sweet to those who have no experience of it, but the experienced man trembles exceedingly at heart on its approach." Pindar

Joint 22nd - 17 points each - 1 list unless stated.

The Hunt for Red October (1990)

In November 1984, the Soviet Union's best submarine captain in their newest sub violates orders and heads for the USA. Is he trying to defect or to start a war?


Bravo Two Zero (1999)

An eight man SAS patrol is dropped behind enemy lines during the Gulf War. When they are detected they must make their way to safety pursued by the Iraqi army through inhospitable terrain.


Casablanca (1942) - 2 lists

In Casablanca, Morocco in December 1941, a cynical American expatriate meets a former lover, with unforeseen complications.


Rome, Open City (1945)

During the Nazi occupation of Rome in 1944, resistance leader Giorgio Manfredi is chased by Nazis and he seeks refuge and escape.


Black Hawk Down (2001) - 2 lists

Mogadishu, 1993. 160 elite U.S. soldiers drop into Somalia to capture two top lieutenants of a renegade warlord and find themselves in a desperate battle with a large force of heavily-armed Somalis.


Braddock: Missing in Action III (1988)

Braddock mounts a one-man assault to free his wife and son who are still being held in a Vietnam prison camp.

 

[Megaclyde]

I didn't put a list in or anything, but would The Last Samurai have been eligible?

 

[SALTIRE]

I didn't put a list in or anything, but would The Last Samurai have been eligible?

Yeah definitely, I was thinking of putting Ran in.

 

[Craig]

"War does not determine who is right, only who is left" Bertrand Russell

Joint 21st - 18 points from 1 list unless stated.


The Cruel Sea (1953)

The World War II adventures of a British convoy escort ship and its officers.


Ice Cold in Alex (1958)

During WWII in North Africa, a medical field unit must cross the desert in their ambulance in order to reach the British lines in Alexandria.


Forrest Gump (1994)

Forrest Gump, while not intelligent, has accidentally been present at many historic moments, but his true love, Jenny Curran, eludes him.


Rogue One (2016)

The Rebel Alliance makes a risky move to steal the plans for the Death Star, setting up the epic saga to follow.


Good Morning, Vietnam (1987) - 2 lists

An unorthodox and irreverent DJ begins to shake up things when he is assigned to the U.S. Armed Services Radio station in Vietnam.


Cross of Iron (1977)

A German commander places a squad in extreme danger after its Sergeant refuses to lie for him.

 

[Cheese & Biscuits]

Ice Cold in Alex - first one that's been posted that I wish I had put on my list.

 

[Dirk]

Ice Cold in Alex - first one that's been posted that I wish I had put on my list.

Never heard of it. But it's an interesting title for a movie about WWII in North Africa. And some quality actors with Sir John Mills and Anthony Quayle (his tv series "Strange report" with Anneke Wills and Kaz Garas is one of the legendary ITC series from the 60's) and the ever present Harry Andrews.

 

[The Jovial Forester]

No list either but hoping that The Victors, Come and See and maybe pushing it The Sorrow and the Pity feature, all excellent.

 

[Stagat]

"War does not determine who is right, only who is left" Bertrand Russell

Joint 21st - 18 points from 1 list unless stated.


The Cruel Sea (1953)

The World War II adventures of a British convoy escort ship and its officers.


Ice Cold in Alex (1958)

During WWII in North Africa, a medical field unit must cross the desert in their ambulance in order to reach the British lines in Alexandria.


Forrest Gump (1994)

Forrest Gump, while not intelligent, has accidentally been present at many historic moments, but his true love, Jenny Curran, eludes him.


Rogue One (2016)

The Rebel Alliance makes a risky move to steal the plans for the Death Star, setting up the epic saga to follow.


Good Morning, Vietnam (1987) - 2 lists

An unorthodox and irreverent DJ begins to shake up things when he is assigned to the U.S. Armed Services Radio station in Vietnam.


Cross of Iron (1977)

A German commander places a squad in extreme danger after its Sergeant refuses to lie for him.

Liked for the quote. Not heard that one before.

 

[Martino Knockavelli]

"
The Great Dictator (1940)

Spoiler: mine

Another type of war film - the comedy. It is fair to ask what role comedy can play in the face of horror and atrocity. Peter Cook's quote about "sinking giggling into the sea" is germane. Tho Chaplin skewered Hitler and Mussolini here (most adroitly in the justly celebrated globe scene), underscoring that they were ultimately absurd figures, it did not send either of them home with tail between legs, or dissuade anyone allied to their causes. But those are existential questions that can be asked of enormous swathes of art history.

IMO what one can say is that if satire is of any value then there are not many better examples than this. The world's most famous film-maker using his prominence as a cudgel (albeit a very entertaining cudgel) in service of a just cause. And it was a bold thing to do. The hideousness of what Nazi Germany would turn out to be was not widely understood (or at least widely accepted) at the time of its production... Chamberlain was still on about peace in our time when Chaplin first began work on it, filming began before conflict had broken out in Europe, and the NYC premiere was a year before the US joined the war. This was an artist walking the talk, doing what he could, as relatively little as it might have been. In that context the common criticism of the last scene as grandstanding, or didactic/preachy/etc seems misguided. As an artist Chaplin was nothing if not sincere, and if there was ever an occasion to ascend to the pulpit and plead straight down the barrel of the camera it was surely then, in the shadow of an actual real life fascist fucken empire...

This is not my favourite Chaplin film, or probs even my 3rd or 4th favourite, and it is flawed and messy and baggy in places, but there aren't many films like this in the history of the medium.

 

[Martino Knockavelli]

Casablanca (1942) - 2 lists

In Casablanca, Morocco in December 1941, a cynical American expatriate meets a former lover, with unforeseen complications.

Warner Bros programmer that ended up being an apex of a Golden Age Hollywood. War is perhaps more background than foreground, but the theme of self-sacrifice in the name of a higher cause is obviously central, and it's pulled off with such irresistible elegance and aplomb that official propaganda a la Destination Tokyo seems laughably crude and superfluous in comparison...

Rome, Open City (1945)

During the Nazi occupation of Rome in 1944, resistance leader Giorgio Manfredi is chased by Nazis and he seeks refuge and escape.

Neorealist (-ish) depiction of occupation and resistance. Written and shot whilst the city was still occupied, on cobbled together film stocks and scrounged up equipment, almost a guerilla act in itself. Realism of a very different kind from that ascribed to the opening scene of Saving Private Ryan, say.

Also, apropos of I don't know what: watched this again the other night and it has an undercurrent of really quite nasty homophobia....

 

[Craig]

"I hate war as only a soldier who has lived it can, only as one who has seen its brutality, its stupidity." Dwight D. Eisenhower

20th - 19 points on 1 list

The Spy Who Came In From The Cold (1965)

British agent Alec Leamas refuses to come in from the Cold War during the 1960s, choosing to face another mission, which may prove to be his final one.


Joint 19th - 20 points

Threads (1984)

Documentary-style account of a nuclear holocaust and its effect on the working class city of Sheffield, England, and the eventual long-term effects of nuclear war on civilisation.


La Grande Illusion (1937) - 2 lists

During the First World War, two French soldiers are captured and imprisoned in a German P.O.W. camp. Several escape attempts follow until they are sent to a seemingly impenetrable fortress which seems impossible to escape from.


Coming Home (1978)

A woman whose husband is fighting in Vietnam falls in love with another man who suffered a paralysing combat injury there.

 

[SALTIRE]

Threads is horrifying and still a hard watch even with the dodgy effects. Didn't like The Spy Who Came In From The Cold, and I hear they are remaking that from the same team that butched The Night Manager.

 

[Martino Quackavelli]

Bump. My number one still hasn't featured.

 

[Martino Knockavelli]

"
Threads (1984)

Documentary-style account of a nuclear holocaust and its effect on the working class city of Sheffield, England, and the eventual long-term effects of nuclear war on civilisation.

Spoiler: mine

Harrowing as fuck. We can talk about anti-war movies, the horror and the cruelty and whatever. But this is it really innit... global annihilation, humanity reduced to bestial remnants scrabbling in the dirt. Unflinching, grim, horrible. Also basically a dual nomination for Peter Watkins' The War Game, which is a very similar film made 20 years earlier. Watkins also did Culloden, another really interesting docudrama which combines an historical setting with modern media war reportage, which was one of the last ones chopped from my list.

La Grande Illusion (1937) - 2 lists

During the First World War, two French soldiers are captured and imprisoned in a German P.O.W. camp. Several escape attempts follow until they are sent to a seemingly impenetrable fortress which seems impossible to escape from.

Spoiler: mine

An atypical sort of a war movie, removed from the trenches and with next to nothing in the way of combat scenes etc. Sometimes criticised as a bit of "gentleman's war" romanticisation, but I think that's a misreading... it's about class but more nuanced than that, the POW camp is a microcosm, the narrative is about the collapse of some (dubious) order of pan-European nobility, WWI as family squabble, class loyalties at both ends of the scale. It's balanced, equanimous, humanistic. Gabin's protagonist has no halo. A subtle film that belies the deftness of its own construction.

 

[SALTIRE]

Threads falls down very slightly towards the end as the young lass makes her way through the desolation and destruction; but the rest of it is incredibly bleak, harrowing and powerful that stay with you long afterwards; and the narrators completely factual and unsentimental voice just adds to the horror as he calmly states what's happening next.

It's a must watch maybe with a double bill of Fail Safe or Dr. Strangeglove, then watch a light comedy afterwards to cheer yourself up!

 

[Craig]

"My first wish is to see this plague of mankind, war, banished from the earth." George Washington

All films from here on in appear on more than one list.

Joint 18th.

Gallipoli (1981)

Two Australian sprinters face the brutal realities of war when they are sent to fight in the Gallipoli campaign in Turkey during World War I.


Kajaki (2014)

Kajaki Dam 2006. A company of young British soldiers encounter an unexpected, terrifying enemy. A dried-out river bed, and under every step the possibility of an anti-personnel mine. A mine that could cost you your leg - or your life.


Regeneration (1997)

Based on Pat Barker's novel of the same name, Regeneration tells the story of soldiers of World War One sent to an asylum for emotional troubles. Two of the soldiers meeting there are Wilfred Owen and Siegfried Sassoon.

 

[Craig]

"The great questions of the day will not be settled by means of speeches and majority decisions but by iron and blood." Otto von Bismarck

Joint 17th

Ran (1985)

In Medieval Japan, an elderly warlord retires, handing over his empire to his three sons. However, he vastly underestimates how the new-found power will corrupt them and cause them to turn on each other...and him.


Empire of the Sun (1987)

A young English boy struggles to survive under Japanese occupation during World War II.


The Longest Day (1962)

The events of D-Day, told on a grand scale from both the Allied and German points of view.

 

[SALTIRE]

Some great films in amongst that lot.

 

[Martino Knockavelli]

Ran (1985)

In Medieval Japan, an elderly warlord retires, handing over his empire to his three sons. However, he vastly underestimates how the new-found power will corrupt them and cause them to turn on each other...and him.

Spoiler: mine

Shall not tell i lie, I hadn't seen this for yonks when I submitted my list and after rewatching would have voted it a lot higher.

Lear inspired and compelling on the level of character and theme (Game of Thrones owes this a co-production credit) but where it really succeeds is an audio/visual treat. The thick end of three hours long but you could pause it on about 50% of however many frames that is and print them out for a gallery.

A masterpiece in dynamic composition. A dialectic that begins with symmetry, and blocking which speaks to hierarchy, and chromatic balance that communicates order, and then descends into chaos, disorder, decay…. the expressionism of the charred ruins of battlements, the crazy paving of cyclopean stone work, the desolation of barren grey wastes...

I'm not normally predisposed to being impressed by directors whose claim to fame is corralling and co-ordinating a shit load of big scale materiel and making it work (Peter Jackson would make a great project manager, so what?), but here it is in the service of something. Incredible use of landscape on an enormous scale, figures subsumed by terrain. Deep focus that features 20 extras in the extreme foreground, and in the background another 100 on a ridge which must be a mile away. Or a battalion that marches from left to right across the frame, their heads perfectly aligned with with the base of the hills in the background, a realist painting in motion.

I thought initially that the one flaw with it is that it peaks with a battle scene about 50 mins in and never quite hits that fever pitch again, but I think that is actually what it really has to say about war: it is shit. it is bloody, it is horror, it is slaughter birthed by the flaws and errors and vanities of small men who think themselves great. And it's all for nothing, chaos, an anticlimax. A blind man weeps. The smartest and most honourable person throughout was the fool. The gods are oblivious.

Also interesting for this is the Chris Marker documentary A.K., which prompts a reading of the film akin to that of Baudrillard on Apocalypse Now… that Ran is less a war film than a military operation in and of itself, an extension of war, with Kurosawa (who, it is shown in the doc, had a field painted gold for a night time scene that didn-t even make the final cut of the film…….) as the ageing patriarch on the edge of madness…...

 

[SALTIRE]

Ran was definitely in my consideration as it has it all and if anything surpasses most adaptations of King Lear on film, with some memorable shots and moments, particularly the way the fallen warlord has that sunken deathly kabuki look about him for the final third or so. It is an unforgettable masterpiece, but not enough to push it ahead of Starship Troopers in my list!

 

[lordofthepies]

Spoiler: mine

Shall not tell i lie, I hadn't seen this for yonks when I submitted my list and after rewatching would have voted it a lot higher.

Lear inspired and compelling on the level of character and theme (Game of Thrones owes this a co-production credit) but where it really succeeds is an audio/visual treat. The thick end of three hours long but you could pause it on about 50% of however many frames that is and print them out for a gallery.

A masterpiece in dynamic composition. A dialectic that begins with symmetry, and blocking which speaks to hierarchy, and chromatic balance that communicates order, and then descends into chaos, disorder, decay…. the expressionism of the charred ruins of battlements, the crazy paving of cyclopean stone work, the desolation of barren grey wastes...

I'm not normally predisposed to being impressed by directors whose claim to fame is corralling and co-ordinating a shit load of big scale materiel and making it work (Peter Jackson would make a great project manager, so what?), but here it is in the service of something. Incredible use of landscape on an enormous scale, figures subsumed by terrain. Deep focus that features 20 extras in the extreme foreground, and in the background another 100 on a ridge which must be a mile away. Or a battalion that marches from left to right across the frame, their heads perfectly aligned with with the base of the hills in the background, a realist painting in motion.

I thought initially that the one flaw with it is that it peaks with a battle scene about 50 mins in and never quite hits that fever pitch again, but I think that is actually what it really has to say about war: it is shit. it is bloody, it is horror, it is slaughter birthed by the flaws and errors and vanities of small men who think themselves great. And it's all for nothing, chaos, an anticlimax. A blind man weeps. The smartest and most honourable person throughout was the fool. The gods are oblivious.

Also interesting for this is the Chris Marker documentary A.K., which prompts a reading of the film akin to that of Baudrillard on Apocalypse Now… that Ran is less a war film than a military operation in and of itself, an extension of war, with Kurosawa (who, it is shown in the doc, had a field painted gold for a night time scene that didn-t even make the final cut of the film…….) as the ageing patriarch on the edge of madness…...

my number 1. good, innit.

 

[SALTIRE]

Can't go wrong with Kurosawa.

 

[Craig]

Joint 16th.

"There never was a good war, or a bad peace" Benjamin Franklin

Jarhead (2005)

Based on former US marine Anthony Swofford's memoirs of his experiences in the Gulf War.


Lebanon (2009)

During the First Lebanon War in 1982, a lone tank and a paratroopers platoon are dispatched to search a hostile town.

 

[Craig]

"History teaches us that men and nations behave wisely once they have exhausted all other alternatives." Abba Eban

Joint 15th

Come and See (1985)

After finding an old rifle, a young boy joins the Soviet resistance movement against ruthless German forces and experiences the horrors of World War II.


The Bridge on the River Kwai (1957)

After settling his differences with a Japanese PoW camp commander, a British colonel co-operates to oversee his men's construction of a railway bridge for their captors - while oblivious to a plan by the Allies to destroy it.


Where Eagles Dare (1968)

Allied agents stage a daring raid on a castle where the Nazis are holding an American General prisoner... but that's not all that's really going on.

 

[Craig]

"I have slain none except my Mother. She (Blessing her slayer) died of grief for me." An Only Son - Rudyard Kipling

14th.

The Dam Busters (1955)

The story of how the British attacked German dams in WWII by using an ingenious technique to drop bombs where they would be most effective.


Joint 13th.

The Hurt Locker (2008)

During the Iraq War, a Sergeant recently assigned to an army bomb squad is put at odds with his squad mates due to his maverick way of handling his work.


Tinker Tailer Soldier Spy (2011)

In the bleak days of the Cold War, espionage veteran George Smiley is forced from semi-retirement to uncover a Soviet agent within MI6.


Das Boot (1981)

The claustrophobic world of a WWII German U-boat; boredom, filth, and sheer terror.

 

[Craig]

“Strike an enemy once and for all. Let him cease to exist as a tribe or he will live to fly in your throat again.” Shaka


12th.

The Dirty Dozen (1967)

During World War II, a rebellious U.S. Army Major is assigned a dozen convicted murderers to train and lead them into a mass assassination mission of German officers.


11th.
Zulu (1964)

Outnumbered British soldiers do battle with Zulu warriors at Rorke's Drift.

 

[Craig]

"Come and See. A film born out of Soviet cold war pride but no less powerful for that. A stark, aggressive portrayal of total war. Humans are reduced to numbers and humanity is bypassed. It's unflinching, massively uncomfortable but hugely important for a few reasons. Blatantly (in your face anti-fascist) completely without glorification for war (unusual for Soviet prop pieces) and completely without ego. Absolute masterpiece of its type and hopefully someone who's never seen it before might give it a go." Aber gas - 28/2/17