Calling all Classic Film Lovers!

Being a military history buff, the role that Gregory Peck brings into my head the most is Pork Chop Hill as a US Army soldier fighting the Korean War.

Speaking of which, I fondly miss those ambitious Battle Epic films such as The Longest Day, A Bridge Too Far, Battle Of Britain, and Tora Tora Tora.

My favorite war films, in terms of the soldier's experience, includes William A. Wellman's The Story of G.I. Joe starring Robert Mitchum in one of his first major films. Highly influential. I think the best war movies overall is Samuel Fuller's The Steel Helmet (on the Korean War) and The Big Red One which is made in 1984 admittedly but since it's by a Golden Age director maybe I can slip that in.

The battle epic has now been transmuted away from actual war movies to fantasy and science-fiction. George Lucas borrowing from the Dam Busters for the first Star Wars movie was the beginning of the end. You can also chalk it to the fact that the kind of grand set-piece battles were rarer in later military engagements.

@Long Tall Shorty 64, I wasn't implying that you hated anyone, it was a general thing I was talking about since someone in the thread mentioned that there are haters of the two actors.

edited 4th May '16 11:43:50 AM by diyedas

Ah, I see. Thanks for the clarification.

You're very welcome. I didn't want to make it seem I was calling ya out or anything.

I personally see Pearl Harbor as the most recent homage to one of those classic battle epics, as it featured large numbers of historical characters despite the film being derailed by the fictional ones. The funny thing is that such big budget war films are still being churned out by foreign countries, while they're presumably seen by US producers as being too costly and inefficient.

That movie is not a good throwback. World War 2 movies are interesting to process. You have the movies made during the war which doesn't really deal with actual events and stuff of the war, are generally propaganda, but with the virtue that they possess the emotions and sentiments of the people who lived during the war. If you want to know what London during the Blitz felt like you have to watch The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp but it doesn't exactly show us the actual Blitz.

So at some point there was a transition between propaganda and actual historical fiction. I think Michael Powell is again crucial. His movie The Small Back Room made in 1946 or 1947 is an incredibly underrated film about the "Back Room Boys", scientists who worked for the government and during the bomb squad, and it shows the British wartime bureaucracy with less idealism than before. Another is The Story of G.I. Joe by William A. Wellman which focuses on the Italian front, which with the exception of Spike Lee in his recent film doesn't get much attention. I think Roberto Rossellini's Paisan was the first real world-war 2 Battle Epic and it was a big global sensation at the time.

But generally movies depicting and showing that war was rare in the 40s and 50s. And it's only the 50s and 60s, you have Longest Day and those other epics. I recently saw Preminger's In Harm's Way and the weird part was that it's a movie about the 40s but it has characters and hair styles as well as details that are actually pure early 60s. So it's a double layer of history you are seeing there. I wonder if it was because of the Generation Gap that the oldtimers wanted to remind the young kids what they fought for, because this was the era where World War II became this important myth to America, America Won The War and all that; especially when Kennedy (a PT boat captain) became President. Because before that you can say that the important war films were British, Italian or in the case of Ballad of the Soldier, Ivan's Childhood, Cranes Are Flying, Soviet Union. During Brezhnev's era the Soviet Union actually made many big battle epics to combat stuff like Longest Day because they felt that the Americans were rewriting history to downplay the Soviet contribution (which after all was greater than any of the three allies).

Something I've wondered at times is what modern cinema would look like if WWII had never happened. Its influence can be seen everywhere, from nearly every blockbuster having a villain analogous to Nazis/Hitler, military pride in American films while distrust of it in Japanese films, destruction of the world with superweapons being a real possibility, and of course award bait Holocaust movies every Oscar season. But if World War One had been our last frame of reference for all out modern war, what would cinema look like then?

Well consider movies made in the 20s and 30s. There aren't many war movies in this period. The Big Parade was hugely successful and there were others but the key thing is that before World War II, the movies that defined America's myth was The American Civil War. The two biggest movies ever were The Birth Of A Nation and Gone with the Wind after all. Whereas much later, World War II which after all made America the global superpower and nuclear powerhouse, became the source for American myth, and it fed the idea of the American GI dispatched abroad as being inherently good guys. And it's also more consensual since well that particular historiography of the South as the real victims of the Civil War, became absurd after the Civil Rights Movement.

But the important thing about myth is that it needs a certain distance from the facts to take root. Like I said before, in the immediate aftermath of the war, the late 40s and 50s you didn't have war movies. You did have many movies about Veterans returning home and this showed up in Film Noir, in The Best Years Of Our Lives and many others. You even had this with regards to World War I, like the end of The Big Parade shows the American soldiers returning home after the war and they don't quite fit in, and the hero who has lost his leg goes back to France and stays there with his nice French girlfriend. But you also had this amazing Pre-Code film, Heroes for Sale by William A. Wellman where the hero is a World War I veteran and he comes home poor and unwanted and becomes a morphine addict. This was also in Busby Berkeley (a WW 1 veteran, which is often forgotten) Gold Diggers of 1933, the Remember My Forgotten Man inspired by World War I veterans march to Washington. Then later you see this in The Roaring '20s which is about War Veterans forced to become gangsters on returning home. That's true enough, the Thompson Gun saw action in WW 1 trenches and on returning to America it became the gangsters Weapon Of Choice.

So I would say that the prevalence and influence of World War II on American culture and blockbusters is more a product of the Cold War than the main war itself. And the Cold War and its tropes, most of it is lies, has become the new George Dunning school because it still persists even when it ended after 1991 and you rarely get objective and critical depictions of this time, like even today the idea of Dirty Communists is used uncritically by default in so many movies.

edited 4th May '16 10:18:13 PM by JulianLapostat

If WW 2 never happened, it is entirely possible that Hollywood wouldn't be as big as it is nowadays. We might watch all French and German movies.

Perhaps but perhaps not. What made Hollywood the only game in town was the arrival of sound. With that language became a major issue and the dominant language was English thanks to the British Empire which covered 2/5ths of the globe giving American cinema a huge global market in addition to its huge internal market (it has the largest population of western nations after all). German/French/Italian cinema can't compete with that, their populations are so small that a movie has to do several times the number of repeat businesses before it can sell say 100 million plus tickets.

Of course the vast number of emigres fleeing fascism would probably not have left Europe without the rise of the Nazis. So that might mean no more Film Noir.

edited 5th May '16 2:19:47 AM by JulianLapostat

True, but on the other hand, Hollywood made a lot of developments because of German, French and Russian immigrants who fled from the war. If the sound movie had become a thing in Europe first, they would have simply watched a dubbed version. But since Hollywood was the big movie makers, they created way more movies in their own country, so there was no need to bother with dubbing.

Well without free trade and laws enabling it, it might be that American movies never get exported or distributed around the world. The consensus for free trade came after World War II after all, and the Marshall Plan dumped an entire backlog of movies to the French, Germans and Western Europeans to bribe them from going commie. But of course the Marshall Plan led to the French New Wave and the Auteur Theory so who knows?

I can see that if a strong German social democratic government remained in power in the 30s, you might have protection, but with the Depression it would be really hard to enforce that kind of thing.

I imagine that the coming of sound probably hurt, not helped, Hollywood. After all for a silent movie all one had to do was change the title cards.

As for what might have happened if World War II hadn't happened, well, movies might have had more of an anti-war tone, as the relatively few movies made about World War I did. And the German film industry wouldn't have been essentially destroyed in 1933, although people still would have gone to Hollywood as Murnau and Lubitsch already had.

Something else I've just realized is that without WWII, American cinema might've taken longer to racially diversify (not that it's sprinting now, but...) While previous wars like the Civil War and WWI had units for African-American men, WWII was where participation by all races and genders became loudly encouraged in recruitment ads, leading to the legendary Tuskegee Airman, Choctaw code talkers, Japanese Nisei, women WASP pilots, etc. Part of this was fueled by the US receiving the world's largest influx of immigrants (23 million) by 1920. When the war ended, there was an effort to return things "back to normal", but the many veterans of all backgrounds couldn't keep quiet again for long.

Same is true for gender equality. Hard to get women out of the jobs once they had their own income for a while.

Casablanca is a kinda-sorta, sorta-kinda World War II movie. Obviously not a grand war epic, still it shows some of the results of Nazi aggression. Love the scene in Rick's Cafe Americaine when Lazlo leads the patrons in La Marseillaise. On a meta level, there are the German and French actors in the film who had escaped the Nazis (or had gotten out while they could still leave). Not a big war film, but a great, great little one.

It's a funny thing, but you ask a lot of people, and they'll think that WWII was the beginning of women in the work force, when in fact they'd been steadily moving into the work force (and, by extension, living independently, unmarried and apart from their parents) since at least the 1880's. WWII saw the largest numbers enter at one time, for obvious reasons, but it was a social trend that had been building for decades.

edited 5th May '16 5:02:52 PM by Robbery

I assume there were plenty of women that had to go into the workforce during WWI as well.

There were also African-American and Native American units in WWI. But since American involvement in the war was limited to under a year (compared to WWII which was four years), it didn't have as large of a social effect back west of the Atlantic.

To me the greatest change World War II being butterflied away could possibly bring is that a huge chunk of the global population lives. This was a war that killed upwards of 50 million people, vast majority being civilians. Who knows what unknown geniuses and great film-makers we might have potentially lost, and now regained.

I think social movements like African-American unity, women's rights and even gay rights would have happened regardless of the war...during the 30s, the American Communist Party went south and organized many African-American communities, and you had cases like the Scotsboro Boys, and the plight of Mexican-American migrant workers which were all key issues for the American left who suffered a huge backlash in the postwar era. This was the stuff Communists in America got up to and this was what drew many people in the arts to the party, not so much the Songs for Stalin part (although that was there as well). The Commies, bless their non-believing hearts, also supported union reform, women's rights and other stuff on their platform that the New Left hijacked from them in The '60s. Without World War II, I don't think America gets the final push and mobilization it needed to become this almighty superpower. So you might have a more multipolar world...where even Republicans think twice before talking smack about the USSR and the British Empire doesn't blow all its savings on the Home Defense and still remains a force.

It would be different certainly but at the same time not too much.

Well goodness, afraid you get no bonus points for noting that the Holocaust was bad. Anyway...

World War II films made during World War II

• Casablanca
• Desperate Journey
• In Which We Serve
• Mrs. Miniver
• One of Our Aircraft Is Missing
• Saboteur
• Five Graves to Cairo
• The Human Comedy (the home front)
• The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp
• Mission to Moscow (this one is pretty goddamn weird)
• Lifeboat
• Ministry of Fear
• Since You Went Away (the home front)
• Thirty Seconds Over Tokyo

I wish I remembered the name of the work that speculated Europe without WWI would've experienced an artistic 1910s boom, citing survivors like Ernest Hemingway and JRR Tolkien as the survivors. What film artists came out of WWII? Jimmy Stewart's the first to come to mind, but he was already an actor.

There is also Day of Wrath by Carl Theodor Dreyer and Ivan the Terrible by Sergei Eisenstein and a number of interesting films made in France during the Occupation like Les Enfants du Paradis and a couple of films by Jean Gremillion (Lumiere d'ete, Le ciel est a vous, the latter film is a stone-cold masterpiece and the best aviation film ever made), Le corbeau by Henri-Georges Clouzot. And during the war, the Japanese made The Loyal 47 Ronin by Kenji Mizoguchi, and you had some films by Ozu and Naruse that were interesting as well.

I also wonder what Samuel Fuller and Jean-Pierre Melville, the two prominent WW 2 soldiers-turned-masters of cinema would have been like without the war.

edited 5th May '16 7:21:42 PM by JulianLapostat

I recall someone once saying that it was practically required to have driven an ambulance in WWI to be a writer of the Lost Generation.

Jimmy Stewart served in WWII, yes, as did Henry Fonda. Clark Gable was part of a bomber crew (he was nearly 40 when he enlisted; some have suggested he was looking to do something meaningful after his wife, Carole Lombard, was killed in a plane crash).

I've heard that the Hays Code was slightly relaxed during the war years, which is how you got a film like Preston Sturges's The Miracle of Morgan Creek, which was a comedy about a woman dealing with the aftermath of a one-night stand.

Here's one for the speculative histories: without WWII, would we have had the Cold War?

edited 5th May '16 7:49:49 PM by Robbery

James Stewart was already well established as an A-lister when the war started. He had already been in You Can't Take It With You, Destry Rides Again, Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, The Shop Around the Corner, The Mortal Storm, and The Philadelphia Story.

I can't think off-hand of a particular artist whose success could be said to have been caused by the war.