Top War Films

Saving Private Ryan. Another masterpiece of the movie genius, Steven Spielberg.

I had to look up Three Bad Men which had to be filmed after Three Godfathers since it starred George Kennedy. In that plot three outlaws on the run find a dying man who asks them to go after his wife who has been taken, Not familiar with Hell's Heroes, but with Wyler directing in precode days, it had to be wooly. It would be interesting to run a quadruple feature and see how Wayne, Kennedy, Clooney, and whoever play basically the same role.

Looked up Hell's Heroes and Three Bad Men since I wasn’t familiar with them. The fact that the first was directed by William Wyler in precode days, I’m not surprised it was rougher than the three subsequent movies. Plot changes are interesting, too, based on the reviews I read and the film I saw (Three Godfathers).In the first, Hell’s Heroes, Charles Bickford plays the leader of 4 outlaws who hold up a bank and kill a man (one of the outlaws also is killed) in the process before escaping into the desert where they find a dying woman and her baby—the wife and child of the man they killed in the robbery. The mother dies and the three outlaws set out to deliver the baby safely out of the desert. A few years later, it’s remade as Three Godfathers. This time John Wayne is the leader of three outlaws who rob a bank and escape into the desert. But no one is killed or even injured in this robbery. The three outlaws find a woman who is about to have a baby in a wagon stuck at a dry waterhole. The waterhole had slowly been delivering up water to travelers for years, but the woman’s worthless husband uses dynamite to try to make it flow faster and cracks the rock basin so the water no longer collects. Then he wanders off looking for lost livestock and likely dies in the desert. At any rate he’s never seen. At any rate one of the outlaws delivers the woman’s baby and she names it after the three of them before she dies. So they set out to save the baby. All of this takes place right at Christmas in a section of Arizona where things have Biblical names like New Jericho.The third picture, Three Bad Men, must have been made some time in the 1960s cause this time the leader of the 3 bank robbers is George Kennedy. This time when they escape into the desert, they find a dying man who begs them to rescue his wife who has been carried off by some culprit.Don’t know much about Three Kings except that it apparently involves three soldiers stealing Iraqi gold before they find some civilian families in the desert that need their help.

The 3 Bad Men I was referring to was filmed in 1926 by John Ford.

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I noticed some people brought up Zulu. Actually the best and the most realistic on that subject was Shaka Zulu, a series that was just awesome.

Full Metal Jacket and Three Kings have my vote...

Actually, it's not exactly the same subject although both involved Zulus. The made-for-TV Shaka Zulu was about the warrior of that name that essentially built the Zulu's into a fighting force to be reckoned with. The tribe was relatively weak until he came along with his idea for a short spear used for stabbing, not throwing, fast mass movements of troops, and a military formation of a bull's head in which the "head" body of troops would engage and occupy the enemy while the "horns" circled to each side to flank and engulf the enemy troops. One method of encouraging his warriors was to award the best-looking women to his best warriors, usually older experienced fighters. His idea was that the bravest warriors would also father brave sons. He built the Zulus into such a fighting force that they systematically took on tribe after tribe through out South Africa, killing them off or running them out until the southernmost area of South Africa was essentially uninhabited whe the Dutch and later English began settling that area. I don't think Shaka himself ever went up against European troops--the English-Zulu war including the battle of Roarke's Drift occurred some years after his death when I think one of his sons was then chief of the Zulu.

Based on what I read about Shaka Zulu, the film didn't even begin to tell how cruel and crazy he really was. He was extremely fond of his mother and after she died he ordered an extended period of mourning. Anyone caught smiling, laughing, marrying, having babies or otherwise seeming to enjoy life during the mourning period was instantly killed. According to one story I read, something like a year after the death of his mother, Shaka ordered the Zulu men and women to dance naked together. Any man who indicated a certain physical reaction to the naked women was dragged from the dance line and speared.

Hmm, didn't see a mention of that one. Was it the same plot about 3 outlaws rescuing someone?

Paths of Glory (1957 - Stanley Kubrick)
"If those little sweethearts won't face German bullets, they'll face French ones!"

Paths of Glory is unsentimental, graphic, horrific and morally murky - everything I believe warfare to be. Of course I have never been a soldier and likely never will be, so my perspective is what it is. But the no-win situations presented in the WWI narrative of Paths mesh with that perspective.

Kubrick's long tracking shots through the trenches and over the shell-pocked battleground give me a visceral cinematic feel for the drama, excitement and trauma of battle. The questions the film additionally asks about duty and higher responsibility in the cynical command decisions and the scapegoat courts martial touch upon the murky middleground any conflict gives rise to for me. It's unflinching, stylized and honest. It is also very much an anti-war statement, which I find all of the best War movies I respond to are, at least in some major part of their intent.

Kirk Douglas' performance is pitched at his usual level, but the seething anger in his eyes and the fantastic outburst, "I apologize...for not being entirely honest with you. I apologize for not revealing my true feelings. I apologize, Sir, for not telling you sooner that you're a degenerate, sadistic old man! And you can go to Hell before I apologize to you now or ever again!!!" are just perfect for him and his persona. The scene at the end of the film with Kubrick's bride-to-be Christiane as the German girl in the cafe is so artfully done and could have easily degenerated into maudlin antics in lesser hands. It's a great, great film.




So obviously Paths of Glory is my number one choice, and my top ten would also include...

2. All Quiet on the Western Front (1930 - Lewis Milestone)
"You still think it's beautiful to die for your country? The first bombardment taught us better. When it comes to dying for country, it's better not to die at all."

3. The Thin Red Line (1998 - Terence Malick)
"What difference do you think you can make, one man in all this madness?"

4. The Grand Illusion (1937 - Jean Renoir)
"Frontiers are an illusion. Nature doesn't give a hoot."

5. The Bridge on the River Kwai (1957 - David Lean)
"This is just a game, this war. You and Colonel Nicholson, you're two of a kind, crazy with courage. For what? How to die like a gentleman, how to die by the rules. When the only important thing is to live like a human being!"

6. Das Boot (1981 - Wolfgang Petersen)
"We'll see. Maybe they're just lying in wait for us until we feel safe enough to surface? These guys aren't stupid. Continue silent running. We'll surface after dark. Then we'll see."

7. Apocalypse Now (1979 - Francis Ford Coppola)
"'Never get out of the boat'. Absolutely Goddamn right. Unless you were going all the way. Kurtz got off the boat. He split from the whole fu*king program."

8. Nobi - Fires on the Plain (1959 - Kon Ichikawa)
"Monkey meat...?"

9. Letters from Iwo Jima (2006 - Clint Eastwood)
"We soldiers dig. We dig all day. This is the hole that we will fight and die in. Am I digging my own grave?"

10. Glory (1989 - Ed Zwick)
"See, the way I figure, this war would be over a whole heck of a lot sooner if you boys just turned around and headed back that way and let us up there where the real fighting is."



And that's with intentionally keeping Kubrick's Dr. Strangelove and Lean's Lawrence of Arabia off of my list, if only because I mention them constantly. Given my Humanistic outlook, I don't think it's at all surprising that so many narratives set during World War I interest me. The trench warfare in particular of the "Great War" is such a perfect example of and metaphor for the futility, madness and extremely high human cost of War. In addition to Paths of Glory, All Quiet on the Western Front, Grand Illusion and Lawrence of Arabia, some other big screen WWI favorites include A Very Long Engagement (2004), Gallipoli (1981), The Big Parade (1925), Joyeux Noël (2005), What Price Glory (1926), The Dawn Patrol (1930), The African Queen (1951) and Oh! What a Lovely War (1969).

Eastwood's Letters from Iwo Jima is a little less than a year old, but I already have it among my ten best of all-time. It may climb higher. And every time I watch Ichikawa's harrowing, surreal and haunting Fires on the Plain it climbs higher and higher on my list. I may have to move it to the top five.


And I would reference everybody back to THIS thread LordSlayton started a few years ago, because more than just lists the purpose was to discuss in detail what you liked about your favorite War flicks.

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I've got to agree with Holden on Paths of Glory and several of his other choices. I thought it was easier to reply about it here at this thread. The war scenes in that film, while brief, are harrowing and seemingly realistic. Those scenes are in raw contrast to the night patrol scene which seems like some kind of expressionistic surrealism. The most impressive things to me about the film are the uniform excellence of the acting and that it covers so much ground in only 86 minutes.

I also want to share something about Letters From Iwo Jima and Fires on the Plain. The Clint Eastwood movie was one of my top films from last year, but I remember reading a review which criticized it for being too sentimental and not having the in-your-face ferocity and utter bleakness of Fires on the Plain. Obviously, the two films are about what the Japanese went through during World War II, but they're trying to do different things. This critic argued that Eastwood went too far into teaching some obvious lesson about both sides in a war being basically the same, in that their primary thoughts are about home and family. I enjoyed the elegaic tone of Letters and didn't find the need for it to be Fires on the Plain II. However, if you haven't seen the earlier film, you should hunt it down. Most war films, if they're done properly, are also horror films, in a way. Fires on the Plain may qualify as one of the most horrific.

Enjoyed your perceptive critique of Paths of Glory, Pike. It's a great movie of any genre, but it's especially outstanding as a war film because it's based on a real incident where several French soldiers were shot for alleged cowardice. After the war, families of the soldiers sued the French government who admitted that the executions were wrong and awarded 2 of the 5 families a franc each. You mentioned some of the great performances in that picture. One of my favorites is Timothy Carey pictured at left. He usually played some really tough bad guys from uncredited roles in The Wild One and as the barroom bouncer in East of Eden, on to the sharpshooter in The Killing and parts in One-Eyed Jacks and the comic Western Waterhole #3.

Also outstanding were Wayne Morris and Ralph Meeker, L-R in the second photo. Wayne Morris was once called "the last of the B-Western cowboys," because his once promising movie career failed to catch hold again after he came back from World War II. What's really interesting to me in this movie is watching Morris, a real war hero, playing a coward who sends another man to the firing squad because he witnessed his cowardness. I think it's interesting to see real heroes playing cowards, as did Eddie Albert in Attack!

Also Meeker was one of those guys whose movie career never measured up to his real talent. After all, he was the guy who replaced Brando in Streetcar Named Desire on Broadway when Brando left that production. He also understudied Henry Fonda for his Broadway role in Mr. Roberts.

Well, this isn't intended as a flame response, but I'll probably step off into a firestorm anyway. Let me say first I haven't yet seen Letters From Iwo Jima but I understand it's well made and I'll probably get around to it some time. So having not seen it, I'm not addressing myself to the acting or directing or anything that went into the actual making of the movie.

But I'm somewhat disturbed by its avowed message--as Mark F. put it, the "obvious lesson about both sides in a war being basically the same, in that their primary thoughts are about home and family." That approach puts the American and Japanese soldiers on Iwo Jima on the same level, simply young men caught up in the horrors of war thinking of home and family. But the truth is that the war horrors of one army were very different from the other in that several of the Japanese units who fought on Iwo Jima had previously been in China and Korea before being transferred to that island. What's more, some had been active in parts of China where Christian missionaries had been rounded up and executed by the Japanese. They were active in areas where Chinese by the thousands were robbed, raped, murdered, tied up in bundles, and burned alive. To "toughen" new troops arriving in China, the Japanese policy was to have their soldiers bayonet living Chinese victims who were tied to upright braces. Officers were expected to "blood" their swords by going down a line of tied and kneeling Chinese lopping off heads. In Korea, where one of the Iwo Jima tank units had been active, civilians were subjected to biological warfare tests. These atrocities have all be documented and units identified. There is also evidence, including testimony from surviving Japanese, that some officiers on some islands ate parts of organs and flesh of allied pilots who were shot down and captured in little rituals. I'm not talking human barbeque, but how much human flesh would one have to devour before it becomes totally reprehensible? My point is that there really was a major difference between the Allies and Axis, especially the Nazis and Japanese during World War II that undermines the concept that all soldiers are the same. I submit that the American soldiers who went to war in the pacific were taking a much higher moral approach in putting an end to Japanese atrocities. The Japanese were cruel to their own soldiers and even more cruel to military and civilian captives who fell into their hands. As a result, the Japanese had a much higher death rate among the POWs they held than any of the other Allied or Axis participants in that war.

I'm sure that is true, and the movie doesn't address any of those topics, at least not directly. However, it does go into some detail to show where the principal figures came from and what they feel about their current situation. That's probably all I'll add for the time being. Maybe, Holden will return later. As far as your comments about cannibalism...

(I have to temporarily remain cryptic, but it makes sense.)

I'm still at work, so I don't have the time to craft a full reply to all of that, but briefly...



I've read Iris Chang's amazing book The Rape of Nanking, so I certainly understand the brutality and horrors the Japanese are capable of. I think most of us at the very least have seen The Bridge on the River Kwai and understand what Japan's ignoring of the articles of the Geneva Convention and of basic human rights is about (I wonder if we can arrange a screening for Bush & Co.?).

As you say, you haven't seen Eastwood film so you'll just have to take our word for it at this point, but while these issues you raise are not really addressed directly in that narrative, I don't think their exclusion is any kind of wash or apology for such incidents, by the soldiers on Iwo Jima or by Japan in general. Letters from Iwo Jima tells the story of the invasion from essentially the perspective of two main characters, General Tadamichi Kuribayashi, the actual commanding Officer (played by Ken Watanabe) and a young soldier Saigo (Kazunari Ninomiya), who is not a real person but a composite of a type. Both of these men are decidedly not those who perpetrated War Crimes anywhere (and in all I've read of General Kuribayashi, I've never seen him implicated in such things). Theirs is the story the film tells. We do witness some atrocities and horrors along the way, of course, but it isn't the focus and it doesn't come from these two individuals. But this isn't a Ken Burns 12-hour documentary, so I don't fault it for doing what it does, nor do I think this was some easy way out to make the main characters sympathetic.

But you'll really have to see Letters from Iwo Jima for yourself if you want to discuss it in detail. And you should, it's a great movie.




Now this is addressed, in Fires on the Plain. That film is set on The Philippines and follows one soldier, Private Tamura (Eiji Funakoshi), as he wanders the island after it has been cut off from supplies, left for dead and descends into madness and complete anarchy, including cannibalism. The only reason Tamura is spared and allowed to be our guide through the worst Horrors of War is that he has tuberculosis and is therefore unfit for meat and unwanted in the packs of crazed soldiers that roam the jungles and plains committing atrocities.


Mark can speak for himself, of course, but I don't believe he was negating all that history by his comment about the losses both sides in war must endure. If you want to say The Allies were absolutely good (despite little things like the firebombings of Germany) and the Axis were absolutely bad, that's fine, but misses a different point: as the poet William Stafford wrote, "Every war has two losers". If you boil this down to a Humanistic level, the death of a person is a horrible thing. Qualify which is worse and which side was right politically and overall morally and the necessity of conflicts from time to time, but in the end it is men, women and children losing life. I'm not a pacifist, but I am a Humanist.

And surely you're not saying every German and every Japanese soldier during WWII participated in war crimes and had no moral center? Whatever the policies and atrocities, whether they came from the command down or the ground up, one can't believe that all those hundreds of thousands of men in those uniforms were all "evil", any more than every single American or Allied soldier or officer was unerringly "good". Letters from Iwo Jima examines what the human cost of warfare is, any war, any human. How frightening and surreal, how psychologically terrifying. That is the "obvious lesson about both sides in a war being basically the same, in that their primary thoughts are about home and family" that Mark was addressing, I believe. To say an individual Japanese soldier couldn't feel these things because Japan as a NationState or whatever percentage of its officers and soldiers were guilty of war crimes strikes me as silly. I'm not saying that's your argument, just wanted to make that clear.

ANYway, who else thinks Michael Bay's Pearl Harbor is AWESOMENESS?!? I've had some issues with Roger Ebert over the years, but the man can write a scathing review with the best of 'em. His opening paragraph to Bay's war film is priceless...

I've previously quoted this in my review of the film version of Jarhead (which you can find HERE). For those who haven't read the book or seen the movie, it's a memoir of Tony Swofford, a young Marine sniper during the first Gulf War (played by Jake Gyllenhaal in Sam Mendes' film adaptation). There's a passage in the book, briefly touched upon in the movie, about his watching War movies in the barracks. This takes place at California's Twentynine Palms Marine Corps Base, as the buildup to the first Iraq War seems more and more imminent....

I don't claim this is universally how soldiers feel about war films, of course, these are just the thoughts of one veteran. But what do you think about his position that no matter what the filmmaker's intent and the overall message, that anyone who wants to can get off on a movie even like All Quiet on the Western Front but certainly Apocalypse Now as some sort of war porn?

When you personally make up a list of your "favorite" war films or "the best" or whatever, are you judging them by their overall message? Does any amount of "entertainment" value enter into your choice (though I notice so far nobody has listed anything like Chuck Norris in Missing in Action III)?

A couple of war films which haven't been mentioned, but which I firmly believe rest somewhere near the top of a fair list of War films are both, coincidentally, Russian. I'm talking about Sergei Bondarchuk's awesome War and Peace (1968) and Elem Klimov's shattering Come and See (1985).

Aside from his flawed version of Waterloo, the only movie of Bondarchuk's I've seen is War and Peace, and it is a truly dazzling peace of cinema, with incredible technique which, no matter how spectacular, never fails to add to the emotional experience of the characters and the viewers and deepens its overall statement of the insanity of war. Some of the things which Bondarchuk comes up with, in his use of editing and long shots, borders on the mind-boggling. He can stage a 10-minute "montage" of battle footage (seemingly done in one take) which crams far more action and horror into it than the entirety of The Two Towers.

Then, he will film a fancy dress ball, with hundreds of dancers and servants, and turn it into an emotional battlefield between the three main characters. As the camera swoops high above the dance floor, the viewer is swept up into the wonder of cinema while still feeling the passion and pain of those involved. Just when you think things can't get any more incredible, he shows you Napoleon's burning of Moscow in horrific detail. The film runs about eight hours, but it's a film you can watch over and over. Just make sure you find a widescreen version (the Russian one is the best) because although it's good in any presentation, it really cries out for perfect presentation because Bondarchuk certainly put a lot of thought and effort into how he made this movie. I'm hoping I can find some of his earlier films because rumor has it that they are also well worth watching.


Although Come and See is equally spectacular cinematically, it approaches its subject in an inverse manner. While War and Peace is the story of a vast war told from the perspective of mostly three characters, this newer film basically tells the story of a boy who is thrust into the unknown horror of war (World War II). His country, and more specifically, his village, needs him to help combat the Nazis. The central character, probably no more than 15, feels pride in being allowed to fight with what amounts to a Resistance movement, since there is really no organized military involved. Director Klimov is a master of sight and sound, and although the film is accessible to everyone, there are periods where it almost seems like an experimental film. After a particular loud nearby explosion, a hum stays on the soundtrack for maybe 20+ minutes because the characters are unable to actually hear each other. One thing about Come and See is that even if you can sense the feeling that you should expect the worst, when it shows up, you are not prepared for how visceral and spontaneous it truly is. I don't really want to reveal anymore, but the boy, despite spending an idyllic couple of days with a girl he meets along the way, looks at the end like he's literally aged from 15 to about 30 in the span of weeks.

Yeah, Come and See is amazing. It's very close to my top ten.

I'll go with Band of Brothers but if this isn't acceptable I'll go with Saving Private Ryan!!!...

How about The Last of the Mohicans? - a great epic about French and Indian War directed by Michael Mann