List of The Greatest War Films of All Time
In no particular order. I decided to limit the list to 20th century conflicts; otherwise one risks sending films as different as The Duellists and Zulu, Alexander Nevsky and Gone With The Wind together.
Key Points
1. My Name Is Ivan (1962 )
Andrei Tarkovsky W: Vladimir Bogomolov Tarkovsky’s first feature, a spellbinding, eerie tale of young title character (Nikolai Burlyalyev) who, having lost his family in the war, now runs dangerous spy missions behind German lines. The final scene is a haunting heartbreaker.
2. The Big Red One (1980)
Samuel Fuller Fuller, the tabloid Welles, provided this ragged wonder; part jut-jawed semi-satiric B-movie, part gritty, you-can-smell-it memoir, part crazy epic poem about World War 2. My favorite scene; the shoot-out in the insane asylum.
3. The Cruel Sea (1953)
Charles Frend W: Eric Ambler Nicholas Monserrat’s novel is pulp, but Frend’s film transmutes the material into a hard, documentary-style companion to In Which We Serve but with far less sentimentality and no Noel Coward talking mannequins either. Sports a majestic performance from Jack Hawkins.
4. Apocalypse Now (1979)
Francis Coppola W: John Milius, Coppola, Michael Herr My pick for THE Vietnam flick, over The Deer Hunter – which, for all its qualities, basically rewrites the WW2 returning-serviceman flick for another war – and Full Metal Jacket, which, though as pungent and elegant as all Kubrick, occasionally threatens to become a collage. Coppola’s film is one of the few true visionary works of modern cinema, and its analysis of that war in specific and the human condition in general is more incisive than is generally conceded. Full of priceless vignettes and acting, but Martin Sheen, giving his greatest performance in the lead, is oddly often overlooked.
5. Come & See (1985)
Elim Klimov W: Ales Adamovich Perhaps the most singularly terrifying and gripping of portrayals of war as utter hell – and similar to My Name Is Ivan in following a young partisan through the warscape – it does wobble in places as the undeniably artistic vision of Klimov becomes too open-ended, but it’s still an awesome journey.
6. Das Boot (1981)
Wolfgang Petersen W: Petersen, Lothair Buchheim It’s almost boring to put Das Boot in this list, and Wolfgang Petersen has become the most tawdry of Hollywood hacks. But it’s still a terrific film, unusually rich for a work set almost entirely inside a tin can, and remains the signal German film on the war (Joseph Vilsmaier’s Stalingrad doesn’t quite has as much of a grip on its characters or their tragic arc as this film).
7. Pork Chop Hill (1959)
Lewis Milestone W: James R. Webb Thirty years after the sublime anti-war of All Quiet On The Western Front, and twenty years after the rowdy propaganda of Edge of Darkness, Lewis Milestone here provided an interesting mid-ground between the two, resulting in the only good film about the Korean War except for MASH. Silly portrayals of the Communist baddies and Panmumjom Peace Talks intrude, but for the most part this keeps to the nitty-gritty of savage combat and effectively presents this war as a trial run for the modern world – the soldiers are a jostling mix of ethnicities, fighting for the UN banner. As for All Quiet…, though I love it, I sneakily prefer the less arthritic TV-made version from 1978.
8. Saving Private Ryan (1998)
Steven Spielberg W: Robert Rodat It’s not Spielberg’s most unique war film – that’s Empire of the Sun (1987) – but Saving Private Ryan, apart from its lamentably tacky present-day framework, tells from start to finish a grim, tough, mighty tale, laced with strong humanity and a darkly ironic sense of humour, something which might have been hard to notice under the orgy of nostalgic flag-waving its release provoked.
9. Lawrence of Arabia (1962)
David Lean W: Robert Bolt An ever-dazzling tapestry, Lawrence is hard to think of as a war film, so much does it stick to the general arc of the Conradian adventure – except that it’s largely true, and provides a genuinely Shakespearean study of Middle East politics and the Allied campaigns, in the background behind Peter O’Toole’s messianic, warped hero who designs history as it chews him up. It’s also a more consistent, less compromised film then Lean’s other great war film, Bridge on the River Kwai.
10. Paths of Glory (1957)
Stanley Kubrick W: Jim Thompson, Kubrick, Calder Willingham Maybe the tightest, coolest, richest 86 minutes in cinema, Paths of Glory suffers from occasional lurches into moralistic proselytising too common in ‘50s art cinema, but shows Kubrick’s razor-sharp sense of purpose and highly original visual style in full early bloom, and the tight band of superlative character actors – George Macready and Joe Turkel stand out as megalomaniac and sceptical victim respectively – does great work. The finale miraculously avoids mawkishness and achieves genuine catharsis.
11. The Travelling Players (1975)
Theo Angelopoulos This long, essentially plotless meditation on the Greek experience of WW2 is one of the strangest and most beautiful films in cinema, an hypnotic series of tableaux, loosely telling the experiences of a family of itinerant actors caught up in partisan, Fascist and Allied violence, emerging generally contemptuous of the lot. Greatly superior to Angelopoulos’ similarly structured Yugoslav epic Ulysses’ Gaze.
12. The Train (1965)
John Frankenheimer W: Franklin Coen, Frank Davis, Rose Valland. As well as an excellent display of film-making from Frankenheimer, The Train is one of the most thematically stirring and impudent war films ever made, asking genuinely interesting questions – what is worth dying for? What is worth killing for? What constitutes the society one fights for? – in between staging great action and providing a Melvillean battle between civilised yet soul-void German officer Paul Scofield and rough-necked but doggedly humane resistance worker Burt Lancaster.
13. Cross of Iron (1977)
Sam Peckinpah W: Julius Epstein, James Hamilton, Walter Kelley, Willi Heinrich. Having been chased out of Hollywood, Peckinpah made this suitably violent, bizarre, mud-caked film, centring on a contemporary Achilles – James Coburn’s Sergeant Steiner, a German soldier, a brave and brilliant warrior who tries against ever-increasing odds to keep Wild Bunch platoon alive and his sense of humanity intact, as he dodges bullets from both the Russians in the endlessly bloody retreat of 1944, and also from his own side, thanks to his only dedicated enemy, Colonel Stransky (Maximillian Schell), a Prussian officer whose life obsession – gaining an Iron Cross – Steiner fouled up. Steiner – working class but educated and witty, a dog soldier but a confidant of generals – and Stransky, a flake but with command from his birth – provide a duel of values even as the world tears itself to pieces. Peckinpah’s direction is at both its messiest – dig David Warner’s proto-hippie officer – and also its punchiest. Evokes My Name Is Ivan and foreshadows The Big Red One and Das Boot.
Other; Emir Kusturica’s gloriously lunatic Underground; Henry King’s robust Twelve O’Clock High; Carol Reed’s The Way Ahead; William Wellman’s Battleground; John Guillerman’s The Bridge at Remagen; Robert Aldrich’s kick-em-in-the-teeth action-comedy The Dirty Dozen; John Woo’s neo-B-Movie Windtalkers; Anthony Asquith’s We Dive At Dawn; Robert Wise’s The Sand Pebbles; Fred Zinneman’s From Here To Eternity; Richard Fleischer and Kinji Fukasaku’s Tora! Tora! Tora!
