Top 10 Second World War films

[Julai]

10 The Bridge on the River Kwai - David Lean, 1957

he lavish production that launched David Lean into the big league is grand, grown-up and full of both eye-popping set-pieces and moral complexity. Alec Guinness is the POW who helps his Japanese captor build a bridge for the Burma-Siam railway. Neither knows that British commandos are planning to blow the fruits of their labours sky high, thereby lending the entire project an epic, Sisyphean futility. Endlessly rewatchable.

9 The Dirty Dozen - Robert Aldrich, 1967

Five years after making Whatever Happened to Baby Jane?, Aldrich came up with this grittily entertaining and hugely profitable adaptation of an EM Nathanson novel. Real-life former marine Lee Marvin is given the unenviable task of moulding 12 (very starry) convicted murderers into a crack unit to assassinate a slew of SS officers, and the sparring between Marvin, Charles Bronson, Telly Savalas et al is great fun. But things grow far darker as the brutal, revenge-fantasy climax rears its head.

8 The Great Escape - John Sturges, 1963

The POW escape movie is a subgenre all of its own – and this is the most celebrated example. Inspired by a real breakout, it’s essentially in two halves. The first section sees the stellar cast – Steve McQueen, James Garner, Richard Attenborough, Charles Bronson, James Coburn and plenty more – plotting and tunnelling like fury. The second begins after the painfully tense “break” itself. No matter how many times you see the movie, you will always will McQueen not to plough his motorbike into that barbed-wire fence, and Attenborough and Gordon Jackson not to fall for that sneaky “Good luck!” trick. Tragically, of course, they always do.

7 Where Eagles Dare - Brian G Hutton, 1968

This glossy adaptation of Alistair MacLean’s screenplay has Richard Burton’s British major joining forces with Clint Eastwood’s US lieutenant and taking on pretty much the entire Wehrmacht, cast-iron proof that Allied soldiers were not only better than their Axis counterparts, they were also – crucially – better looking. The film is irresistible Boy’s Own nonsense, a hush-hush alpine death mission with echoes of a dirty weekend in Val d’Isère. Eastwood has a machine gun in each hand, Burton has a frauline in every cabin, and together they somehow wreak more havoc armed only with a snow plough and an overnight bag of dynamite than Rommel managed in the whole of North Africa.

6 Casablanca - Michael Curtiz, 1942

Casablanca’s chief battleground is one of hearts rather than guns, but it’s also emphatically a war movie, made and set during the 1939-45 conflict, narratively driven by it, and playing out in a Vichy-controlled territory. What else to say about the film that hasn’t been said already? Bogey! Bergman! That bar! That song! And, above all, that screenplay, so gloriously witty, but also whisking you along on storm-tossed oceans of emotion. The scene in which Die Wacht am Rhein is drowned out by the La Marseillaise still makes you want to punch the air and devour a croissant.

5 Ice Cold in Alex - J Lee Thompson, 1958

The monochrome still from Ice Cold in Alex of John Mills contemplating his beer glass at a bar, while three similarly khaki-clad pals look on, is one of the most iconic in British cinema. And yet, tempting as it might be for the uninitiated to dismiss the film as just another Fifties three-cheers-for-Blighty war flick, it is far more sophisticated than that. It’s less a tale of Brits versus Germans than of man versus the elements. Besides, the nominal hero (Mills’s Captain Anson) is flawed, while the soldier (Anthony Quayle) that he and his two nurses pick up as they try to drive from Tobruk to Alexandria is at once not what he claims to be, but also their saviour. Richly entertaining.

4 Schindler’s List - Steven Spielberg, 1993

It’s impossible not to have this second Spielberg film near the top of the list. At once a great achievement and a desperately upsetting picture to watch, his adaptation of Thomas Keneally’s historical novel Schindler’s Ark is one of the pivotal movies about the Second World War, in that it cuts so directly to the heart of the Nazis’ poisonous ideology. It is debatable whether it needs the epilogue of the real-life survivors putting memorial stones on their saviour’s grave, but only because the three hours-plus that precede it are so staggeringly potent in their depiction of the Nazis’ atrocities and the suffering they caused. Morally and historically, the film feels like essential viewing as both a formidable exercise in “never again”, and a reminder of the good that a lone act of defiance can bring about.

3 The Thin Red Line - Terrence Malick, 1998

Terrence Malick, that elusive maverick of modern American cinema, has completed only four full-length features in 36 years. Hardly over-productive, and yet, just as his films seldom come, they come at the perfect moment. The Thin Red Line – adapted from James Jones’s autobiographical account of the ferocious Guadalcanal assault of 1943 – was no exception. It came out just months after Saving Private Ryan, and, while (like Spielberg’s film) it in no way shrinks from depicting the terrors and frustrations of war, it at times makes a virtue of reining in the gore, and has luxuriantly beautiful and even near-spiritual moments.

2 Das Boot - Wolfgang Peterson, 1981

Peterson has returned more than once to the theme of peril on the seas (The Perfect Storm, Poseidon), but this early-Eighties odyssey remains his best film. In any language, this tale of 42 submariners trying to sink as much Allied shipping as possible while staying alive is riveting: tense, sweaty and full of robust gallows humour, with liberal and expert use of Steadicam to convey the grim claustrophobia of living in a metal box that could so easily become a coffin. To a Briton, it’s a particularly engrossing, commendably un-jingoistic portrait of how the “other side” existed and thought. And, as such, it’s a hugely humanising movie, as well as a salutary reminder that they were every bit as terrified of us as we were of them – little surprise, given that of the 40,000 Germans who set forth in U-boats, only 10,000 are said to have survived.

1 Saving Private Ryan - Steven Spielberg, 1998

Private Ryan, as it’s often known, is not perfect: it plays its strongest card first, the middle section is uneven, and there are unwelcome sallies into sentimentality. But, 11 years on, the climactic stand in the town of Ramelle still packs a punch as fearsome as it is underrated. And no film-maker has ever plunged the audience into the nowhere-to-hide horror of battle as Spielberg does in the film’s opening 25 minutes. It’s partly the meticulous sonic and visual composition of his depiction of the D-Day landings on Omaha beach, partly the grimly desaturated film stock. But particularly smart is Spielberg’s refusal to show us the same gruesome episode twice, which means we never have the luxury of developing any psychological resistance. Every few seconds, a fresh corner of hell awaits you – and yet, you can’t tear your eyes away. It’s an astonishing, genuinely terrifying spectacle, and a magnificent tribute to the men who did it for real.

[AW]

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