A-List: Top Five World War II Movies of All-Time
By J. Don Birnam
January 5, 2015
BoxOfficeProphets.com
So, what are some of the best World War II themed movies of all-time? Doing research on this topic proved that coming up with the list is nearly as impossible as coming up with a list of greatest movies of all times. Online sources list anywhere between 10 and 50 World War II movies produced worldwide for each year between 1939 and the present.
It does appear, however that some of the definitions that the online portals use are somewhat loose, and I will restrict them now to make my life easier. For example, online sources will list movies taking place entirely outside of the 1939-1945 period as World War II movies if they touch on themes such as causes and effects of the war. But, to make my life easier, I will require that at least a significant portion of the movie I list here take place during the actual war - that is, between September 1, 1939, when the armed conflict began in Europe, and September 2, 1945, when the Japanese signed their surrender in the Pacific.
Thus, iconic movies like The Best Years of Our Lives (winner of the Academy Award for Best Picture in 1946, dealing with WWII veterans and the challenges they face) will not appear here. Nor will movies that perhaps explain or are symptoms of the upcoming war - Leni Riefenstahl’s infamous Nazi propaganda piece Triumph of the Will, made in 1935, will not be listed (nor will another favorite, The Sound of Music, which takes place in the days of the Anschluss, before the official start of the war). Finally, another favorite of mine, Judgment at Nuremberg, is also out because it deals mostly with the consequences for Germany of the war, not the war itself.
Some more arbitrary rules: I am excluding post-2010 movies as I tend to do when listing top films for any category, as recency makes their evaluation difficult. I’m also leaving out movies that center mostly around The Holocaust. As a subset of WWII movies they are massive, and are worthy of separate analysis on their own. Thus, one of the best movies of all-time, Schindler’s List, and other magnificent pieces such as The Pianist, will not be seen today.
Fret not, because despite these restrictions, we are left with a healthy diet to choose from. You can always start with dishonorable mentions: Pearl Harbor and Baz Luhrmann’s Australia come to mind as recent World War II Oscar bait movies that went nowhere (will Unbroken join their unwanted fate?).
The honorable mentions, however, are long and plentiful. Clint Eastwood’s best work is arguably the Flags of Our Fathers/Letters from Iwo Jima one-two combo from 2006. The two movies explore in a realistic and fair manner how national identity affected not just the two nations warring in the Pacific, but the day-to-day fights of the soldiers dueling in that theater. In Flags, the Iwo Jima picture is seen for what it rightly was: an important piece of war propaganda. But there’s nothing dishonorable in that. And at the same time the overwhelming sense of loss that overwhelmed the characters unable to care about propaganda is conveyed respectfully and realistically. At the same time, the Iwo Jima battle and the picture taking itself is subtly explored in Letters, where Eastwood taps brilliantly into the honor-driven war valor of the Japanese. The two movies are brilliant.
I’m also partial to Steven Spielberg’s Empire of the Sun, starring an almost toddler Christian Bale living in China in the days before the last Americans were evacuated after the Japanese invasion. This movie was an epic Spielberg style- spanning years and costing millions. Many did not like it, but I was impressed with how the profound length of the movie makes one fall for the characters to the point of really feeling their sense of loss in the face of the tragedy of war.
Other more modern movies deserve mention. Saving Private Ryan could arguably be in the top five. The opening scene, depicting the Allied disembarkment in Normandy, is arguably one of the best war sequences ever filmed. Brutal, shocking, and impeccably filmed, it rightly won Steven Spielberg his second Best Director Oscar for a war-related movie. Yet I left it off the list because I find the backdrop story simply too romanticized - too easy of a set-up, climax, anti-climax, and denouement to be in the top five. The movie is respectful to war veterans and pulls at the heart strings in ways only Spielberg knows how. But many of the performances, particularly Matt Damon’s, are so disconnected with how I perceived soldiers in that war would act that at times the movie seems almost fantastic.
So too must I discard The Thin Red Line. Many people (certainly movie experts) will say that Terrence Malick’s star-studded melodrama about the war is one of the best, if not the best WWII movies of all time. I respect and admire it greatly, like I do Saving Private Ryan, but the style is simply not my thing. In fact, despite most people’s view that the movie is artistically brilliant, I view it as more show than substance. I respect the brutally honest portrayals of the horrors of war, but I do not find it emotionally compelling because of its disjointed narrative.
Lighter recent fare that deserves mention is of course Inglourious Basterds, Quentin Tarantino’s dark-humor parody. I left it off the list because there are more serious movies that explore the war in ways that are more to my liking. Patton is also fantastic, but omitted because I saw it more as a character study than a study about that particular conflict. The same could be said about another favorite of mine, Enemy at the Gates, about two assassins during the siege of Stalingrad. I’m also quite partial to Atonement but, again, that movie is less about the war than it is about the tragic lovers’ story. Valkyrie was a guilty pleasure, but not realistically a great World War II epic.
Really, I could go on forever with lists of honorable mentions. I haven’t even seen the overwhelming majority of the foreign WWII-themed movies whose names I read for the first time on Wikipedia.
5> Downfall
Dealing with the last days in Hitler’s bunker in Berlin, the German movie Downfall is memorable and worth many a repeat viewing. I have never seen - and experts agree - a more vivid and disturbingly realistic portrayal of the dictator than in this film. And the recreation of the bunker and its major players with such accuracy must also be noted. In Berlin, I had the opportunity to visit the location where some of the bunkers were. The accurate scale of the film is immediately apparent.
And the movie is not apologetic about its portrayal of the brutal generals who surrounded Hitler. Nor is it apologetic about the cowards the innocents or the brave. It simply hits you in the gut with every turn in ways that American films and filmmakers normally don’t dare to do, and leaves you completely stunned at the end. Helpfully, it portrays some Germans - particularly some citizens of Belin - as unwitting and even innocent bystanders. If you’ve read, for example, “Berlin 1945,” you know that the movie is eerily exact in showing some of the crimes suffered by the German people at each other’s hand. Downfall is truly a must see for any World War II student.
4. Das Boot
Not to be monotonous, but the next entry on the list is also a German film, the 1981 portrayal of life in a U-Boat, Das Boot (“The Boat”). The movie was directed by one of Germany’s most iconic directors of all time, the acclaimed Wolfgang Petersen. And like others on the list, it tells the story from the human perspective. The members of the crew are simple individuals trying to do what they believe is right for their country.
What follows, however, is anything but simple. The crew members first face almost light-hearted adventures and missions, but quickly find adversity at the hands of British airplanes. The fate of most members, as in most of these movies, is foreseeable and expected, and yet it is still effective in making a point about the horrors of war and horrific in experiencing it. A decidedly anti-war piece, Das Boot is worthy of being on this list for many of those reasons and then some, including the stunning underwater sequences for the boat.
3. Stalag 17
While most movies like to depict the slaughter, carnage, and humanity of a war battlefield, Stalag 17 gives us a different and at times more harrowing perspective: the lives of prisoners of war in a German camp. Directed by the talented Billy Wilder and starring one of my favorites, William Holden - who won a well-deserved Best Actor Oscar in 1953 for his role here - the movie is set in a Luftwaffe prisoner of war camp and centers around a group of mostly Americans striving to survive while they try to uncover an unsuspected traitor in their midst.
What is most memorable about this movie is that it makes every character feel real, human, and truly affected by his condition. The plot is also suspenseful and unforgiving in the depiction of prisoner of war brutal conditions; it is interesting and deceptive in the denouement regarding the prisoner of war-turned-German spy and the efforts made by the prisoners to outwit him.
Ultimately, then, Stalag 17 is a worthy list-member today because, like many of the other movies I have listed today, it is about the people affected by and involved in the war, more than about broader war themes. Correction, the broader themes (here, isolation, betrayal, mistrust, and death) are explored subtly and effectively through the specific human story. That is a sign of a brilliant World War II movie.
2. Casablanca
One of many Best Picture Oscar winners that touch upon World War II, I admit it is somewhat of a stretch to include this movie here. Casablanca, the city in Morocco, was not exactly a major WWII theater. Yet the Bogart/Bergman classic is really such a flawless movie that it is too hard not to place on the list and the plot is World War II centric, telling the story of an American expatriate who helps a Czech woman smuggle her husband out of Nazi-controlled Morocco so he can continue fighting for the Czech resistance.
Yes, the movie is perhaps not about a particular battle during the war, and takes place somewhat removed from the main action. But the movie accurately depicts what’s always the greatest loss suffered by the survivors of a calamity: the loss of their humanity. It is my theory that movies that manage to connect with audiences, perennially, Titanic, do so in part because they tap into human emotion about suffering and loss. It is not just the physical destruction and physical violence - we are so used to it in movies and TV today, including the news - but the wrenching of one’s own soul. Thus, as the star-crossed lovers are unable to stay together as a result of their respective roles during the WWII, the viewer comes to feel loss that is deeper than any physical item.
Casablanca is also memorable for the star-studded cast of Humphrey Bogart and Ingrid Bergman in iconic career roles, and for its multitude of now timeliness lines. “Here’s looking at you, kid,” “Louis, I think this is the beginning of a beautiful friendship,” and “We’ll always have Paris” are among the best. Some, like “round up the usual suspects,” have even inspired entire movies. The movie is now timeless and classic.
To think that this movie was actually made during the war itself and ended up winning the Best Picture Oscar in 1944 while war still raged is nothing short of incredible. Thus, one of the first main movies about World War II is arguably also the best such of movies of all time, except for…
1. The Bridge Over the River Kwai
Before Unbroken told the story of the torture of one Olympic hero at the hands of Japanese internment camp guards, David Lean’s 1957 World War II drama provided *the* definitive story about torture of World War II fighters at the hands of Japanese internment camp guards.
The Bridge Over the River Kwai is considered one of the best movies of all time. It is also another of the Best Picture WWII winners (the others, from memory, are Casablanca, The Best Years of Our Lives, From Here to Eternity, The Sound of Music, Patton, Chariots of Fire, Out of Africa, Schindlers List, and The Kings Speech - about one per decade and maybe I missed one). The acting by Alec Guinness is haunting in its veracity. William Holden is also brilliant here. And the story is disturbing and ahead of its time for its portrayal of torture, starvation, and abject suffering and its effect on the human soul. Psychologically, it is a twisted thriller that combines elements of Stockholm Syndrome with excessive military loyalty and the nationalistic paternalism we experienced more subtly and therefore more effectively than in Flags of Our Fathers and Letters from Iwo Jima.
By the time the climactic scene rolls around, the viewer is not even sure who or what to root for anymore. Told from a British perspective (unlike most of the other movies in this genre that I have seen), the entire movie is arguably an allegory for the grandeur yet decline, the old age, of the entire British Empire. The intentions are mostly good, but the circumstances and the changed nature of conflict make it impossible for the old man to survive. Brilliant and subtle in its execution, The Bridge Over the River Kwai is arguably one of the top Best Picture winners of all time, and certainly my favorite World War II themed movie of all.