Movies - War film

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	Movies - War film

The war film is a film genre that has to do with warfare, usually focusing on naval, air, or land battles, but sometimes focusing instead on prisoners of war, covert operations, military training, or other related subjects. Sometimes they focus on daily military or civilian life in wartime without depicting battles directly. Their stories may be fiction, based on history, or docudrama.

History

1920s and 1930s

Films made in the years following World War I tended to emphasise the horror or futility of warfare, as in All Quiet on the Western Front
(1930) and Grand Illusion
(1937), but some glamorized warfare, in particular those based on the new technology of aerial combat in films such as Wings
(1927), Hell's Angels
(1930), and The Dawn Patrol
(1930 and 1938 versions).

1940s

Europe

The first popular war films during the Second World War came from Britain and Germany, and were often documentary or semi-documentary in nature. Examples include The Lion Has Wings and Target for Tonight (British), and Sieg in Wessen (German).

By the early 1940s, the British film industry began to combine documentary techniques with fictional storylines in films like In Which We Serve
(1942), Millions Like Us (1943) and The Way Ahead
(1944).

United States

After the United States entered the war in 1941 Hollywood also began to mass-produce its own war films. Many of the American dramatic war films in the early 1940s were designed to celebrate American unity and demonize "the enemy". One of the conventions of the genre that developed during the period was a cross-section of the American people who come together as a crack unit for the good of the country. The American industry also produced films designed to extol the heroics of America's allies, such as Mrs Miniver (about a British family on the home front), Edge of Darkness (Norwegian resistance fighters), and The North Star (the Soviet Union).

1950s and 1960s

The years after World War II brought a large number of mostly patriotic war films, often based on true stories. Examples from Britain included The Dam Busters (1954), Dunkirk
(1958), Reach for the Sky
(1956) and Sink the Bismarck!
(1960).

Hollywood films in the 1950s and 1960s were often inclined towards spectacular heroics or self-sacrifice in films like Sands of Iwo Jima
(1949), Halls of Montezuma (1950) or D-Day the Sixth of June (1956). They also tended to toward stereotyping: typically, a small group of ethnically diverse men would come together but would not be developed much beyond their ethnicity; the senior officer would often be unreasonable and unyielding; almost anyone sharing personal information - especially plans for returning home - would die shortly thereafter; and anyone acting in a cowardly or unpatriotic manner would convert to heroism or die (or both, in quick succession). However, other films such as Command Decision and Twelve O'Clock High
were able to examine the psychological effects of warfare and the strains of command.

POW films

A popular sub-genre of war films in the 1950s and '60s was the prisoner of war film. This was a form popularised in Britain, and usually recounted stories of real-life escapes from (usually German) P.O.W. camps in World War II. Examples include The Wooden Horse
(1950), Albert R.N. (1953) and The Colditz Story
(1955). Hollywood also made its own contribution to the genre with The Great Escape
(1963) and the fictional Stalag 17
(1953). Other fictional P.O.W. films include The Captive Heart
(1947), Danger Within (1958) and Hart's War
(2002). The British industry also produced a film based on German escapee Franz von Werra, The One That Got Away
in (1957).

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