5. “La Grande Illusion” (1938)
Some would claim that war is the great leveller — men of all classes, races and creeds finding alongside and against each other, with a bullet or a bomb capable of ending any of their lives at any point, but with a gentlemanly respect between the sides. Though his title refers to that, Jean Renoir’s “La Grande Illusion” doesn’t entirely buy into that idea, but it does interrogate it properly. Set during the First World War, it sees two French aviators, the aristocratic Boeldieu (Pierre Fresnay) and the working class Marechal (Jean Gabin), captured by the Germans and held in a prison-of-war camp, where the former forms a bond with the similarly upper-crust German commander who shot them down (Erich von Stroheim). There’s comradeship between the aristocrats, and a friendship forms, based in part on the recognition that their Europe is coming to an end, but ultimately their shared social status won’t stop one from gunning down the other if it comes to it. It’s a gorgeous, deeply sad film, full of despair at what war does to people, and a humanist classic nearly eighty years on.
4. “Come And See” (1985)
Though films from the U.S.S.R., like those from Tarkovsky, had managed to break through the Iron Curtain to Western audiences through the Cold War, it feels appropriate that one of the masterpieces of Soviet cinema, and perhaps the definitive take on the nation’s suffering during World War Two, arrived just as Perestroika was beginning and relations with the West were beginning to thaw. Elem Klimov’s “Come And See” is the visually stunning (if harrowing) tale of Florya (Aleksey Kravchenko), a young Belarussian boy conscripted into Soviet forces, who befriends a girl (Olga Mironova) after he’s left behind by his comrades, only to be caught up in German attempts to march East. Full of curious surreal touches amidst the stark landscapes it depicts, it’s as savage and experiential a war movie as has ever been made, and one that was understandably close to the director’s heart: he was the same age as his protagonist at the time, and the film’s based partly on his experiences.
3. “Paths Of Glory” (1957)
As this list has more than demonstrated, plenty of filmmakers have made anti-war movies, many of them powerful. But few struck such a nerve as “Paths Of Glory,” which was essentially banned for two decades in France (and nearly three decades in Spain), so potent was its message and effective its art. The film that really put Stanley Kubrick on the map, it tells the true World War I story of three soldiers in the French army court martialed for cowardice as scapegoats for a failed attack, and Colonel Dax (Kirk Douglas), the man who attempts to defend them. “Lions led by donkeys” was the famous description of the armies and generals of World War One, and Kubrick’s film is positively savage in its depiction of the rottenness of the leadership (while not portraying the men as entirely saintly either), the passing of the buck and ass-covering and cowardice that made the conflict so senseless. And while Kubrick would make grander films to follow, he never quite matched the emotional punch of the final moments here.
2. “Apocalypse Now” (1979)
If there’s one war movie that is hard to divorce from its subsequent colossal reputation, it’s undoubtedly Francis Ford Coppola‘s troubling, indulgent, mighty masterpiece. Recasting Joseph Conrad‘s “Heart of Darkness” against the backdrop of Vietnam as Martin Sheen‘s captain embarks on a perilous upriver journey to assassinate the rogue Colonel Kurtz (Marlon Brando) it’s a work of tedium and delirium as well as grand spectacle, a journey into the darkest recesses of human nature so warped with bloodlust and power it has mistaken itself for divinity. Sheen is stellar as the ambivalent, psychologically crumbling narrator, but of course it’s Brando’s poetry-spouting Kurtz in his dripping lair that remains the movie’s most indelible attribute and is the chief reason its poster still graces so many dorm room walls to this day. Like all great films, though, it’s mutable and ambiguous and you can revisit it a hundredfold and have a slightly different impression each time. Though of course, what remains constant is “The horror. The horror.”
1. “The Thin Red Line” (1998)
It isn’t contrarianism that has us put Terrence Malick‘s 1998 film at the number one spot above some more widely seen picks — or rather, it’s not only contrarianism. The fact is that “The Thin Red Line,” while set during the Guadalcanal campaign in the Pacific theater of WWII, and drenched in atmospheric light and sensuous, verdant photography from John Toll, belongs at the top of any list of war films because it contends with war in the abstract, as a condition under which people sometimes find themselves struggling, rather than a concrete, political fact with historical specificity. Within the ensemble, Jim Caviezel, Nick Nolte and Elias Koteas are probably the standouts, but the whole massive cast is instrumental in making this feel like a choral expression of the human spirit in a state of war. And while the scenes of combat are highly effective and the drudgery of a soldier’s life in between brilliantly evoked, it’s the humming mood of wonder and loss that is its most lasting impression. Where many of these films tend toward war’s epic, ennobling, bonding or legend-creating potential, this one plays like a hymn to memory, family, jungles, trees, animals, water and from the inside of a devastating conflict, casts war as the repellant, ugly aberration amid so much life. It’s a lesson we still haven’t learned, but that Malick’s film expresses in the most extraordinarily cinematic terms.
As ever, there’s lots more we could have included, even away from the parameters of avoidnig war-adjacent movies like, say, “Casablanca” or “Schindler’s List.” John Ford’s “They Were Expendable” and Henry King’s “Twelve O’Clock High” came within a hair’s breadth of the list, as did “Patton,” while we also came close to including “Glory,” “Waltz With Bashir” and “Starship Troopers.”
We also considered tank drama “Lebanon,” “Welcome To Dongmakgol,” “Ballad Of A Soldier,” “Ivan’s Childhood,” “The Red & The White,” “In Which We Serve,” “The Dam Busters,” “Zulu,” “Tora Tora Tora,” “Black Hawk Down,” “Jarhead,” “The Admiral,” “The Sun,” “Downfall,” “American Sniper,” Howard Hawks’ “Air Force,” William Wellman’s “Battleground,” Leone’s “Duck, You Sucker,” Anthony Mann’s “Men In War,” De Palma’s “Casualties Of War” and propaganda classic “Sergeant York.”
And that’s without mentioning “Overlord,” “Midway,” “The Longest Day,” “The Battle Of Britain,” the 1993 “Stalingrad,” “Run Silent, Run Deep,” “Hell In The Pacific,” “Play Dirty,” Clement’s “Forbidden Games,” “The Guns Of Navarone,” “Kelly’s Heroes,” “The Dirty Dozen,” “Inglourious Basterds,” “Letters From Iwo Jima,” “Hangmen Also Die!,” “The Great Escape” and “The Ascent,” plus a bunch of other WW2 movies that we might save for another day…
Anything else we didn’t mention? Let us know your favorites in the comments. (DUH “Dunkirk,” obviously).