| The 10 Essential World War II Films |
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 | By
Al Weisel
CDNOW Senior Editor, Movies
If Vietnam was the first television war, World War II was
the first movie war. Movie industries around the world
mobilized their resources to aid in the war effort. Today the
war continues to be a favorite topic. World War II was not
only the defining event of the 20th Century, it was a
touchstone in film history as well.
Documentary filmmakers reached new levels of realism as
they documented battles on the spot -- and also discovered how
the form could be manipulated for sometimes less-than-truthful
propaganda. (For the best of these films, visit CDNOW's 10
Essential World War II Documentaries.) The lack of
resources in post-war Italy led to the Italian neo-realist
movement, featuring on-location shooting (since the studios
had been bombed), which transformed the way films are made.
One can trace developments in film history by looking how
the movies dealt with the war. The war provided
black-and-white heroes and villains that fit perfectly into
the Hollywood formula in such early films about the war as
The
Sands of Iwo Jima and such action movies as The
Guns of Navarone. But changes in attitudes during the
Vietnam War led to more morally ambiguous films about the war
such as Kelly's
Heroes, The
Dirty Dozen, and Catch-22.
And as the Baby Boomers revisit the past in light of their own
aging, they have begun to look back at the accomplishments of
the "Greatest Generation" in such films as Saving Private
Ryan and The
Thin Red Line. | |
| 1. Best Years of Our Lives
(1946) |
 No
film has so well summed up the hopes, dreams, and
disappointments of a generation as this one. After defeating
the most heinous threat of the 20th century, the men and women
who accomplished this extraordinary task try to go back to
their ordinary, everyday lives. But they discover that they,
and the world around them, have changed irreparably. This
powerful, classic film won seven Oscars, including Best
Picture, Best Director for William Wyler, and Best Supporting
Actor for Harold Russell, who not only plays a disabled man,
but was an actual veteran who lost his own hands in the war --
as he reveals in one of the film's most moving
scenes.
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| 2. A Man Escaped (1956) |
 One of the most intense and thrilling films ever made,
the premise of director Robert Bresson's A Man Escaped
is deceptively simple. A French resistance fighter, who has
been locked up by the Gestapo and condemned to death, plots
his escape. We see him execute his plan in minute, painstaking
detail to the point that we feel that we are in the cell with
him. The tension is agonizing as he struggles to free himself
and avoid detection. It's absolutely riveting.
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| 3. Schindler's List(1993) |
 The Holocaust was such an unfathomably horrific event
that few filmmakers have been able -- or even dared -- to
render it on film. Steven Spielberg succeeds where few have
ventured by stripping away every manipulative trick he ever
learned and letting the story tell itself. Rather than
populate the film with larger-than-life heroic figures,
Schindler's List tells the story of a real-life
ordinary man, Oskar Schindler (Liam Neeson), who saved
hundreds of Jews solely because he believed it was the right
thing to do. Even Nazi Amon Goeth (Ralph Fiennes) is not an
inhuman monster but a human representation of the banality of
evil.
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| 4. Casablanca (1942) |
 One of Hollywood's towering achievements, this film
has everything you could want from a movie -- crackling, witty
dialogue; exceptional performances from such stars as Humphrey
Bogart and Ingrid Bergman; an atmospheric setting; gripping
action; a suspenseful story; a tragic romance;
three-dimensional characters; and a worthy message about the
necessity for self-sacrifice in the face of evil. No matter
how many bad movies Hollywood makes, we'll always have
Casablanca.
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| 5. Open City (1946) |
 This powerful film -- directed by Roberto Rossellini
and co-written by Federico Fellini -- about Italian resistance
fighters during World War II was made on actual locations in
Rome shortly after the war and launched the style of Italian
neo-realist filmmaking. Anna Magnani's performance as the
lover of a resistance fighter is one of the most moving in the
history of film. Also worth seeing are Rossellini's Paisan,
an anthology of stories set around post-war Italy, and
Germany Year Zero, set amidst the devastation in
Germany.
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| 6. Bridge on the River Kwai
(1957) |
 David Lean's epic film about British soldiers in a
Japanese prisoner of war camp looks at the conflict of
cultures and passing of a historical epoch through the prism
of richly drawn characters. Alec Guinness won an Oscar for his
performance as a British officer who wages a battle of wills
with the camp's Japanese commander (Sessue Hayakawa) -- which
will end up destroying them both. Lean also co-directed (with
Noel Coward) the inspiring In Which We Serve, about men
on a British warship.
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| 7. From Here to Eternity
(1953) |
 Set against the backdrop of the attack on Pearl Harbor
and based on a book by James Jones, this film won an Oscar for
Best Picture and includes one of the most famous scenes in
movie history: the beach love scene between Burt Lancaster and
Deborah Kerr. With great performances from a cast that also
includes Montgomery Clift and Frank Sinatra (in his comeback
role), the film climaxes in striking action sequences
depicting the Japanese attack. Director Fred Zinnemann also
made the exemplary World War II films The
Seventh Cross and Julia.
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| 8. Patton (1970) |
 Based on a screenplay co-written by Francis Ford
Coppola (with Edmund North) and directed by Franklin
Schaffner, this biopic about General George S. Patton is an
unusually complex look at a complicated man. The film doesn't
gloss over the more controversial aspects of the life of the
tank commander who led American forces in North Africa and
Italy. George C. Scott gives a bravura Oscar-winning
performance as the general, who was a military genius with a
love of poetry and military history as well as a hot-tempered
and stubborn man who was eventually relieved of his
command.
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| 9. Saving Private Ryan
(1998) |
 Steven Spielberg's film has the most amazingly
realistic war footage ever shot -- the terrifying sequence
depicting the invasion at Normandy. While the rest of the film
doesn't top this bravura opening, it comes close in the final
battle sequence. Unfortunately, the middle of the film is
chock-full of World War II clichés, but it's all held together
by the moving, humane performance of Tom Hanks.
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| 10. Story of G.I. Joe
(1945) |
 This grunt's-eye view of the war, directed by William
Wellman, was based on the dispatches of the conflict's most
famous correspondent, Ernie Pyle (Burgess Meredith). It's a
wonderful, deglamorized look at the ordinary men who fought
the war, which makes a better case for their quiet heroism
than all the romanticized John Wayne war movies put together.
Robert Mitchum, in his first major role, is superb as the
world-weary captain.
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