Day for Night Magazine

Representing World Conflict

The Evolution of American World War II Films
BY Andrew Sheivachman

Immediately after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941, Hollywood began to mobilize. In meetings with the head of every major Hollywood studio, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt made it clear that American films could and would contribute to uniting American society. Hollywood had played an indispensable role in the Liberty Bond drives of World War I, using famous actors to raise money for the government.
In the next year, many of Hollywood’s most prolific figures had entered military service or volunteered to participate in the creation of patriotic war films. Directors like John Huston and Frank Capra entered active duty and began to produce films to bolster public support for the war effort. Dozens of actors, ranging from Ronald Reagan to Sammy Davis Jr., quit their lucrative careers to enlist in the military. The following five years would witness a surfeit of films attempting to define the narrative of the war using powerful propaganda techniques. These films portrayed the war as a glamorous adventure, a bold journey in which even a famous movie star would join.

There was one cardinal rule that governed the production of these films: it was forbidden to portray the American military, or the troops and commanders of the Allied powers, in a negative manner. Portraying realistic violence, too, was forbidden. The earliest movies of the war were little more than racist propaganda films, depicting Nazi and Japanese soldiers as snarling monsters while extolling the value of military service.

A Yank in the RAF (1941), one of the earliest Hollywood World War II films, released even before Pearl Harbor, is little more than the story of a headstrong American, Tyrone Power, incensed by a desire to go to war. Many early wartime films employ this premise: an American man raring for combat gets his opportunity to escort British bombers during the Battle of Britain and learns that, in combat, only the service of plucky, rakish Americans can prevent global catastrophe.

Once the Hollywood studios began to produce WWII films in abundance, the focus shifted from the spectacle of war to the diversity and character of Americans who contributed to the war effort. Casablanca(1942) is an example of such a shift. Although Humphrey Bogart’s Rick isn’t a soldier, and is portrayed as a solipsistic ugly American, he still contributes to the Allies’ war effort by helping the Czechoslovakian revolutionary Laszlo escape with Rick’s love Ilsa. In Objective Burma! (1945), the Japanese aren’t the only enemy of Errol Flynn and his platoon of hard-boiled soldiers. Flynn and his men also struggle through the dangers of the Burmese jungle, a trek that extols the strong character and never-say-die attitudes of American servicemen.

All told, fifty-eight World War II films were released by Hollywood between the years of 1941 and 1945, nearly a dozen a year, not including the hundreds of short films produced. After the end of the war, Hollywood continued to crank out WWII films to the tune of ten per year for the next decade. These films contained fewer racist elements and featured increased violence while maintaining the aim of inspiring Americans to join the military. There also existed a new, built-in audience for these films: the American servicemen who served during the war and, back stateside, wanted to revisit the scenes of their triumph with family and friends. Now that the war itself was over, the positive example of military heroism became a central theme of Hollywood war films.

The Longest Day (1962) is one of the first films to move away from a Manichaean view of the soldiers of the war, portraying the events of D-Day from both the perspective of Allied and Axis soldiers. Soldiers speak in their native languages and the narrative itself encompasses American paratroopers, German commanders, and even the French Resistance in an effort to give a circumspect portrayal of the conflict. A different director was used for each major perspective: Andrew Marton for the Americans; Ken Annakin for the British; and Bernhard Wicki for the Germans.

Although it lacks any visceral bloodshed, the film is extremely effective in showing the humanity of soldiers during the struggle. Even the German soldiers, who are pawns in their commanders’ game of predicting where the Allied counterattack will be focused, are just combatants fighting for their country. The kaleidoscopic focus of the film helps to avoid the bias and prejudices of earlier WWII films based around battles. German soldiers are just men doing their duty like the Americans, even if the Nazi generals have engaged them in a bloody, unjust campaign using sometimes deceitful tactics. By humanizing the Germans and employing the German perspective often during the film, The Longest Day was one of the first WWII films to present its audience with a depiction of morality at odds with the American status quo.

Production of WWII films dipped in Hollywood during the sixties, a result of national anti-war sentiment provoked by Vietnam. The most popular war films of the decade, especially The Manchurian Candidate (1962) and The Dirty Dozen (1967), expounded the dangers of indoctrination and poor leadership. The seventies followed with a similar slate of films like Patton (1970), which explored the hubris of America’s most dynamic WWII general, and A Bridge Too Far (1977), which detailed the failures of American leadership and overconfidence in Operation Market Garden in the Netherlands.

Released on the heels of a number of anti-Vietnam War films, Samuel Fuller’s The Big Red One (1980) set the golden standard for moral complexity and realistic violence in future WWII films. Fuller wrote and directed the movie based on his experiences in the First Infantry Division of the U.S. Army during WWII, and the characters were written to underscore the psychological trials that soldiers endured during the war. The film follows a group of five wry soldiers and The Sergeant, their sanguine commander (played by Lee Marvin), from the beginning of their tour in Africa to its brutal end pushing towards Germany. Through Fuller’s expertly honed lens we see this core group of soldiers grow from boys to men, before they begin to unravel under the terror and violence of a lengthy campaign.

In one of the final scenes of the movie, the rifle squad liberates a concentration camp and is shocked by the emaciated prisoners. Pvt. Griff (Mark Hamill) is almost killed by a lone German with a machine gun hiding in the ovens used to exterminate Jews, and proceeds to fire every bullet he has into the German soldier’s corpse. Formerly a pacifist, the horrors of his years of service have finally caught up to Pvt. Griff. His face contorts in pure agony as he fires. Fuller seems to espouse the view that WWII wreaked a psychological toll on the men who fought, regardless of the soldier’s heroism or bravery.

The most provocative and violent WWII films reflect the theme of psychological anguish, repurposing the gusto of early war films. Saving Private Ryan (1998) begins with an aged vet in tears at the tombstone of the man who saved him. What follows is the horrific violence of D-Day. The Thin Red Line (1998), similarly, reflects the effect of war on the soldier’s mind in its scattershot narrative and lengthy, contemplative shots of nature. Modern WWII films combine the anti-war sentiment the U.S. garnered during and after the Vietnam War with the reflections of aged former soldiers who look back on the horrors of their early life with pain and bewilderment. Spike Lee’s Miracle at St. Anna (2008) is driven by the encroachment of past war trauma onto everyday American life, opening with the hero of the film murdering an Italian partisan who betrayed him during the war.

In the 1940s, Hollywood WWII cinema was heavily controlled by the government, and the films that were produced vacillated between pure propaganda flicks and pro-American cheerleading. But the cultural understanding of war in America has transformed over time, and its cinematic representations have followed suit. After the end of the war, and particularly after the massive change in the nature of the WWII film that occurred in the early 1960s, these films began to reflect the experiences of the men who fought and not the propagandist fervor that convinced them to join the military in the first place. In other words, the WWII film evolved as American consciousness of the war did. As soldiers aged and were haunted by the horrors of war, the cinema reflected the inevitable change in perception about what was once considered a grand, patriotic conflict.