As we head into Memorial Day, TCM airs some of the greatest war movies ever made, one after another, for the whole weekend. That means today will have plenty of great ones on hand, many of them my all time favorites. There have been plenty of war movies I’ve loved while never really considering it as a genre I care much about. There are as many reasons for that as there are movies about war.
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I seem to mention this every Memorial Day, so I may as well say it again now, but my uncle was killed in action in the battle of Iwo Jima. If you scroll down to the “f”s at this website, you’ll find the listing for “Ferrara, Joseph L, Cpl, KIA, 25th Marines, USMC.” That’s him, my father’s older brother, who joined up after Pearl Harbor and whose medals I still have. Maybe that’s why I’ve always been more interested in World War II war movies than any other kind and, particularly, those having to do with the Japanese military, not the German military. Or maybe not. War is a genre like any other and prone to the same vague outlines as all the rest. Saying you’re a fan of Horror as a genre could mean anything. Maybe you like slasher flicks but hate classic monster movies. Maybe you like psychological horror or ghost stories but hate demon possession stories. And so it goes with war.
Where War as a genre is different is that it’s subsets often follow historical markers like the World War I, II, Korea, Vietnam, Gulf War, Iraq, and so on. The stories are often fictional, though not always, but the backdrop is almost always a real event. There are no war movies based around wars that never happened that we consider war movies in the same genre sense. It seems that once we make up a war, as in Things to Come, Starship Troopers, or Edge of Tomorrow, it then becomes a different genre, usually Fantasy or Science Fiction. There are plenty of battle scenes in the Lord of the Rings trilogy but I doubt anyone would classify Return of the King as a war movie, even though it pretty much is. By contrast, The Bridge on the River Kwai, an oft-used example in my posts, is clearly a war movie even though there’s not a single classic battle in the movie (obviously there’s a lot of action at the very end but it’s not a standard battle). Just having battles or even full scale wars does not make your movie a war movie. For that to happen, it really has to be connected to history. And maybe that’s why I can love and respect so many war movies without ever thinking of it as a favorite genre.
While there’s been a steady market for war comedy from The General to Stripes, war movies tend to be on the serious side and when you’re watching one, even if the story and characters are fictional, you know it’s based around a very real event in which thousands to millions died. Often, if not almost always, war movies will try to focus in on a small story taking place within the larger backdrop of war. Kwai offers an obvious example of this but other movies, like Paths of Glory and Breaker Morant, show the hypocrisy happening on the sidelines as men away from the war attempt to make one small part of it feel just and right by doing something utterly unjust and wrong. I’ve tended to like that kind of war movie more (hence my love of Kwai) because it removes the war from the movie in a strange sense. Paths of Glory and Breaker Morant become philosophical courtroom dramas to me that deal with events that occurred during war but have no need to actually show the war, at least not for most of the movie (though Paths does have an expertly shot nighttime advance that is, obviously, if you’ve seen the movie, very important to the plot).
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Then there are the biopic war movies, usually of famous heroes or leaders (To Hell and Back, Patton) but sometimes of completely fictional characters, like Clive Candy, the British soldier we follow from the Boer War all the way to 1943 and the midst of World War II in The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp. That one, Blimp, is an all time favorite and it doesn’t show any real fighting scenes (you do see battlefields and London being bombed) but has a solid sense of war and the immense horror and loss that goes along with it.
One type of war movie I can view without most of the psychological baggage that attends to movies concerning wars where I still have a personal, emotional connection, are the war movies dealing with a much older war for its narrative, like the Civil War in America or the Revolutionary War in the Colonies against the British. Once you’ve gone that far back, I can almost just watch it as an adventure movie, even though I know the same horrors were present. As far as both of those war movie types go, I guess Red Badge of Courage and Drums Along the Mohawk are my favorites.
No matter how you feel about the genre of war movies, the fact is, unscientifically speaking, it’s got a pretty good track record. Most of the war movies I’ve seen are pretty good, either because the filmmakers approach the subject with more care and reverence than they do other movies or I’ve just been successful at avoiding the dogs, and believe me, that might be the case. All I know is, it’s a genre with a lot of movies I love but not a genre that I love for itself. I never find myself saying, “Let’s watch a good war movie” like I might with many other genres but if you asked, “Want to watch…” and then inserted the title of pretty much any movie on today’s TCM schedule, my answer would be a resounding “Yes!” As TCM honors the countless souls who paid the ultimate price, by playing war movies all weekend, we remember, sometimes painfully, that it’s the one genre whose very existence depends on that sacrifice by so many.