War film

[b][16] The British military historian Antony Beevor "despair[s]" at how film-makers from America and Britain "play fast and loose with the facts", yet imply that "their version is as good as the truth".

[17] He is equally critical of Christopher Nolan's 2017 film Dunkirk with its unhistorically empty beaches, low-level air combat over the sea, and rescues mainly by the "little ships".

Among these was a film shot on the Eastern Front by official war photographer to the Central Powers, Albert K. Dawson: The Battle and Fall of Przemysl (1915), depicting the Siege of Przemyśl, disastrous for the Austrians, with incidents reenacted using soldiers as extras.

[27][28] The 1915 Australian film Within Our Gates (also known as Deeds that Won Gallipoli) by Frank Harvey was described by the Motion Picture News as "a really good war story, which is exceptional".

[29] The 1916 British film The Battle of the Somme, by two official cinematographers, Geoffrey Malins and John McDowell, combined documentary and propaganda, seeking to give the public an impression of what trench warfare was like.

[49] Ken Loach's Land and Freedom (Tierra y Libertad, 1995), loosely based on George Orwell's Homage to Catalonia, follows a British communist through the war to reveal the painful contradictions within the anti-fascist Republican side.

The Taebaek Mountains (1994) dealt with leftists from the south who fought for the communists, while Silver Stallion (1991) and Spring in My Hometown (1998) showed the destructive impact of American military presence on village life.

[56] With the shift in American politics to the right in the 1980s, military success could again be shown in films such as Oliver Stone's Platoon (1986), Stanley Kubrick's Full Metal Jacket (1987) and John Irvin's Hamburger Hill (1987).

[63] In America, documentaries were produced in various ways: General Marshall commissioned the Why We Fight propaganda series from Frank Capra; the War Department's Information-Education Division started out making training films for the U.S. Air Force and U.S. Navy; the Army made its own through the U.S. Signal Corps, including John Huston's The Battle of San Pietro.

[67] Towards the end of the war popular books provided higher quality and more serious stories for films such as Guadalcanal Diary (1943),[68] Mervyn LeRoy's Thirty Seconds Over Tokyo (1944),[69] and John Ford's They Were Expendable (1945).

Jeanine Basinger gives as an example the "worst image for stark violence" when a Japanese soldier beheads an American: the victim shows pain and his lips freeze in a scream, yet no blood spurts and his head does not fall off.

[76] The propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels chose the historical subject as suitable for the worsening situation facing Nazi Germany when it was filmed from October 1943 to August 1944.

[79] The historian John Dower found that Japanese wartime films had been largely forgotten, as "losers do not get reruns", yet they were so subtle and skilful that Frank Capra thought Chocolate and Soldiers unbeatable.

The Dam Busters became the most popular film in Britain in 1955,[86] and remained a favourite as of 2015 with a 100% score on Rotten Tomatoes,[87] though, partly because it celebrated an "exclusively British [victory]", it failed in the American market.

U.S. Marines considered Sands of Iwo Jima visually authentic, but found Lewis Milestone's Battle Cry (1955), with its attention to the lives of the men, the more realistic film.

[92] The formula for a successful war film consisted, according to Lawrence Suid, of a small group of ethnically diverse men; an unreasonable senior officer; cowards became heroic, or died.

[102] Jeanine Basinger notes that critics experienced it as "groundbreaking and anti-generic", with, in James Wolcott's words, a "desire to bury the cornball, recruiting poster legend of John Wayne: to get it right this time"; and that combat films have always been "grounded in the need to help an audience understand and accept war".

[103] Others tried to portray the reality of the war, as in Joseph Vilsmaier's Stalingrad (1993), which The New York Times said "goes about as far as a movie can go in depicting modern warfare as a stomach-turning form of mass slaughter".

[105] Critics have argued that the film Pearl Harbor's US-biased portrayal of events is a compensation for technical assistance received from the US armed forces, noting that the premiere was held on board a U.S. Navy carrier.

[109] Zhang Yimou's epic Chinese film Flowers of War (2011), based on Geling Yan's novel, portrays the violent events through the eyes of a 13-year-old girl.

Teguh Karya's Doea Tanda Mata (Mementos, literally "Two Eye Marks", 1985) covers the limited nationalist resistance to Dutch colonial rule in the 1930s.

[111][112] A third group of films such as Enam Djam di Jogja (Six Hours in Yogyakarta, 1951) and Serangan Fajar (Attack at Dawn, 1983) covers the Indonesian war of independence (1945–1949).

[112] The more recent Merdeka (Freedom) trilogy (2009–2011), starting with Merah Putih ("Red and White", the colours of the flag of the new Indonesia), revisits the campaign for independence through the lives of a diverse group of cadets who become guerillas.

[115] Leonid Lukov's popular and "beautiful"[116] Two Warriors (1943) depicted two stereotypical Soviet soldiers, a quiet Russian and an extrovert southerner from Odessa, singing in his dugout.

Michael Powell and Clark agreed on a story about survivors of a U-boat crew, imbued with brutal Nazi ideology, travelling across Canada and meeting various kind, tolerant and intelligent Canadians, to encourage America into the war.

[147][148] British cinema in the Second World War marked the evacuation of children from London with social comedies such as Those Kids from Town (1942) where the evacuees go to stay with an earl, while in Cottage to Let (1941) and Went the Day Well?

The Walt Disney Company, working with the American armed forces, produced 400,000 feet of war propaganda films between 1942 and 1945,[156] including Der Fuehrer's Face (1943) and Education for Death (1943).

[158][159] Barefoot Gen (1983) portrays the bombing of Hiroshima through the eyes of a child,[160] but reviewers consider it a less well made film than Grave of the Fireflies with "stomach-churning detail" bizarrely paired with crude artwork, giving it the look of a "Saturday morning Warner Brothers cartoon".

[148] Andrew Kelly, analysing All Quiet on the Western Front, defined the genre as showing: the brutality of war; the amount of human suffering; the betrayal of men's trust by incompetent officers.

Ehrenstein describes the film as an "outwardly cool/inwardly passionate protest drama about a disastrous French army maneuver and the court-martial held in its wake", contrasting it with the "classic" All Quiet on the Western Front's story of an innocent "unstrung by the horrors of war".