Photo by Melinda Sue Gordon — © 2016 Warner Bros. Entertainment Inc.

How the World War II Movie Has Evolved Over the Last 75 Years

With ‘Dunkirk,’ Hollywood has once again made a war film that’s as much about the present as it is the past

Tim Grierson
Jul 24, 2017 · 13 min read

This past weekend, Dunkirk was the biggest movie in the country, earning rapturous reviews and quickly establishing itself as one of the greatest, most immersive World War II films ever made. While all kinds of war movies have been made over the years, the battle between the Allied forces and the Axis powers has always been the most compelling for filmmakers. There are obvious reasons for that: World War II very much felt like a conflict that would decide the fate of the planet; Adolf Hitler was a true-life villain so monstrous that he was impossible to ignore; and, for the Allies (which included the U.S.), there was a built-in happy ending that argued that good will always triumph over evil.

Directors all over the world have made great World War II movies, but we wanted to focus on Hollywood films that have depicted this bloody conflict over the years. Starting in the early 1940s, American audiences have gone to the theater and seen that same war play out, but the style and attitude of these films have shifted as we move further away from the actual events. As a result, Hollywood’s evolving depiction of World War II can serve as a handy guide to what was going on in the film business, and America, at different times.

The films we spotlighted aren’t necessarily the greatest of the genre — although several of them are pretty terrific — but they’re all representative of their eras. Each of them dramatizes a moment in history, but each of them is also an apt time capsule for their own moment.

‘Casablanca’ (1942)

What’s Going On in Hollywood? Americans may have been torn about joining the Allied cause before Pearl Harbor, but after the attack President Franklin D. Roosevelt made sure he had Hollywood on his side to sell voters on the war. As chronicled in journalist Mark Harris’ book Five Came Back (which later was adapted for a Netflix documentary series), FDR created the Office of War Information’s Bureau of Motion Pictures, which recruited well-respected filmmakers, like John Huston, Frank Capra and John Ford, to produce documentaries on the importance of defeating the Axis powers. Along the way, Casablanca also was affected by this sales job: The film’s original writers, Julius and Philip Epstein (working from the unproduced play Everybody Comes to Rick’s), had to leave the project to work with Capra on his Why We Fight documentaries.

People love Casablanca for the love story between Humphrey Bogart and Ingrid Bergman — World War II is merely a backdrop — but the characters’ resistance to the Nazis, especially during the famous scene when singing German soldiers are drowned out by impassioned French patrons singing their national anthem, hints at the pro-Allies mood of the country. As New York Times critic Bosley Crowther put it at the time, “We will say that Casablanca is one of the year’s most exciting and trenchant films. It certainly won’t make Vichy happy — but that’s just another point for it.”

‘The Best Years of Our Lives’ (1946)

What’s Going On in Hollywood? As World War II dragged on, combat pictures were proving to be box-office disappointments. (Goldwyn knew this all too well: His 1943 movie The North Star had been a commercial dud.) So Best Years was hardly a guaranteed hit — the film also ran nearly three hours and featured downbeat subject matter such as alcoholism and adultery. And yet, Best Years was a sensation, winning nine Oscars. Along the way, it became the template for several generations of movies — everything from The Deer Hunter to The Master — that turned their attention to war’s aftermath, bringing attention to the psychic wounds that soldiers carry with them long after they escape the battlefield.

‘From Here to Eternity’ (1953) and ‘The Bridge on the River Kwai’ (1957)

What’s Going On in Hollywood? If a decade earlier Hollywood had to contend with the fact that audiences didn’t want war movies, the 1950s saw them come back into vogue. Beyond From Here to Eternity and River Kwai, the era featured a number of dramas that were major Oscar players, including Decision Before Dawn, The Caine Mutiny, Mister Roberts and The Diary of Anne Frank. But, perhaps just as importantly, World War II found its way indirectly into the sci-fi genre, where fear of nuclear weapons — first utilized by the U.S. against Japan — sparked films like The Day the Earth Stood Still and the screen adaptation of The War of the Worlds.

‘The Great Escape’ (1963) and ‘The Dirty Dozen’ (1967)

What’s Going On in Hollywood? In the 1970s, Hollywood would reinvent itself through a group of maverick filmmakers, like Martin Scorsese, who were inspired by the counterculture movement. But in the 1960s, the studio system was running on fumes, challenged by the rise of television for American viewers’ attention. Nonetheless, producers could still churn out sprawling action flicks that did robust business. (This period was the time of brawny pictures like The Guns of Navarone and Patton.) And although a more subversive, anti-authoritarian kind of Hollywood picture would soon arise — such as Bonnie and Clyde and Five Easy Pieces — these conservative, blood-and-guts epics would inspire later filmmakers. The most prominent of them was Tarantino, who credited The Great Escape as “one of those bunch-of-guys-on-a-mission movies that got me to sit down and write Inglourious Basterds.”

‘Empire of the Sun’ (1987)

What’s Going On in Hollywood? By the time Empire of the Sun opened in December 1987, studios were still making war movies — just not about World War II. Starting in the late 1970s, Hollywood had turned its attention to Vietnam, and the resulting films split into two very different categories. On one side, you had Coming Home, The Deer Hunter, Apocalypse Now and Platoon — dramas that measured the emotional, physical and spiritual toil that misguided war wrought on its participants — while on the other you had escapist action-thrillers like the Rambo movies in which Sylvester Stallone’s troubled Vietnam vet refights the conflict so that America, in essence, can end up winning.

Based on J.G. Ballard’s novel, Empire of the Sun felt out-of-step with both camps, depicting a young Christian Bale as a British boy living in China who has to learn to survive after he’s separated from his parents as World War II looms. The movie was a commercial and critical disappointment. (Spielberg’s next film was the much more crowd-pleasing Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade.) But its reputation has improved over time, with critics now seeing it as his first step toward the more accomplished dramas he would make in later years, like Schindler’s List.

‘Schindler’s List’ (1993)

What’s Going On in Hollywood? Spielberg’s adaptation of Thomas Keneally’s prize-winning book was hardly a surefire hit, and for quite some time, it seemed that he wasn’t the director to make the movie. Universal bought the rights in the early 1980s after Spielberg suggested it, but for years Scorsese was attached to the film. Eventually, though, the two directors swapped projects — Spielberg would take Schindler’s List and Scorsese would take Cape Fear — and the rest is history. But because Schindler’s List was so successful — it was one of 1993’s highest-grossing films — it opened the door for many more World War II movies that focused on the Holocaust. Everything from The Pianist to Life Is Beautiful to Son of Saul have, arguably, enjoyed a wider audience simply because of Schindler’s List’s existence.

‘Saving Private Ryan’ (1998) and ‘The Thin Red Line’ (1998)

Though the two films were very different in tone — Spielberg’s patriotic and sentimental, Malick’s poetic and mysterious — they spoke to a country that had gone a long time without experiencing a conflict in which America was clearly victorious and its cause unquestionably just.

What’s Going On in Hollywood? The directors behind these two films couldn’t have been more different. Spielberg was at the height of his powers, winning a Best Director Oscar for Schindler’s List and enjoying continued major commercial success with the first two Jurassic Park films. He’d win his second Oscar for Saving Private Ryan, which was the highest-grossing movie of 1998. Meanwhile, Malick, though a revered filmmaker, hadn’t finished a project since 1978’s Days of Heaven, cultivating an aura of reclusive genius. Around the time of The Thin Red Line’s release, Vanity Fair ran a long investigative piece about what Malick had been up to since Days of Heaven, including stories of the fame-shy director disappearing for weeks without even telling his wife where he was going.

The two movies helped kick-start a new rash of war films, including Three Kings and Black Hawk Down. More specifically, any subsequent war movie with intense sequences of combat footage will inevitably get compared to Saving Private Ryan’s brutal D-Day opening — it remains the high-water mark for realistic, bloody war scenes. As for The Thin Red Line, the film brought Malick back from the cinematic wilderness — in the last 20 years, he’s made six movies, his most prolific period.

‘Letters From Iwo Jima’ (2006)

But even more powerful was Letters From Iwo Jima, which focused on the doomed Japanese soldiers in that same battle, who knew they had little chance of survival against the superior numbers of American troops. In an era when many Americans were questioning our place in the world and how our foreign policy affected others, Letters From Iwo Jima boldly asked viewers to consider “the enemy” as people with their own hopes and fears.

What’s Going On in Hollywood? Antiwar films such as Platoon and Three Kings have demonstrated how American soldiers wrecked havoc on the people they encountered overseas, but it remains remarkable that a major studio, Warner Bros., financed Letters From Iwo Jima, which was essentially a foreign-language drama with no major stars. Even more remarkable was that Letters emerged as an afterthought while Eastwood was developing Flags of Our Fathers. While doing research about the Battle of Iwo Jima, the filmmaker became interested in the Japanese commanding officer, who would be played by Ken Watanabe.

“General Kuribayashi was a unique guy,” Eastwood later said. “He liked America. He thought it was a mistake to go to war with America. He thought America was too big an industrial complex, from a practical point of view. … [H]e turns out to be an interesting person. And in our research, we found out there were many other interesting people that were there. The young Japanese conscriptees that were on the island were very much like the Americans. They didn’t necessarily want to be in the war.”

Deeply sympathetic to its Japanese characters, Letters is an astounding movie that paints the U.S. troops as the bad guys — a rarity in Hollywood war films.

‘Dunkirk’ (2017)

What’s Going On in Hollywood? Dominated by superhero films, modern-day Hollywood is taking a risk with Dunkirk, a summer blockbuster that features no major stars and is inspired by a World War II battle that’s not well-known in the States. Even if the film is directed by Christopher Nolan, responsible for several smashes (including the Dark Knight trilogy, Inception and Interstellar), there’s no guarantee this $150 million film will make back its money.

Nonetheless, Dunkirk has already proven to be that rare event movie at a time when audiences have so many entertainment options. Shooting the film with large-format cameras, Nolan is putting out the film in IMAX 70mm and traditional 70mm, creating a massive theatrical experience that can’t be replicated at home. That’s important when Hollywood is trying to encourage people to leave their couch to see movies at the multiplex. On screen, Dunkirk depicts the war against the Nazis. But for the film industry, this action-thriller is battling everything from Netflix to prestige television — enemies that may not fall as easily as the Vichy.

Tim Grierson is a contributing editor at MEL. He last wrote about Jason Bateman’s new Netflix series Ozark.

More movies:

MEL Magazine

There's no playbook for how to be a guy

Tim Grierson

Written by

Contributing Editor at @WeAreMEL | tim.grierson@melindustries.com

MEL Magazine

There's no playbook for how to be a guy

Welcome to a place where words matter. On Medium, smart voices and original ideas take center stage - with no ads in sight. Watch
Follow all the topics you care about, and we’ll deliver the best stories for you to your homepage and inbox. Explore
Get unlimited access to the best stories on Medium — and support writers while you’re at it. Just $5/month. Upgrade