War Movies
The Dirty Dozen – 1967 – A CLASSIC!
Director: Robert Aldrich Cast: Lee Marvin. Charles Bronson. John Cassavetes. Telly Savalas. Jim Brown. Ernest Borgnine. Robert Ryan. Donald Sutherland. Richard Jaeckel. etc In England, Major John Reisman (Lee Marvin) watches the hanging of a soldier in a military prison and is immediately asked to report to General Worden (Ernst Borgnine), who then gives him…
Read MoreGo Tell the Spartans – 1978 – Underrated Gem
Director: Ted Post Cast: Burt Lancaster. Craig Wasson. Marc Singer. The French were defeated in 1954, and as a last act, Vietnam, over which they had ruled completely, was divided into two halves. With Hanoi as its capital, North Vietnam was Communist and wanted complete unification. With its capital in Saigon, South Vietnam was “democratic”…
Read MoreZulu 1964 – Empire triumphs
Director: Cy Endfield. Cast: Stanley Baker, Nigel Green, Michael Caine (introducing) In the early to mid-1960s, massive worldwide shifts happened. All the “colonies” were becoming independent. Old timers could see their nations crumble in front of their eyes. No wonder, in this atmosphere, the English-speaking world took to a gentleman named James Bond,…
Read MoreZulu Dawn (1979). Empire’s Disaster
Director: Douglas Hickox. Cast: Burt Lancaster, Peter O’Toole, Simon Ward, Bob Hoskins Films on the British Empire usually have a familiar trope – the “Empire brought civilisation “and “progress”. Rarely are the subjects of the Empire treated with respect. Mostly the “local natives” are treated onscreen with ridicule and scorn. Wicked local villains usually…
Read MoreTo End All Wars (2001) – From despair and anger to Forgiveness.
World War 2 usually has a one-sided, one-dimensional portrayal of the Allies. Very rarely are the enemies humanised – even if they are evil. Rarely do the onscreen sufferings translate into a personal, almost spiritual salvation for the person undergoing severe torture and terrible health, yet emerging victorious in spirit at the end of the…
Read MoreThe Enemy Below (1957) – A fascinating battle between men (or machines?).
In 1957, World War 2 was only twelve years old. The general depiction of Germans and Japanese in 1950s films was of brutal, nasty savages hell-bent on doing all sorts of bad things to “clean” “decent” Americans and or British, the epitome of “Western civilisation”. This 1957 film changed that. It was one…
Read MoreThe Outpost (2020) – Edge of seat
After twenty years, trillions of dollars, and thousands of deaths on all sides, the U.S. finally replaced the Taliban with the Taliban. This was an actual WhatsApp message circulating in August 2021 when the Taliban finally took over Afghanistan for the second time in 20 years. The comparison with Vietnam in 1975 (below top)…
Read MoreNarvik – Hitler’s First Defeat (2022) – Disappointing
I got at least three messages asking me to take a look at the latest Netflix release and so watched the film. First: the plus. This is a Norwegian production with Norwegian actors, thus devoid of the typical Hollywood “showbiz” angle. However, there are some war movie cliches. Second Plus: while the…
Read MoreLand and Freedom (1995) – Powerful yet poignant
Films on World war 2 (WW2) are a dime a dozen ranging from the great to the abysmal. But films on WW2’s curtain raiser, The Spanish Civil War (SCW(, are very few or not well known. Ken Loach’s 1995 film remedies that by offering a powerful and insightful view of The Spanish Civil War, as…
Read MoreOperation Anthropoid – multiple versions of a grim story
Czechoslovakia was the first country to be occupied by the Germans before WW2 started. The Germans partly occupied it in 1938 and fully annexed all provinces into the “German Reich” in March 1939, six months before the official starting date of September 3, 1939. The Czechs thus had the longest history of Resistance against the…
Read MoreOn The Beach (1958) – Humanity loses.
The 1950s saw The Cold War take off spectacularly. The two sides kept staring at each other and made worldwide alliances based on ideology. For all its talk of “Democracy”, the US supported unpopular dictatorships with terrible Human Rights records (Guatemala, Paraguay, Argentina, Zaire, etc.). The Socialist Bloc wasn’t far off, often crushing democratic dissent…
Read MoreA Bridge Too Far (1977) – A Truth Too many
I first read the story “A Bridge Too Far” when I was a teenager, in Reader’s Digest. In my college days, I bought the Cornelius Ryan book on which the film was based. The story seemed highly heroic then, full of pluck, raw courage, and determination. I looked forward to the film’s release in India…
Read MoreThree films on Hitler’s last Days – EVIL’S GRAND END
“Berlin where Hitler had fought his last battles against marriage and the Red Army and, defeated by both Venus and Mars, blew out his troubled brains”. This is one of the most significant lines by my favorite writer Len Deighton which appears in the Bernard Samson series of spy thrillers. This post will show why.…
Read MoreNUREMBERG (2000) – Evil fascinates
When World War 2 ended, the Allies decided to put all the top Nazi leadership on trial. The “undertrials” would be given the best of “Western” justice – the very kind of justice that they had denied to most, if not all, their victims in the countries occupied by them. The trial of the…
Read MoreAll quiet on the western Front – Political Correctness over human savagery
Erich Marie Remarque was a German soldier who wrote about his experiences in the First World War. His books were so influential that the Nazis banned them when they gained power in 1933. The book Im Westen nichts Neues (All Quiet on the western Front) became an all-time classic. It is still regarded as one…
Read MoreThe Forgotten Battle – Predictable yet engrossing
The Historical map and background shown at the beginning of the first few seconds clarify what the film is all about. Simply put, since French ports were still in German hands and being defended resolutely, the only other port, easily captured was Antwerp in Belgium which sat at the end of the long journey…
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