Not Your Grandfather’s Hollywood

Movies from the 40’s about WWII while America was engaged in WWII:

Action in the North Atlantic (1943) (”Warner Bros. thunderous story of the men of the merchant marine!”)
Air Force (1943)
Back to Bataan (1945)
Bataan (1943) (”THE STORY OF A PATROL OF 13 HEROES”)
La Bataille du rail (1945)
Captains of the Clouds (1942)
Casablanca (1941) [Ed.: One of my all-time favorites]
Corregidor (1943) (”28 days of epic heroism - that shook the world!”)
Corvette K-225 (1943)
Crash Dive (1943) “Leading a reckless crew on the war’s most daring mission!”)
The Fighting Seabees (1944) (”The thrilling story of America’s supermen!”)
The Fighting Sullivans (1942) (”The Guts and Glory of the Fighting Navy!!”)
Flying Tigers (1942) (”STRONG Brave Men Flying In The Face Of Death That We May LIVE”)
Forty-Ninth Parallel (1941)
Gung Ho! (1943) (”Battle cry of the Marine raiders!”)
Hangmen Also Die (1943) (”The shot heard ’round the world!”)
In Which We Serve (1942)
Man Hunt (1941)
The North Star (1943) (”A rolling wall of hell that couldn’t be stopped… A handful of men who had to stop it!”)
One of Our Aircraft Is Missing (1942) (”Never have so few done so much for so many.”)
The Purple Heart (1944)
Sahara (1943) (”A mighty story of adventure, courage and glory in the desert!”)
Sergeant York (1941) (”America’s Greatest Modern Hero!”)
So Proudly We Hail (1943) (”The first great Love Story of our women at the fighting front!”)
The Story of G.I. Joe (1945) (”War correspondent Ernie Pyle joins Company C, 18th Infantry as this American army unit fights its way across North Africa in World War II”)
They Were Expendable (1945) (”A Spine-Tingling Thundering Saga Of The Sea!”)
Thirty Seconds Over Tokyo (1944) (”In the wake of Pearl Harbor, a young lieutenant leaves his expectant wife to volunteer for a secret bombing mission which will take the war to the Japanese homeland.”)
This Land Is Mine (1943)
Wake Island (1942) (”Tougher than Leather . . . Harder to Kill! Daring Americans Fighting Against All Odds!”)
The Way Ahead (1944)
Went the Day Well? (1942)

Those were almost exclusively movies about the heroism of our troops. That was even the selling point for many of them (as evidenced by the taglines appended after a few of those above). Now compare those movies from the 40’s to the recent Hollywood releases about the war in Iraq, all playing in US theaters while we’re still fighting over there:

In the Valley of Elah (2007) (”Sometimes finding the truth is easier than facing it.”)
Grace Is Gone (2007) (”Upon hearing his wife was killed in the Iraq war, a father takes his two daughters on a road trip.”)
Stop-Loss (2008) (”Back home in Texas after fighting in Iraq, a soldier refuses to return to battle despite the government mandate requiring him to do so.”)
Rendition (2007) (”What if someone you love…just disappeared?”)
Redacted (2007) (”Truth is the first casualty of war.”)
No End in Sight (2007) (”The American Occupation of Iraq - The Inside Story From the Ultimate Insiders”)
Lions for Lambs (2007) (”If If you don’t STAND for something, you might FALL for anything”)
The Hurt Locker (2008) (”You’ll know when you’re in it.”)
Gunner Palace (2004) (”Some war stories will never make the nightly news.”)
The Prisoner or: How I Planned to Kill Tony Blair (2006) (”A freedom-loving Iraqi journalist is mistaken as Tony Blair’s would-be assassin and sent to Abu Ghraib Prison where he discovers the true meaning of liberation.”)
Home of the Brave (2006) (ending tagline from Machiavelli: “Wars begin where you will, but do not end where you please.”)

That’s not all the movies about the war in Iraq or the GWOT, but it’s enough for comparison.

It’s not your grandfather’s Hollywood.

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10 Responses to “Not Your Grandfather’s Hollywood”

  1. on 27 Oct 2007 at 3:20 pm Trumpy

    Because in WW2, the left was onboard- we had to defeat the dastardly alliance that turned on Uncle Joe and attacked the Motherland in violation of treaty

  2. on 27 Oct 2007 at 4:53 pm Jsoh

    ”If you don’t STAND for something, you might FALL for anything”

    That’s usually how I think of the left on the subject of the war. They refuse to take a stand against hostile countries or even against this war and now they bellow about loose change and how Bush and Rove personally flew the planes into the WTC towers.

    I’m sure that’s not what that movie is about.

  3. on 27 Oct 2007 at 9:08 pm glasnost

    In an unreported coincidence, the Iraq War has killed somewhere between .05 and .01 of the people WWII killed. These two data points unrelated, eh?

  4. on 27 Oct 2007 at 10:26 pm abw

    Gunner Palace is a documentary and doesn’t belong on the dishonor list (or at least I don’t remember anything in particular from when I saw it years ago).

    On the 40s side, it’s good to remember Jimmy Stewart left Hollywood to join the military and war hero Audie Murphy became a star. Also, “The Best Years of Our Lives” deserves a mention.

  5. on 27 Oct 2007 at 11:05 pm Lance

    In an unreported coincidence, the Iraq War has killed somewhere between .05 and .01 of the people WWII killed. These two data points unrelated, eh?

    So wars with far fewer casualties should therefore be seen as worthy of more attacks? Uh, should we send more of our guys to certain death and change that dynamic?

  6. on 28 Oct 2007 at 3:49 am Tito Santana

    Just for the record, Sergeant York was about World War I.

  7. on 28 Oct 2007 at 6:09 am peter jackson

    Uh, should we send more of our guys to certain death and change that dynamic?

    It is the blood, yea verily how it purifies…

    yours/
    peter.

  8. on 28 Oct 2007 at 2:53 pm MichaelW

    Gunner Palace is a documentary and doesn’t belong on the dishonor list (or at least I don’t remember anything in particular from when I saw it years ago).

    I don’t mean to “dishonor” it, so much as point out how Hollywood chose to show the heroic side of soldiers in the films made during WWII, while it chooses to concentrate on the darker side of the military, war etc. nowadays. The whole point of “Gunner Palace” was to show how broken and miserable these soldiers were after coming back home. The bravery and honor of our fighting men and women are not virtues put on display by Hollywood.

    Just for the record, Sergeant York was about World War I.

    Yeah, I added that after compiling the original list and forgot that I said these movies were all about WWII. I just knew that “Sergeant York” was a hugely popular movie at the time and wanted to make sure it was included.

  9. on 31 Oct 2007 at 5:02 am glasnost

    So wars with far fewer casualties should therefore be seen as worthy of more attacks? Uh, should we send more of our guys to certain death and change that dynamic?

    No.

    The point is that a Hollywood culture less tolerant of war has led to… less and smaller wars.

    Not, of course, proven or easy to prove (or disprove) but quite plausible.

  10. on 31 Oct 2007 at 1:55 pm Lance

    Interesting conjecture, and we reward those here!

    I don’t think that holds up however when we look at the number of wars either that we have been involved in or globally. You might be able to argue that there were fewer than otherwise might be expected. As you say, not something easily demonstrated. Still, that could be considered a possible benefit. I do think it has led to a greater attention to protecting the lives of our soldiers as, despite complaints that might suggest otherwise, we have accelerated the training and equipping soldiers over time to make them far less likely to be killed or maimed. This has negative effects as well, as force protection has led to less effective tactics (which Petraeus has reversed.)

    On the other hand we might also surmise that it may have made warfare more likely, as a sense that we are reluctant to fight encourages policies in other countries that actually ratchet up the danger of war. Kind of Hyman Minsky’s theory applied to foreign policy. Game theory would imply that this is a factor as well. The various effects acting upon and modifying each other.

    What I do think is a negative is that once within a war we are inherently divided with a media (Hollywood or otherwise) which sees its role as opposition. As for myself I don;t want the old Hollywood of uncritical boosterism (nor do I think Michael does) but we would like something less than knee jerk and distortive hostility.

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