Films about World War II
Films about World War II encompass a diverse array of cinematic expressions that emerged during and after the conflict. Initially, Hollywood adapted its various genres to incorporate war themes, producing musicals, comedies, and dramas that reflected the realities and sentiments of the time. Popular stars like Bob Hope and Bing Crosby led musical revues, while comedies often highlighted military life and home-front challenges, as seen in films featuring Abbott and Costello. The war also prompted the production of combat films, which shifted focus from individual heroism to group dynamics, showcasing a "melting pot" of characters united in their fight against the enemy.
As the war progressed, non-feature films, including animated shorts and government-sponsored documentaries, played significant roles in shaping public perception and morale. Post-war cinema saw a shift in perspective, with filmmakers beginning to question the legitimacy of war, as illustrated in adaptations of notable literary works. More recent films continue to explore World War II themes, reflecting on its moral complexities and the human experience, with directors like Steven Spielberg and Clint Eastwood offering nuanced portrayals of the conflict from multiple viewpoints. This broad spectrum of films has helped to engrain the war's legacy in cultural memory, making it one of the most documented and analyzed events in history.
Films about World War II
Films about North American involvement in World War II made during and after the war
After the United States entered World War II in December, 1941, the American film industry embraced the Allied war effort and became a central transmitter of wartime policy, with a goal of inspiration for the war effort added to the traditional mandate of entertainment. By mid-1942, one-third of all features in production explicitly referenced the war, and Americans flocked to movie theaters for stories of valor and hope.
During the early 1940’s, each Hollywood genre adapted its formulas to war themes. Musicals continued to headline stars, such as Paramount’s popular team of Bob Hope and Bing Crosby. In Star Spangled Rhythm (1943), the duo continued their typical patter and music, with a focus on war goals. Hollywood studios efficiently delivered popular revues to movie audiences by filming military stage shows. Warner Bros. bought the rights from the War Department to film the 1942 Broadway show This Is the Army, with music by Irving Berlin. An enormous success on both stage and screen, the 1943 film, featuring many soldiers who had been actors in civilian life, ran without interruption throughout the war years. Betty Grable, a musical star at Twentieth Century-Fox, became the quintessential pinup girl of the war as the gal with the “million-dollar legs” (insured by Lloyd’s of London for that amount).
Comedy production continued, with military topics inspiring amusing situations. The team of Bud Abbott and Lou Costello, who were ranked fifth among stars in the war years, appeared in eleven quickly produced wartime comedies. Director Preston Sturges adapted sophisticated screwball comedy formulas to war themes. The talented satirist worked against the Hollywood grain of boosterism by questioning the fidelity of women on the home front in The Miracle of Morgan’s Creek (1944) and by mocking hero worship in Hail the Conquering Hero (1944).
Thrillers turned their attention to spy plots, stories of resistance fighters, and dramas about mysterious men living in dangerous circumstances. In three films— Casablanca (1942), Passage to Marseille (1944), and To Have and Have Not (1944)—Warner Bros. star Humphrey Bogart played a reluctant patriot; in each film, his ultimate conversion to the war effort forms the climax.
The adventure and action of big-budget Westerns transferred into combat pictures, and the emotional intensity and focus on female protagonists of “women’s pictures” transferred into home-front dramas. Many early features with military themes focused on fliers, including Cavalcade of Aviation (1942), Eagle Squadron (1942), Flying Tigers (1942), and Thunder Birds (1942). Wake Island (1942) was one of the first of scores of films that dramatized ground-war heroics. Production of combat films quickly accelerated, with about 60 percent of war-related films in this subgenre by 1945 (in contrast to a decline in espionage films, which were dominant during the early 1940’s). Most combat films shifted the traditional Hollywood spotlight on the exploits of a single hero to the actions of a disparate group of combatants, led by an appealing individual. These idealized “melting pot” units, brought together by the circumstances of war in films such as Gung Ho! (1943), Bataan (1943), and Pride of the Marines (1945), put aside differences of class, ethnicity, region, religion, and (most unrealistically) race to defeat the enemy. Although Army soldiers occupied the most military positions on screen (as well as off), all branches of the military appeared in Hollywood films. The combat film Corvette K-225 (1943; released in the United Kingdom as The Nelson Touch) saluted the Canadian Navy.
“Women’s pictures” continued to emphasize women making sacrifices, but with a new emphasis on how the war caused separation from husbands, sweethearts, and sons. Working-girl dramas such as Tender Comrade (1943), starring the dynamic and much-loved Ginger Rogers, and Since You Went Away (1944) showed the physical and moral strength of female workers in industrial plants, while So Proudly We Hail! (1943) honored the military nurses who worked and sometimes died in combat zones. Often the struggle between duty and romance drove these films, with female protagonists inevitably choosing wartime duty. John Ford’s memorable drama They Were Expendable (released in 1945, after the war’s end) featured a combat nurse as a figure of goodness who sacrifices romance for military necessity.
By 1944, 80 cents of every dollar spent on “spectator amusement” in the United States went for movie tickets. The military movie audience was also massive. Called “two-hour furloughs,” screenings of Hollywood features boosted morale and entertained troops. By 1945, approximately 2,400 nightly shows occurred in the European and Mediterranean theaters.
Nonfeature Films
In addition to theatrical features released by Hollywood during the war years, studios also produced war-related serials, newsreels, live-action shorts, and cartoons. The first war-related animations, produced by Disney and Warner Bros., appeared in January, 1942, only a month after the United States entered the war. A patriotic Donald Duck not only starred in many cartoons but also was featured in more than 400 official military insignia designed by Disney animators. Bugs Bunny and Daffy Duck served the war effort in the Warner Bros. animation unit, whilePopeye fought the good fight at Paramount and Mighty Mouse battled the Axis forces for Twentieth Century-Fox. MGM’s combative Tom and Jerry won an Academy Award for the Hanna-Barbera unit with The Yankee Doodle Mouse (1943).
The U.S. government also engaged in filmmaking during the 1940’s, enlisting the assistance of a contingent of top Hollywood directors. In 1942, director Frank Capra took command of the 834th Signal Service Photographic Detachment. Under Major Capra’s leadership, the unit produced a seven-part series of orientation films that became required viewing during military training. The Why We Fight films (1942-1945) were the most widely viewed of the wartime documentaries (sometimes perceived as propaganda) and became landmarks of documentary history. Each of the films wove together a variety of source materials, combining clips from old Hollywood films, newsreels, and documentaries (including several made in Germany and Japan) with originally produced maps, illustrations, and special scenes. An emotional, aggressive voice-over delivered a history lesson and an argument for “why we fight.” Three of the films—Prelude to War (1942), which won an Academy Award for best documentary, The Battle of Russia (1943), and War Comes to America (1945)—were offered free to exhibitors and played in movie theaters stateside, while the entire series was screened in many noncommercial venues. Another War Department orientation film made under Capra’s supervision, The Negro Soldier (1944), was required viewing for all soldiers and was shown in theaters stateside (but not in the South).
The Battle of Midway (1942), directed by John Ford, was the first and most influential of the government-sponsored combat reports, although atypically, it was shot in color. Ford, who had enlisted in the Navy, won an Academy Award for this endeavor. The Office of War Information (OWI) was far less pleased with the trilogy of documentaries directed by John Huston. Report from the Aleutians (1943) had a sorrowful tone and provoked a lukewarm response from the small audiences who saw it. The mood of regret also permeated The Battle of San Pietro (1945). Shot in central Italy, the documentary showed the great loss of life among American and German troops; in addition, two of the fourteen cameramen were killed and all but two were wounded during the making of the film. The OWI attached an introduction by General Mark Clark to the film in which he claimed that the deaths presented were “not in vain.” The third Huston film, Let There Be Light (1946), was suppressed from distribution until 1981 on the basis of privacy concerns regarding the veterans shown receiving care at an Army psychiatric treatment center. A masterful combat report, William Wyler’s The Memphis Belle (1944), documented (in Technicolor) the twenty-fifth and final mission of a storied flight crew.
John Grierson, a Scot who was the film commissioner of Canada during the war years, oversaw production of the influential Canadian series The World in Action. He also acted as spokesman for the effectiveness of films in the propaganda war.
War Films in the Postwar Years
New depictions of the war by Hollywood all but ended after V-J Day (August 15, 1945). Despite the tremendous success of The Best Years of Our Lives (1946), a sensitive drama of postwar adjustment that earned seven Academy Awards, including those for best director for William Wyler and best supporting actor for disabled veteran Harold Russell, only two of 369 features produced in Hollywood in 1947 had war-related themes. After almost three years of avoiding the war, and during the confusion of the Korean War, Hollywood returned to the certainties of World War II, with films such as Battleground (1949) and The Sands of Iwo Jima (1949; rereleased in 1954) celebrating American heroism. The most decorated soldier in World War II, Audie Murphy, played himself in a Cinemascope reenactment of his bravery in To Hell and Back (1955). During the 1960’s, several epic films, including The Longest Day (1962) and Battle of the Bulge (1965), memorialized successful American campaigns in Europe.
A significant shift in tone concerning the war occurred during the late 1960’s and into the 1970’s, when Hollywood reflected a national attitude of questioning the legitimacy of war. Two films based on best-selling novels set in World War II— Catch-22 (1970, from Joseph Heller’s 1961 novel of the same title) and Slaughterhouse-Five (1972, from Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.’s 1969 novel Slaughterhouse-Five: Or, The Children’s Crusade, a Duty-Dance with Death)—dramatized the absurdity of war. Tora! Tora! Tora! (1970) told the story of the attack on Pearl Harbor from both American and Japanese perspectives, Hell in the Pacific (1973) reduced the Pacific theater to a struggle of wills between a surviving Marine and his Japanese counterpart, and Patton (1970), a biopic of the flamboyant general, played to Oscar-winning perfection by George C. Scott, opened itself to interpretations attractive to both hawks and doves in a nation polarized by the Vietnam War.
Many of the best contemporary directors have turned to “the good war” as a thematic source and a forum to consider issues of morality. Sam Fuller, himself a veteran of the D-day landing on Omaha Beach, directed The Big One (1980), re-creating his memories of confusion and terror. Terrance Malick set his meditative film The Thin Red Line (1998) in Pacific jungles to explore the interior emotions of combatants in a natural environment of great beauty and terrible violence. Steven Spielberg has directed several films set in the war years, including his memorable Saving Private Ryan (1998), which earned him an Academy Award for best director. Framed by a contemporary visit to the commanding officer’s grave in France, this widely successful film acknowledges the role of memory while presenting skillfully produced combat sequences of enormous visceral power.
Filmed on an enormous budget of $150 million, with full military cooperation and expert use of computer-generated imagery, Pearl Harbor (2001) returned to traditional storytelling, with war heroics surrounding the personal stories of men whose lives were changed forever by the December, 1941, attack. In sharp contrast, Clint Eastwood directed a pair of films that explore the role of memory in contrasting history and the distortions of myth making. Flags of Our Fathers (2006) shows how memories of their buddies’ deaths haunt veterans for a lifetime, while a companion film, Letters from Iwo Jima (2006), tells the story from a Japanese perspective, with English subtitles. Critics uniformly praised this thoughtful diptych, but even with modest production budgets by Hollywood standards, each of the films lost money.
A stream of documentaries about U.S. involvement in World War II has been produced since the war years; many of them have aired on the History Channel. None has been more ambitious than the seven-part, fourteen-hour series The War (2007), codirected and produced by Ken Burns and broadcast on public television to a huge audience. The series focuses on the impact of the war on the lives of families living in four different parts of the United States, spotlighting the recollections of average Americans rather than depending on the opinions of historians.
Impact
World War II was the most thoroughly documented event in history. During the war years, many Hollywood studio heads, stars, and studio personnel enlisted in the armed services; those who stayed stateside directed their efforts toward producing pictures that would help to win the war while still entertaining audiences. During the 1940’s and ever since, representations of “the good war” and its key events, effects, and influences have captivated filmmakers and audiences in the United States and beyond.
Bibliography
Basinger, Jeanine. The World War II Combat Film: Anatomy of a Genre. Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan University Press, 2003. Includes an extensive annotated filmography by Jeremy Arnold. An excellent genre study of films made between 1941 and 2002.
Doherty, Thomas. Projections of War: Hollywood, American Culture, and World War II. New York: Columbia University Press, 1999. Thorough survey of war films and their political and industrial contexts. Appendixes list most popular films from 1941 to 1945 as well as “victory films” released in the same period. This revised edition considers relatively recent films about World War II.
Eberwein, Robert. The War Film. New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 2005. Essays, five focused on World War II, are organized by topics of genre, race, gender, and history.
O’Brien, Kenneth Paul, and Lynn Hudson Parsons, eds. The Home-Front War: World War II and American Society. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1995. Essays by nine scholars on domestic issues during the war.
Shull, Michael S., and David Edward Wilt, comps. Hollywood War Films, 1937-1945. Jefferson, N.C.: McFarland, 1996. Exhaustive, useful filmography.
Suid, Lawrence H. Guts and Glory: The Making of the American Military Image in Film. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2002. Research based on hundreds of interviews by the author. Provides detailed information (including the extent of military cooperation) on more than two hundred films. Outstanding resource.