WW II movies

[Mojave Jack]

Ice Cold in Alex
Malta Story
Yank in the RAF
Flying Leathernecks
Flying Tigers
Sands of Iwo Jima
A Matter of Life and Death
Between Heaven and Hell
Tora, Tora, Tora
Guns of Navarone
From here to eternity

I just watched From Here to Eternity last weekend. I hadn't seen that for years, and didn't realize as a kid what a powerful movie it is. Man, if you don't get a bit broken up when Prewitt plays taps, you're just not human! What an incredible film.

 

[Hammelby]

‚Ä¢ Aim?© & Jaguar (love in berlin 1942) (ultra romantic:eusa_clap )
• Der untergang (Hitlers last days)

 

[zeus36]

John Wayne in
"The Fighting Seabees"

Lots of guys in fedoras , including Wayne. They wore them in the first half of the film and during a nightclub scene.
They were civilians at first working construction and had hats on when returning from overseas and on the ship enroute to the South Pacific. Even wore the fedoras during construction on the island.
Good look at the high waisted pants too.

 

[Hondo]

Mine have mostly been mentioned...

12 o'Clock High - possibly the best WW2 movie dealing with conventional warfare.

I got off track, but I agree many great choices, I got a new 12 O'Clock High DVD for $10 last year when I flew in the Nine-O-Nine B-17. I greatly admire Gregory Peak, he also had a great voice.

I might as well add "The White Cliffs Over Dover" which is about to start on TMC tonight

 

[Nathan Dodge]

The Human Comedy (1943)

For a view of the "Home Front" and some genuinely moving scenes, (you will cry!) take a look at The Human Comedy (1943). Sure, it's propagandistic, but it's such an underrated movie and probably has Mickey Rooney's best performance. I think of The Human Comedy as "War Finds Andy Hardy."

It's one of my favorite movies.

 

[airfrogusmc]

I would have to say The War Lover is one of my favorites that I don't think got mentioned.
I aso really like Terrence Malicks The Thin Red Line

One of my all time favorites war films not WWII though is Apocalypse Now redux. I got to see it on the big screen and Coppala recut and remastered the original film. The color was just incredible.

 

[Serial Hero]

The Story of G.I. Joe
Battleground
Guadalcanal Diary
Go 4 Broke
A Walk in the Sun
Hell Is For Heros
Sands of Iwo Jima
Attack
Gung Ho

and (even though it's not WWII)
Pork Chop Hill

 

[Forrestal]

I think all the movies that have been mentioned are great, but one that I didn’t see listed and I feel is as good as it gets is Stalag 17.

What do you think?
Regards,
Forrestal

 

[Serial Hero]

I think all the movies that have been mentioned are great, but one that I didn’t see listed and I feel is as good as it gets is Stalag 17.

What do you think?
Regards,
Forrestal

After I signed off last night I realized I had left it off. I was just going to mention it when I saw your post. It’s a classic, I felt kind of silly for not mentioning it.

In fact, I just picked it up at Best Buy last night after work.

Another couple are:

Saints and Soldiers
The Last Drop

 

[Quigley Brown]

A little offbeat...Hitler's Children (1943) with Tim Holt and that nasty Otto Kruger. A Hollywood propoganda flick, but apparently it grossed more than Citizen Kane that year.

 

[mlktrout]

An Intro...

Greetings from the Trout in the Milk, new kid on the block. What a great list of movies. When I grew up Ted Turner only had ONE TV station -- now known as "Superstation TBS," back then it was just WTCG from Atlanta, and it showed just about every black and white movie ever made, or so it seemed. I loved 'em all and would sit up all night drinking tea and watching guys like John Garfield and Spencer win the war, or Jimmy Cagney and Pat O'Brien wisecrack their way through good times and bad, or Bogie...ah Bogie, need I say more.

One thing I don't see being mentioned in this list of memorable WW2 flicks is the wartime musical. Some of the movies mentioned -- The Great Escape, the Longest Day -- these movies showed how we fought. Movies like Watch on the Rhine, Casablanca -- they showed us why we fought. But the a lot of the movies showed us what we had to come home to. Oh, they weren't all musicals -- Mrs. Minniver is a great example of that. But remember Anchors Aweigh? The two sailors on leave, looking for good times and nothing more -- and instead finding the girls they wanted to come home to. Or Music for Millions, in which the war is discussed but never seen, because the movie is about a lonely bass fiddler waiting for her husband to polish off the Pacific and come home. (Incidentally that movie starred the radiant June Allyson, who just died last week, may she rest in peace.)

Let's hear it for the wartime musical, and its message of better things to come!

 

[Sierra Charriba]

The Dirty Dozen
The guns of Navarone
Story of G.I. Joe
Men in war (the best!)
Objetive Burma
The Merril's Marauders
The Train (also the best!)
Enemy at the gates
And much more...

 

[nightandthecity]

Mrs. Minniver is a great example of that.

thanks for reminding me... what a great film it was. Greer Garson was absolutely gorgeous in it. I believe she was already in her thirties when she became a star, proof that youth isn't everything.....

 

[mlktrout]

Youth

Greer Garson is and was and will always be timelessly beautiful, that's all there is to it...

But "youth" is defined so differently among different groups. When the Spanish pianist (and later, movie star) Jose Iturbi arrived in the United States he was a month shy of his 34th birthday, and when the music critics fainted dead away over his playing, they all said, "Despite his youth...."

Iturbi was 47 when he made his first movie, shocking people in theaters who had heard his records but never seen him in concert -- he looked no older than 35 even then. By the time he made his last movie, age had begun to catch up to him but he still didn't look his true age of 54.

The point of my rambling (aside from taking the opportunity to mention Iturbi again)...youth depends on whose perspective you're looking from. I'm now 47 myself, older than Bogart when he did "Casablanca," older than Iturbi in "Thousands Cheer." And Greer Garson's 30-something of Mrs. Minniver seems quite young to me!

BTW about Greer Garson...I was fascinated to see that she married the fellow who played her SON in Mrs. Minniver, I believe his name was Richard Ney or Bey or something like that. That's wild.

Trout

 

[Clyde R.]

Great thread...

Many of my favorites have already been mentioned: Stalag 17, The Great Escape, From Here To Eternity, The War Lover, Hell Is For Heroes, The Longest Day, Twelve O'Clock High, Das Boot. I really liked The Sands of Iwo Jima when I was a kid.

On the lighter side I've always liked Operation Petticoat and Kelly's Heroes as good comedies. Like MK said early in the thread, I, too have always liked the submarine movies like Destination Tokyo and the later Das Boot. They're just fascinating.

I'll have to look up Lacombe Lucien and A Canterbury Tale based on Nightandthecity's recommendation. They sound very interesting.

Speaking of WWII sub movies, the Peter O'Toole flick, Murphy's War is very good. O'Toole plays a beached British sailor in South America who fights a one man war against a German U-boat, using a scavenged and pieced together flying boat amongst other weaponry.

 

[VintageJess]

Another Sub Movie

I watched "Run Silent, Run Deep" the other night on TCM--starring Clark Gable and Burt Lancaster.

I really enjoyed it.

 

[Clyde R.]

Speaking of sub movies, I took a tour last week in Oahu while on vacation of the USS Bowfin. The Bowfin is a WWII US Balao class submarine at Pearl Harbor that had a great war record. As a sub movie buff, my first tour of an actual WWII submarine was really great.

Here's one pic of the bow of Bowfin. She was called the "Pearl Harbor Avenger" because she was launched Deceber 7, 1942. Maybe I'll post some more pics on the WWII board.

 

[TM]

One of the interesting things about The Longest Day is that it had four directors:

Ken Annakin (British exterior episodes);
Andrew Marton (American exterior episodes);
Bernhard Wicki (German episodes); and
Darryl F. Zanuck (uncredited)

I found that this gave individual sequences a certain cultural identity – the British, American and German scenes looked British, American and German. Although obviously within the confines of Zanuck’s overall vision.

I’ve always been impressed by that really long tracking shot across the harbor to the attack on the casino. And I’ve always wondered how they did that!


Regarding The Story of GI Joe, I found the film to be a bit uneven. But it did have some great scenes. One of the curiosities is the sequence where Ernie Pyle finds out that he won the Pulitzer Prize. The dapper guy who informs him is Lucien Hubbard, playing himself. During the war Hubbard was a war correspondent for Readers Digest. But he was also had a long and successful career in movies as a director, producer, and writer. With over 60 screen credits. And he won the very first Academy Award for a motion picture for producing Wings. A fact that was so irrelevant that it was not reported in the Los Angeles Times.

Tony

 

[Rumpled Fedora]

Well, I don't have any new movies to add to the list but I gotta say, Stalag 17 is one of my all-time favorites. I feel it blended stern drama and a little bit of humor quite well. I think a lot of actors should take a lesson from Holden's Best Actor acceptance speech for this film.

 

[Baggers]

Speaking of Gregory Peck, I was browsing through Best Buy the other day and took a chance on The Purple Plain.

The setting is Burma in 1945 and Peck plays a Canadian serving with the RAF. Shot on location in Ceylon ( now Sri Lanka), the procuction had the assistance of the RAF and so I was treated to some wonderful shots of real De Havilland Mosquitos working at a rather convincing representation of a forward air field. It was also great to watch for the uniforms obviously (lots of KD). A bit of a pot boiler at times plot wise, it was still worth the 10 bucks I paid for it.

Joe Bob says check it out.

Cheers!