What's your favorite war movie?

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Saving Private Ryan, for the scene on Omaha Beach alone.

Schindler’s List, although it’s not war movie per se, but a movie about that part of the war.

Where Eagles Dare, with Clint Eastwood and Richard Burton.

Stripes. They did invade Czechoslovakia. Short war.

The Mouse That Roared. And the USA gets invaded by Grand Fenwick. Very short war.
 
I am surprised that no one mentioned navy movies, especially submarine flicks. Here are some great ones:

Run Silent, Run Deep
The Hunt For Red October
Das Boot
Torpedo Run
Destination Tokyo
Crash Dive
The Enemy Below
Up Periscope
Midway
30 Seconds Over Tokyo
The Caine Mutiny
They Were Expendable
The Fighting SeaBees
In Harm’s Way
Sink the Bismarck
and, finally, three all-time classics:
Destination Burma
Sands of Iwo Jima
Flying Tigers
 
PoliSciProf said:
I am surprised that no one mentioned navy movies, especially submarine flicks. Here are some great ones:

Run Silent, Run Deep
The Hunt For Red October
Das Boot
Torpedo Run
Destination Tokyo
Crash Dive
The Enemy Below
Up Periscope
Midway
30 Seconds Over Tokyo
The Caine Mutiny
They Were Expendable
The Fighting SeaBees
In Harm’s Way
Sink the Bismarck
and, finally, three all-time classics:
Destination Burma
Sands of Iwo Jima
Flying Tigers
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You mentioned some great war movies!! I love the submarine movies - Run Silent, Run Deep, Up Periscope, Torpedo Run.
Was Ice Station Zebra a war movie?
I also liked Battle of the Bulge and The Longest Day.
 
PoliSciProf said:
I am surprised that no one mentioned navy movies, especially submarine flicks. Here are some great ones:

Run Silent, Run Deep
The Hunt For Red October
Das Boot
Torpedo Run
Destination Tokyo
Crash Dive
The Enemy Below
Up Periscope
Midway
30 Seconds Over Tokyo
The Caine Mutiny
They Were Expendable
The Fighting SeaBees
In Harm’s Way
Sink the Bismarck
and, finally, three all-time classics:
Destination Burma
Sands of Iwo Jima
Flying Tigers
Click to expand...
Das Boot was really great.
 
“Born on the 4th of July” with Tom Cruise…gritty, true story, but gives good idea of the anger of Viet Nam veterans!
 
My favorite, and the best war movie ever made, IMHO, is Stalag 17 because it had heart, suspense, grit, patriotism, and humor all rolled into one. The plight of prisoners of war is often overlooked–at least it was before S17 was released. It highlighted a whole era in one film–the hopes, fears, deprivations, and the loss that war, any war, brings about.

Another great little film is Stage Door Canteen. A docudrama about the efforts of USO clubs to give WWII military personel a good send-off/return from war. Touching, funny, and sweet.
 
7_Sorrows said:
You mentioned some great war movies!! I love the submarine movies - Run Silent, Run Deep, Up Periscope, Torpedo Run.
Was Ice Station Zebra a war movie?
I also liked Battle of the Bulge and The Longest Day.
Click to expand...
Ice Station Zebra could probably be considered a Cold War movie. It was Howard Hughes favorite movie, and when he was living in Las Vegas if he wanted to watch it, he would call the TV station he owned and tell them to yank whatever was showing and put on Ice Station Zebra,. This is what billionaires did before the invention of VHS players.

I still like the movie too. I like anything Patrick McGoohan was in, and it always seemed like his character in that movie was John Drake (from his TV series Secret Agent) working under an alias, and that the treachery and double-crosses by all the different powers led him to quit the intelligence service when he came back - which led to him being imprisoned in The Village in his later series The Prisoner. That’s how I’ve always seen it, anyway.

Some other war movies I’ve always enjoyed:

The Big Red One - Lee Marvin at his best. Another Sam Fuller film

The Odd Angry Shot - an Australian film about the Australian SAS in Vietnam

The Frogmen - I loved this movie as a kid.

Hamburger Hill - underrated film about the 101st in Vietnam

American Sniper - quite good.

The Deer Hunter - inaccurate as heck (since when did Vietnam-era SF wear full beards in their Class As?) but still a poignant reminder of the war’s effect on small-town America.

The Dogs of War - based on the Frederick Forsythe novel about mercenaries (also by John Irvin, who did Hamburger Hill), with the unusual casting of Chris Walken as a mercenary leader - who makes it work. Dark, moody, lots of early appearances by actors who will achieve prominence later.

The Green Berets - also pretty inaccurate, but hey, The Duke (a Catholic convert)

We Were Soldiers - One of my friends who fought in the battle said this was a largely accurate film. One of Gibson’s best.

Glory - Hard to watch this and not choke up at the end.

Sergeant York - Got to give it up for one of my 82nd peeps, Sgt. Alvin York, as played by Gary Cooper (Catholic convert)

Dr. Zhivago - WWI and the Russian Revolution are kind of the backdrop for Zhivago’s life rather than the point of the movie, but still amazing, as are Lean’s other war films - Lawrence of Arabia and The Bridge Over the River Kwai. Alec Guinness (another Catholic convert!) is great in both Zhivago and Kwai.

Taking Chance - this HBO movie with Kevin Bacon is one of the saddest movies I’ve ever seen, with a fairly simple, straightforward plot - Bacon is a Marine charged with returning the body of a Marine who was killed in Iraq back to his family. Elegiac, very moving, it’s hard to watch this without weeping all through it.

I’ll Be Seeing You - A somewhat depressing Christmas war movie with Joseph Cotton as a soldier on medical leave from the front with PTSD and a non-singing, non-dancing Ginger Rogers as an inmate on leave from prison for killing the man who tried to rape her - you have to be in a special mood to watch this 1944 film. It’s actually quite good, and was the first sympathetic treatment of PTSD (or as it was known then, combat fatigue), as well as a good love story about two very wounded, lonely people. Also has a teenage Shirley Temple as Rogers’ ditsy niece. This shows up at Christmastime on TMC most years.
 
So many good ones, but if I had to pick one, I would go with “Where Eagles Dare” for the mash up with Eastwood and Burton, two unlikely to go together. Also, the plot was intricate and engaging.
 
You folks already mentioned some of my favorite war movies. Here are a few more:

Attack! - It stars real-life war hero Eddie Albert as a cowardly colonel who keeps getting his men killed when he repeatedly fails to commit troop support when they get caught under fire. Jack Palance is a hard-nosed leiutenant at odds with him.

Hell is for Heroes - A small handful of men have to convince the Germans that they have a much larger force until support arrives the next day. It stars Steve McQueen and a very funny supporting role from Bob Newhart.

Fixed Bayonets - Another movie where a small number of men have to fool the enemy into thinking there is a larger force, this time as a read guard unit in Korean winter to give the larger force time to fall back. Richard Basehart is an officer whose biggest fear is being in charge.

A Bridge Too Far - This is an all-star cast about the failed Operation Market Garden offensive. A must see.

Gung Ho! - It’s the real-life story of a group of Asian-American troops serving in Germany. Not only is it well-done, but it’s that right point where it doesn’t underplay the racism that they faced abroad and at home, while at the same time it doesn’t beat you over the head with its message.
 
First is Saving Private Ryan. Everything else is a distant second, at best.

Of those distant seconds (I’ll call it a tie for all of these), I would list:

Platoon
Full Metal Jacket
The Thin Red Line
The Dirty Dozen
The Bridge over the River Kwai
Black Hawk Down

I absolutely loved Band of Brothers, but since that was a series and not a movie, I won’t list it in the “distant seconds”.

Schindler’s List. What a movie, what a story. But I really don’t see that as a war movie even though it takes place during a war.

Peace

Tim
 
Orogeny said:
First is Saving Private Ryan. Everything else is a distant second, at best.

Of those distant seconds (I’ll call it a tie for all of these), I would list:

Platoon
Full Metal Jacket
The Thin Red Line
The Dirty Dozen
The Bridge over the River Kwai
Black Hawk Down

I absolutely loved Band of Brothers, but since that was a series and not a movie, I won’t list it in the “distant seconds”.

Schindler’s List. What a movie, what a story. But I really don’t see that as a war movie even though it takes place during a war.

Peace

Tim
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Yes. Black Hawk Down was really good.
 
1 Apocalypse Now
2 Full Metal jacket
3 Life is Beautiful
4 Platoon
 
Della said:
My favorite, and the best war movie ever made, IMHO, is Stalag 17 because it had heart, suspense, grit, patriotism, and humor all rolled into one. The plight of prisoners of war is often overlooked–at least it was before S17 was released. It highlighted a whole era in one film–the hopes, fears, deprivations, and the loss that war, any war, brings about.

Another great little film is Stage Door Canteen. A docudrama about the efforts of USO clubs to give WWII military personel a good send-off/return from war. Touching, funny, and sweet.
Click to expand...
Stalag 17 was such a great movie with a stellar cast. Directed by the great Billy Wilder, who made many of my favorite movies (Double Indemnity, Sunset Boulevard, The Apartment, etc.)
 
Hoosier_Daddy said:
1 Apocalypse Now
2 Full Metal jacket
3 Life is Beautiful
4 Platoon
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I’m kind of surprised no one mentioned Apocalypse Now until now (or if they did I missed it) as it loomed so large in the popular culture of my childhood. I’ve learned that it’s not in any way to be taken as a documentary of the Vietnam War (although Marlon Brando’s Kurtz was based on a real person, I think I read somewhere?) but it’s still a pretty interesting film with a magnificent cast, and a nice adaptation of Joseph Conrad’s “Heart of Darkness.” In fact I should have shortlisted it for my favorite war movie.

To the extent that I think it may have captured anything about the real experience of Vietnam, it may have been how isolated the American soldiers were there and (probably) the extent to which they created a little America in their bases and outposts - which is what any army stationed overseas does.
 
Another great war movie I recommend is The Americanization of Emily, starring James Garner. It’s a great black comedy that can hold it’s own against Dr. Strangelove, which came out around the same time. For some odd reason it isn’t widely known, though.🤷
 
I loved Das Boot - and Saving Private Ryan. And it’s not really a “war” movie - more like “Cold war” movie - but The Hunt for Red October is one of my favs.
 
Exiled_Child said:
Another great war movie I recommend is The Americanization of Emily, starring James Garner. It’s a great black comedy that can hold it’s own against Dr. Strangelove, which came out around the same time. For some odd reason it isn’t widely known, though.🤷
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I have seen the Americanization of Emily on many times, but never watched it. Is it engaging? I never could understand what it was about.
 
7_Sorrows said:
I have seen the Americanization of Emily on many times, but never watched it. Is it engaging? I never could understand what it was about.
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Oh, I bet you’d really love it! It’s such a good movie! It’s an anti-war black comedy. I’m not sure how to describe it without giving away too much of the story, however…:o James Garner did a superb job though, and yeah, I think his performance was definitely engaging. I think if you liked Dr. Strangelove you would like Emily.
 
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