I enjoy any war film that inspires – the film The Great Escape is one of my all time favourites. Not only were most of the team from the Magnificent 7 re-united but it was actually based on some truth:

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/uk/article1082619.ece

Without a doubt real war is filled with blood, guts, misery, cowardice, heroism, pointlessness at times and a film that can convey this has its place.

…but to see a war film such as The Great Escape shows the nobility of an individual/swho refuses to remain a captive of the enemy.

I await with great anticipation Christian Bale’s new film where he portrays the only man to have escaped during the Vietnam War…and I would recommend to anyone the film:

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0097441/

I’m glad I’ve seen all of them, especially the ones that I may watch only once or twice more in my life because they tore at my guts (as they were intended to). Add Schlindler’s List to that list, although it’s not technically a war movie.

I’ve got a slowly growing list of movies that, as my children age, I plan to sit down with them and force them to watch. In the afternoon, so we can talk about them for as long as we need to, both during and after the movie. There are just some things that I feel everyone, and especially my children, should be exposed to.

I don’t see those flicks as being low brow, at all.

I grew up on those heroic war movies, but the older I get, the less I like them. The more I read about real war and the people in them, and the more I learn from actual memoirs of people in real war, the more the movies seem fake to me. My Uncle John recounts how, on Tarawa, he first found a hole and just tried to stay alive, terrified out of his mind. He had to keep reminding himself who he was just to stay sane.

I guess my favorite war movies these days are the ones that expose war for what it really is: human butchery.

Johnny Dangerously
The Quiet Man (my favorite Wayne movie)
Airplane
Silverado (one of the best westerns ever made, and a “serious” spoof at that)
Aliens (Nuke the site from orbit – it’s the only way to be sure.)
Predator
The Running Man
Bladerunner (I haven’t seen it near often enough – I need to borrow Sam’s copy of the findal director’s cut. HINT HINT!)
The Abyss
Total Recall
Bullet
Das Boot
Tora! Tora! Tora!

and last but certainly not least,

Pink Floyd’s “The Wall”

I will still watch the Battle of the Bulge, Guns of Navarone, Dirty Dozen, and The great escape whenever they’re on.. They’re wonderful movies, and very well crafted.

What’s some other “guy’s movies” related to war that y’all watch whenever they’re on?

That being said, my must see movie list also includes “Every Which way but loose”,Pocket Money”, Dr.Strangelove,” and “Being There.”, and “Smokey and the bandit.”

I’m low brow, and proud of it.

Jeff

Everyone thinks Viet vets were different because they were psychically harmed more by what they did than by what was done to them. As Iraq is showing, that’s probably true of all wars, including WWII.

He would never speak of what he saw. His one comment to me (made after I was an adult and apologized for having bugged him to talk about it when I was a kid): “I don’t know if I deserved to talk about men that brave.”

My late father in law was a Navy UDT guy (ancestors of the Seals). He and a buddy were the guys who put up the “Welcome, Marines” sign at Tarawa, Iwo or Saipan. He could never remember which one they did it at – he said different guys did it at different places . He also saw Bobby Thomson hit the shot heard round the world in 1951. Quite a life.

Interestingly, JS, both those guys thought Wayne was full of it, too.

Yeah, he weaseled out. (Not that I’m one to talk. I did the same with the Vietnam War.)

OK. But did you go on to become a war hawk (so long as others did the dying and the getting crippled)? Did you make movies turning you into a military icon?

Didn’t think so.

Only in America.

For the record, four of my five uncles on my father’s side (plus my father) served during WWII. The sixth was 35 years old, and the military wouldn’t take him because of his age and the fact that he was the last male from the family. The family story is that he had to be jailed because he punched out a sergeant in a recruiting office who said he was too old.

One of my uncles was with Eddie Albert (not a play hero) at Tarawa, one of the most vicious fights of the Pacific war. My father was in the South Pacific in PT boats (and anyone who knows the story of the PT boats know what he probably saw). Uncle Russell (32 when he enlisted) was in combat in North Africa, Sicily, and Italy. Uncle BP was in France. Uncle Alex was in the service in Hawaii on December 7, 1941.

The uncle who was at Tarawa despises John Wayne, and refuses to watch war movies in which some actor single-handedly takes on the entire opposing army, runs through machine-gun fire, never gets hit, and has soldiers die in his arms peacefully without extraneous body parts strewn untidily around on the ground.

The people of Orange County, California, who named their airport after Wayne, seem incapable of separating the on-screen actions and the personal actions.

Form over substance. Often, it’s what America seems to be about.

It’s not well-known, but the most decorated WWII veteran from Hollywood — other than Audie Murphy, who went from war hero-dom to Hollywood — was Charles Durning.