War on Film

By Mark London Williams

Perhaps it's a sign of the waning influence of movies as a medium for propaganda that, in the recent budget tussles in Congress, part of the ballooning "Homeland Security" budget was diverted from Hollywood. Lawmakers decided not to pay a proposed $100,000 to former Dukes of Hazzard actress Bobbie Faye Ferguson to work as the agency's liaison to filmmakers, a line item presumably directed toward insuring not only accuracy but sympathy in depicting "homeland security operations" on the screen.

During World War II, when FDR asked Hollywood to make films sympathetic to the cause, the response produced not only cartoons like Porky Pig taking on the Germans in "Confessions of a Nutzy Spy" or, switching species and theatres of operation, "Bugs Bunny Nips the Nips," but Frank Capra's documentary series Why We Fight, which postulated an America that was completely free, even for its black soldiers, as they marched off against the Hun. That conflict also saw possibly the greatest Hollywood film ever made: Casablanca.

That 1942 classic replicated, in the person of Bogart's bar-owning Rick Blaine, the journey that America, as a whole, had taken up to the bombing of Pearl Harbor. It was an arc that moved much more slowly than FDR would have preferred: We moved, like Rick, from "I stick my neck out for nobody" to being welcomed "back to the fight."

Casablanca also neatly brings up the question of what, exactly, constitutes a "war film."

Are war movies only the ones that actually show battles and recreate the fighting, like Thirty Seconds Over Tokyo, where Spencer Tracy, as Jimmy Doolittle, reenacted the successful bombing raid over Japan's major city? There are, after all, other aspects of war: causes and aftereffects.

One of the best films dealing with the latter is William Wyler's Best Years of Our Lives. This Oscar-winning film wasted no time in looking at WWII's sobering domestic repercussions: It came out in 1946, while radios were still playing the Harry James/Kitty Kallen recording of "It's Been a Long, Long Time" as a soundtrack for returning GIs. But beyond the simple yearning of that No. 1 pop song - "Kiss me once, then kiss me twice, then kiss me once again/It's been a long, long time" - Best Years showed that those homecoming kisses were fraught with complications: obvious ones like physical wounds (Harold Russell, playing the hand-less Homer Parrish, was discovered by Wyler in an army rehab training film - now, one assumes, the prosthetic limbs would be digitized) and more subtle ones, like the family that has moved on in the father's absence (in the case of the Frederic March character) or, quite simply, a world that simply doesn't understand (Dana Andrews' Fred Derry, suffering a mild form of what would now be termed post-traumatic stress syndrome).

The film was about grief and loss and reconciliation, summarized as Homer at last fully "reveals" himself to his fiancé, Wilma, and takes her upstairs not to make love but to show her his evening routine of removing his prosthetic arms. "This is when I know I'm helpless. My hands are down there on the bed. I can't put them on again without calling to somebody for help," he tells her. Then he tries to send her away to seek a less complicated life with somebody else.

But she wants to stay with him, and so, shortly thereafter, they're married, with Dana Andrews' Fred as best man and Frederic March's Al watching the ceremony, each attempting their own healing, their own "moving on." By the time we fade to black, it's implied that such a moving on is indeed in the cards. And why not? Despite the problems of readjustment, this was, after all, "The Good War" - it's no accident that Studs Terkel gave his oral history of WWII that title - and such re-entry back "into the world," as the later Vietnam vets would term it, was not only warranted but fully deserved.

Besides, the 1950s, with their easy mortgages, cheap gas and suburban middle-class, steak-on-the-grill lifestyles, were just around the corner - boom times ahead.

Meantime, there was also a not-so-good war in Korea, beginning our game of Cold War "dominoes," this time with communist China; the same theory of containment that would have us entangled in Vietnam by the decade's end.

Korea spawned a few films, including the Bogart-starring Battle Circus, where he's still drinking and still world-weary, only this time as a doctor attached to-yes-a MASH unit, who observes he's seen "three world wars in one lifetime" (a tacit acknowledgement of the Korean conflict's larger geopolitical currents). But it was not until the U.S. was entrenched in Vietnam that the Korean War would reach the zenith of its cinematic fame.

Of course, we refer to that other medics-in-Korea opus, 1970's MASH (the asterisks, making it "M*A*S*H", would be the contribution of the TV version which followed in 1972). While not set in Vietnam, Robert Altman's film is definitely of that time, with its cultural battle between the hips and squares, its non-'50s tonsorial palette and the revelation that war is such a soul-stultifying affair that sex and drugs become the only escape (and even suicide, per the title song, "is painless.")

It was a direct challenge to the only explicitly Vietnam-set film Hollywood had produced before it, The Green Berets, in which John Wayne (who, like Ronald Reagan, had never actually fought in a war) leads World War II-like charges against the dark and gathering forces of a monolithic Communism. Indeed, Wayne even co-directed the film, the narrative of which becomes its own twisted version of Why We Fight. David Janssen plays ostensibly naive, peacenik reporter George Beckworth, whose eyes are opened by seeing just how wily/evil/ruthless the Viet Cong are when he attaches himself to the Duke's Special Forces unit.

The latter film continues to exist as a kind of American political Rorschach, as do views on Vietnam itself. A look at Amazon's discussion board for the DVD shows comments running the gamut from "John Wayne... was what every man wanted to be and what every woman wanted. He loved his country and hated its enemies. Thats (sic) why he made this film," to the movie being "about what you would expect from a rabid anti-communist draft dodger."

Yet in spite of American sentiment turning against the war as the '60s and early '70s unfolded, there weren't any overtly anti-war, or explicitly anti-Vietnam War, films coming from Hollywood until the documentary Hearts and Minds in 1974.

Produced by Bert Schneider, who'd had a hand in ushering in much of the filmic images of the era - from "The Monkees" TV show to movies like Easy Rider and The Last Picture Show - the film's capturing of a best documentary Oscar in 1975 provoked a hubbub that puts to shame the staged booing aimed at Michael Moore during his Bowling for Columbine win: Schneider read a telegram from the Viet Cong, and the Hollywood Right - which included former Democrat and then co-host Frank Sinatra - responded with a hastily written counter-statement disassociating themselves from the telegram's contents. The Hollywood Left, in the person of presenter Warren Beatty, quipped back: "Thanks, Frank, you old Republican, you."

It was the first time mainstream Hollywood wrestled directly with an anti-Vietnam statement on film. Yes, the colonial conflict's reverberations were felt in movies like the aforementioned MASH, and even in Sam Peckinpah's 1969 Western masterwork, The Wild Bunch, which postulated that authority, in the guise of "the railroad men," was lying and corrupt, and not above using violence - women and children in the crossfire be damned - to ensure its own new world order.

Directors like Stanley Kubrick practically had a cottage industry of anti-war films as well, with 1957's Paths of Glory, starring Kirk Douglas as a French officer in WWI trying to deal compassionately with his soldiers' refusal to carry out a clearly suicidal attack, and 1964's Dr. Strangelove, which demonstrated that only the insane would use nuclear weapons. Indeed, if Vietnam was too hot for Hollywood, the threat of global annihilation did manage to get filmmakers' attention, as movies like Fail Safe and On the Beach proved.

But foreign films were beginning to specifically tackle the theme of futile imperial adventures, notably 1965's Battle of Algiers, by Italian director Gillo Pontecorvo. This film brilliantly captures, in semi-documentary style, the nihilistic desperation of the occupied - the Algerians, a.k.a. the Islamic "terrorists" (yes, the word is used here) - and the self-loathing of the occupiers, namely the French.  What is most startling about this film when viewed today is that it stands as the most trenchant commentary on the U.S. invasion of Iraq committed to film (about which more in a moment).

Hollywood was no stranger to the anti-war film: The very first "Best Picture" Oscar, in 1930, went to Universal's adaptation of All Quiet on the Western Front, the Lewis Milestone-directed version of Erich Maria Remarque's first-hand account of the utter futility of young men dying in European trenches for that other "game of Kings."

By World War II, Remarque had to flee Germany for Hollywood, while Hollywood was declining to show, let alone make, films about the futility of war as we geared up for another. (WWI would be revisited in 1971's Johnny Got His Gun, another anti-Vietnam War film in disguise, about a young man rendered blind, deaf, mute and limbless by war, based on McCarthy blacklist survivor Dalton Trumbo's novel).

Vietnam wasn't tackled directly in narrative film until - were you going to guess 1979, and Apocalypse Now? Good try. But 1978's The Boys in Company C, directed and co-written by Sidney J. Furie, about a group of soon-to-be-disillusioned Marines on their first tour of duty "in country," and Ted Post's Go Tell the Spartans from that same year, featuring Burt Lancaster as a circa-1964 military "advisor" in Vietnam in an entanglement that was about to get much, much worse, both preceded it.

As did Best Picture winner The Deer Hunter, which came out the following year, along with Coming Home. In the former flick, director Michael Cimino, working with Robert DeNiro and a then-unknown Christopher Walken and Meryl Streep, didn't condemn Vietnam in political terms - indeed, there could be no telegram from the Viet Cong to read on Deer Hunter's Oscar stage, since "Charlie," and all Vietnamese, were shown to be as ruthless and bloodthirsty (even running apocryphal Russian Roulette games) as the Americans were.

In Hal Ashby's Coming Home - a film which must still have AM talk radio hosts seeing red - a veteran's wife, played by Jane Fonda, falls in love with a paraplegic Jon Voight, whose wound has opened him to the Big Hurts of the world, making him more empathic and, finally, more desirable as a lover. This is in contrast to her own husband, the far more rigid Bruce Dern character, whose cognitive dissonance between what he saw in Vietnam and his mythologizing of the military finally leaves him only one option: running into the tide, with no way back.

Then came Apocalypse, which captured the hallucinogenic aspects of the war - brutalizing, and being brutalized, are easier when you're high - and, finally, a seeming slew of films examining the crimes and misdemeanors of Vietnam, including Kubrick's Full Metal Jacket (1987) and Vietnam vet Oliver Stone's Oscar-winning Platoon in 1986.

There were many others, including some that touched on the topic of how, exactly, you "come home" from something like that (which wasn't a "best year" of anyone's life). Stone's own Born on the 4^th of July offered protest and resistance as the antidote to a soldier's feelings of betrayal, and Robert Zemeckis's Forrest Gump added the more '90s twist of "just don't ask too many questions, and everything will be fine."

Of course, revisionism was rampant by then: Stallone had made his Rambo films, and Chuck Norris likewise contributed to the conservative's film thesis that Vietnam - and, by implication, American manhood - was "lost" not because of colonial complications, à la Pontecorvo, but because we didn't have the stones to finish the job.

And now here we are, a few short years later, with not one but two Bush family-sparked wars in Iraq, and how ironic that the shorter campaign gave us the only notable film to come out of the conflicts: 1999's Three Kings, directed by David O. Russell, which portrayed Operation Desert Storm in generally hopeless Algiers-like stripes, with the American grunts as manipulated as the hapless Saddam Hussein pawns they were expected to fight.

It's a mark of how poor our cinema has become as a platform for public discourse that the DVD release of Three Kings struck fear into Time Warner's hearts when Russell wanted to include a shorter, Hearts and Minds-like doc, with both pro and con interviews about the current Iraq invasion, on the disc.

Too controversial so close to an election, the corporation decided. So the documentary, Soldier's Pay, wound up being shown on the IFC Channel, instead.

Maybe Congress has it right, in terms of propaganda and controlling public discourse: Few movies make people think, let alone change hearts or minds, anymore. (That $100,000 slated for their Tinseltown lobbyist is probably better spent infiltrating Internet sites, where people really get their information these days.)

Either that, or we'll have to settle for the glancing roman à clef in George Lucas' Episode III as the only studio film about our current war and foreign policy that we're likely to get for quite some time, unless cable TV gives people another reason to stay home from the theaters: At press time, Steven Bochco is prepping the pilot Over There for FX - a series that will follow an American platoon through a tour of duty... in Iraq.

Model: David Lee Rawleys of the Agency AZ

Make Up: Hayley Thomas, Hair: Curtis Blue