How will Dunkirk stack up against the great WWII movies?

Films serve a practical purpose, rallying American solidarity behind WWII

Charlie Chaplin, Alfred Hitchcock, Roman Polanski, Spike Lee, Clint Eastwood, Angelina Jolie, Steven Spielberg—all have made movies related to World War II.

Now Christopher Nolan joins their ranks with “Dunkirk,” the story of the military and civilian evacuation of more than 300,000 Allied troops trapped on the beaches of northern France in 1940. The big-budget Hollywood picture out this week, written and directed by the British-American filmmaker behind “The Dark Knight” trilogy, is not about an Allied victory, but a rescue at a highly precarious moment in history.

Directors who want to test their mettle continue to turn to World War II, the subject of more American movies than any other conflict in U.S. history, film experts say. US wars in Iraq and Afghanistan remain intermittent screen subjects, but World War II, with its sense of moral clarity, is a constant. The war formed the backdrop of several movies last year and returned this year with pictures including the Holocaust film “The Zookeeper’s Wife” and the D-Day drama “Churchill,” as well as the Winston Churchill biopic “Darkest Hour” coming in the fall.

 

“Dunkirk” fits into a tradition of historical recreations of the war while bringing the latest camera and sound technology and a major Hollywood budget to bear on its subject—what Mr. Nolan has called “virtual reality without the headset.” Sounds of rushing air and whizzing bullets thump the bodies of viewers in their seats, while the wide-screen format delivered with the help of six IMAX cameras costing $1 million each. The new technology brings out the tiny details of grime on a soldier’s ear, foam on the ocean, bootprints in the sand. The end result is a film with hyper-real shots of soldiers getting strafed on beaches, underwater images of men in doomed naval vessels and speeding aerials of dogfights.

“I knew I didn’t want to make a film that could be dismissed as old-fashioned, something that wasn’t relevant to today’s audiences,” Mr. Nolan wrote in a column for the Telegraph earlier this month. “My pitch to Warner Bros was: ‘We’re going to put the audience into the cockpit of a Spitfire and have them dogfight the Messerschmitts. We’re going to put them on the beach, feeling the sand getting everywhere, confronting the waves.’”

Many World War II films reveal at least as much about the times in which they are made as they do about the conflict itself. “It’s possible that 20 years from now we’ll look back at ‘Dunkirk’ and say, ‘That movie was so 2017,’ and everyone will know exactly what that means,” said film historian Mark Harris, author of “Five Came Back,” a book about Hollywood and World War II that was also the subject of a recent Netflix documentary.

Around the beginning of the war, films served a practical purpose, rallying American solidarity behind the conflict. In 1940, Hitchcock’s “Foreign Correspondent” featured a reporter calling for action with guns and battleships in a scene of a radio broadcast: “It’s as if the lights were out everywhere except in America,” he says. Chaplin, who directed and played the lead speaking role in 1940’s “The Great Dictator” about an Adolf Hitler-like figure, delivers a final speech directly into the camera that includes the line: “Let us fight to free the world.”

During the war, filmmakers churned out movies in close to real time, going from script to screen in as few as six months, said Mr. Harris.

“Films made about World War II during the war are special because we don’t know we’re going to win,” said Thomas Doherty, a professor of American studies at Brandeis University who wrote “Projections of War: Hollywood, American Culture, and World War II.” “I’m always surprised when I look at World War II movies made during the war just how stern the lessons are. The guy you really like is often killed in the film.”

Soon, the anxieties of the atomic age begin to surface. “In Harm’s Way,” a 1965 film starring John Wayne as a naval officer in the Pacific after Pearl Harbor, ends with a shot of the ocean that morphs into what looks like a mushroom cloud. Mixed feelings around the Vietnam War enter the picture with movies like 1967’s “The Dirty Dozen,” a subversive take on conflict told through the story of death-row convicts on a mission to kill Nazis.

Veterans of World War II and Vietnam and civilian Baby Boomers might have taken different messages from 1970’s “Patton,” at once a portrait of a victorious general and a man driven by ego and ambition. Douglas Cunningham, co-editor of “A Wiley Companion to the War Film” and a teacher of film history at Westminster College in Salt Lake City, Utah, recalled a scene where Patton slaps the helmet of a soldier suffering from shellshock. “By 1970, you would have had plenty of folks returning from Vietnam traumatized in ways that would have been familiar to some members of that audience,” he said.

In time the Holocaust became a central part of the screen version of World War II, with movies like 1982’s “Sophie’s Choice,” about an Auschwitz survivor, and Spielberg’s 1993 drama “Schindler’s List.”

Movies have furthered an idea that the Holocaust was known to most American soldiers during the war. A scene hinting at that connection occurs in Spielberg’s “Saving Private Ryan,” when a Jewish soldier holds up the Star of David on his dog tag and repeats the German word for Jews—“Juden”—to captured enemy soldiers. “This is the way America sees World War II now—that it was all about the Holocaust and the Holocaust was the governing point,” said Robert Burgoyne, professor of film studies at the University of St Andrews and author of two books on U.S. history as told through the movies. “The Holocaust was not known to American culture generally. It is simply a kind of rewriting of World War II according to the contemporary generation’s perspective.”

In 1998, “Saving Private Ryan” presented the war to a new generation, starting with its harrowing opening of Allied troops storming Omaha Beach on D-Day. “In terms of stoking interest in World War II, these are the most important 20 minutes in cinema history,” said Rob Citino, senior historian at The National World War II Museum in New Orleans.

Within the last decade, films have dug into less-explored angles on the war. “Inglourious Basterds,” Quentin Tarantino’s 2009 revenge fantasy, is “a thoughtful commentary on the powerful role film itself plays in war,” said Mr. Cunningham, recalling a scene where Hitler is shot to death in a blazing movie theater that incinerates its Nazi audience.

Other contemporary films have examined war through the lens of identity politics. “The Imitation Game” is a 2014 film based on the biography of Alan Turing, the brilliant mathematician who helped crack the German spy code and was later punished for his homosexuality. “Today we’re going to tend to focus on issues of race, ethnicity and sexuality, where in the past maybe it would be the Jew, the Irishman and the Italian you’d see in the combat squad,” said Mr. Doherty.

All the elements of World War II—weapons, intrigue, fear, bravery, psychological breakdown—make for great storytelling. “If we wrote books and made TV shows and movies about World War II from now until 4,000 AD,” said Mr Citino, “we still wouldn’t exhaust it as a source of human drama.” 

Source: The Wall Street Journal