Remembrance Cinema

The question that's vexing me today is whether I'm being disrespectful and unpatriotic by having missed my annual watching of The Longest Day (1962) in this, the eightieth anniversary of D-Day?  After all, Rishi Sunak is being pilloried, even by his own party, for being disrespectful because he left the official event in Normandy early, so maybe I'm just as guilty.  In fact, I'm a serial offender: I've failed to watch The Battle of Britain (1969) during August or September the past few years and I can't remember the last time I watched The Dambusters (1954) at all, let alone on or near the anniversary of the bombing of those dams.  Actually, now I've thought about it, commemorating war anniversaries by watching films based on them is an intriguing idea.  But could we extend it beyond World War Two, which is, without doubt, the most popular cinematic war?  The 18th of June is coming up soon, so perhaps I could watch Waterloo (1970) then in order to commemorate it.  (Although, if I don't, there won't be any angry veterans to berate me for being disrespectful - that was Sunak's mistake: if he wanted to skip a D-Day commemoration, than he should have waited a couple of years when there wouldn't be anyone left to disrespect).  While we're on the subject of the Napoleonic wars, I seem to recall  that there was also one of those big international co-productions about the Battle of Austerlitz, but beyond that, I can't think of any others about specific battles from the era.

It's much the same for World War One - quite a lot of films set in the period telling fictional stories, but not much on the subject of specific battles.  Possibly because they all looked the same - thousands of guys running through mud and barbed wire being mown down by machine guns or gassed - and are all incredibly depressing.  For the Korean War, there's a movie about Inchon - starring Laurence Olivier of all people as MacArthur - but not much else.  The same for Vietnam - lots of generic pictures, but little about specific battles.  But World War Two is definitely the king of wars when it comes to film adaptations of real battles.  Dunkirk, the Battle of Bulge, Anzio, Arnhem, D-Day, Midway, the liberation of Paris, Guadalcanal - they're all there.  If you extend the net to include foreign-language productions then you can add many more, from well known ones, like Stalingrad or El Alamein, (oddly, the only two movies about this British victory are Italian made and show the battle from their perspective, portraying the British as the villains), to battles of more local interest, like Neretva (in Yugoslavia) or Kursk (in the Soviet Union - the largest tank battle of the war).  There are even Japanese war movies (with effects by the guys who did Godzilla films - lots of insanely detailed large scale model ships and planes are involved for the action scenes), portraying the war in the Pacific from their perspective.  The fact is that you could spend all year commemorating various World War Two battles by watching films, or, you could actually try to relive every year of it in real time via the medium of film.  What could be more respectful than that?