5. The Great Dictator (Charles Chaplin, 1940)
War is not a human condition
It all started in New York Museum of Modern Art, in the showing of Nazi propaganda film “Triumph of the Will” by Leni Riefenstahl. Rene Clair was horrified by the power of a masterly directed film and was shouting that it should be banned. Chaplin was sitting in a corner laughing. An idea had just crossed his mind.
It was 1937 and few people around the world suspected where Hitler and the Nazi party were headed. Chaplin did. And he went on to make his first sound movie, more than a decade after the end of the silent era. Shocked by what had seeped out of Germany about the treatment of Jews, he wrote, directed and played a political satire about Hynkel, the dictator of Tomainia, on the losing pαrt of World War I, who sets off to conquer the world.
Chaplin plays also the role of a Jewish barber who fought and got wounded in World War I and, when he goes back to the ghetto, he knows nothing about the pogroms against the Jews. He rents a room, works in a barber shop, falls in love with the neighbor, and plays hide and seek with the Nazis as he used to do with policemen in his earlier films; he is still the Tramp.
Chaplin managed sound with virtuosity; he even substituted image for sound, during a battle where, after a bomb explosion, the little barber walks around calling his folks and we hear sound but we see no picture. The body language of the silent films is still present, as, for example, in the ballet scene where the dictator dances with a balloon in the form of the globe.
However, what remains etched in our minds is the final speech where the barber, who is mistaken for Hynkel, addresses a huge crowd with a deeply emotional humanitarian speech that disturbed many by its honesty and truth. Here are the ending words:
“Let us fight to free the world – to do away with national barriers – to do away with greed, with hate and intolerance. Let us fight for a world of reason, a world where science and progress will lead to all men’s happiness. Soldiers! in the name of democracy, let us all unite!”
4. Apocalypse Now (Francis Ford Coppola, 1979)
War reigns by horror
It’s not another movie about Vietnam. It’s not even an anti-war movie in its strict sense. It’s a revelation. Francis Ford Coppola deliberately uses the Greek word ‘apocalypse’ that refers to the text of John the Evangelist to give the message: it is a journey deep into the war, the jungle, the limits of human power.
Based on a free adaptation of Conrad’s “Heart of Darkness” by Coppola and released only a few years after the end of Vietnam War, maybe the most ‘shameful’ of all the wars, this movie follows the journey of Captain Willard who, together with a small team of soldiers, is commissioned to penetrate the Vietnamese jungle on the border with Cambodia to assassinate Colonel Walter Kurtz, a renegade who is now conducting a war of his own. Ιt’s a journey to the end, as the song from The Doors indicates in the opening.
The action scenes are apocalyptic. The helicopters, the great Iron Monsters of the Evangelist, fly through the orange flames of Napalms and bombard camps and schools while their loudspeakers are playing “Ride of the Valkyries” (“I love the smell of Napalm in the morning”). Deprived soldiers rush to the call girls who have descended on a stage deep in the jungle from helicopters to entertain the Army and then fight with each other. Willard’s crew rides Nong River by speedboat listening to the latest rock successes and skiing as if they were on holiday.
As they go up the river, the jungle becomes dense, darker, more threatening. The enemy is everywhere and does not seem anywhere. Willard loses his men one by one and, finally, he faces the Colonel and his loyal army of natives. Is the Colonel as crazy as described, or, having experienced the paranoia and horror of war, having seen so many atrocities, his thoughts on ethics have completely changed? The monologue from Kurtz, played by Marlon Brando, that concludes the movie, is one of the most impressive in cinema history.
3. Paths of Glory (Stanley Kubrick, 1957)
There is no justice in war
This is the second movie by Stanley Kubrick on this list. It seems that the cinema genius loves to hate war. It is based on a novel Kubrick had read as an adolescent. Its theatrical release was a flop, but nevertheless, Kubrick wanted to make it into a movie and Kirk Douglas agreed to it, knowing both that it wouldn’t stand many chances with the box office.
It is the true story of an incident during World War I, in the trenches of the French – German frontline. As time drags and there is little advancement but lot of casualties, General Georges Boulard orders General Paul Mireau to lead an attack to capture a key position occupied by the Germans. Both generals want a victory for their own fame and glory, whereas Colonel Dax, who has to execute the orders knowing that there is very little chance of success, cares about victory as much as he cares about the lives of his subordinates.
When the soldiers realize that they are sent to clear death, they retreat and Mireau orders the artillery to shoot them and send them back to battle. As artillery refuses to do so, General Mireau, infuriated by the failure of the operation, decides to court-martial three soldiers at random. Dax, feeling the injustice towards the soldiers, assumes their defense.
A cruel Grande Illusion, “Paths of Glory” leaves no doubt as to whom the wars serve. No noble aristocracy, only people with power who use other people, poor people, the soldiers in World War I trenches, as pawns to achieve their personal ambitions.
2. The Burmese Harp (Kon Ichikawa, 1956)
There is so much death in war
World War II is probably the densest historical time in human history. Millions of everyday people’s stories all over the planet offered an excellent opportunity for cinema, the new form of art that could disperse the meaning together with the image, to count wounds and record most aspects of this war.
This masterpiece, written and filmed by the Japanese just a few years after their overwhelming defeat by the Americans, takes place in a remote corner, in an almost ‘dead’ historical time.
In 1945, a small unit of Japanese soldiers roams in Burma, a British colony at that time. It is a strange military unit: the captain is a musician, and Mitsushima, the lookout, alerts his fellow guards with coded music he plays with his harp. As they prepare for another battle with the English troops in a village, the latter inform them that Japan has capitulated, the war is over and they have to surrender.
Before leaving for the prisoners’ camp, the English officer asks them to send a soldier to another Japanese unit and convince them to surrender. Mitsushima goes there but he cannot change the opinion of his compatriots, who consider surrender a disgrace. The English bomb their dyke and Mitsushima wakes up buried amongst a bunch of corpses. The experience of blood and slaughter, of so many unburied bodies, haunts him and prevents his return to his companions. He walks around Burma, the country of Buddha, as a monk, gathering and burying the scattered members of the people who died there.
It really requires a lot of courage for the Japanese to face this painful part of their modern history. And this film does it in a simple, honest and poetic way. The director looks steadily at the soldiers who have to suffer a humiliating surrender and understands both reactions: that of wrath and the other of those who prefer to think about tomorrow. And the third one, the lonely road of Mitsushima who stays on the battlefield, transforms it into the terrain of his personal battle with death and meaningless loss: “I will stay here to bury the dead.” At the top of anti-war movies, this is an elegy dedicated to life, death, memory and love.
1. Johnny Got His Gun (Dalton Trumbo, 1971)
War simply destroys everything
Dalton Trumbo was an eminent Hollywood script writer who was blacklisted, lost his job and served some months in a federal prison as a result of his denial to testify in front of the House Committee of Un-American Activities. Through his life, whether or not he was being blacklisted, he wrote plenty of marvelous screenplays, winning two Oscars. It was only once that he stood behind the camera, and that was to direct his own novel, “Johnny Got His Gun,” an anti-war lyrical film like no other.
Johnny, a soldier in World War I, is seriously injured by a fragment of a shell on the last day of war. His fate is even worse than death: he loses all his limbs and his face, he’s deaf and blind, left only with his brain, his lungs, his heart and his penis functioning. He is lying in a military hospital bed, lost in his memories, while doctors and marshals dispute his fate. His mind is working in finding a way to communicate with them and tell them his will: he wants them to kill him or to show him around as an attraction for people to understand what war means.
Balancing between the screening of Johnny’s labyrinth of thoughts; snatches from his past life; sweet moments with his girlfriend; imaginary dialogues with his father and his instructor, Christ; the atrocious, dead-end reality of the hospital, with the military men, the doctors, the sympathetic nurse and the “it’s not God’s but men’s fault” priest moving slowly around the monstrously mutilated body, the very idea of identifying with the protagonist is so shocking that it’s impossible to watch the movie twice.
It came to surface when rock group Metallica used scenes of the film in their video clip for the song of “One,” 13 years after Trumbo’s death. Johnny’s dialogue with Christ is written by Luis Bunuel.
Honorable Mentions: The Thin Red Line, The Bridge of River Kwai, The Cranes Are Flying, Full Metal Jacket, The Tin Drum, Au revoir les enfants, Casualties of War, Forbidden Games, The Great Escape, The Big Parade, Okraina, Gallipoli, Broken Lulaby, War Horse, Breaker Morant.
Author Bio: Regina Zervou is cultural sociologist who took some fifteen years to move from carnival and popular culture studies to cinema theory. An afficionado of movies since she was twelve, she loves the way reality and ‘surreality’ is depicted on the screen. When not watching movies, she loves walking the dogs, swimming, cooking for her children or traveling someplace in Africa or South America to take some pictures.