Monday, March 24, 2003 | 8:44 a.m.
As the old saying goes, where there's a will, there's a way.
And in Hollywood, where there's a war, there's a potential film.
"War films have always been a popular subject since the dawn of cinema," Tim Dirks, webmaster of filmsite.org, said in a recent e-mail interview. "Most films glorify war or at least glamorize it although some of the most powerful war films have taken an anti-war stance."
A 54-year-old amateur film buff in the Bay Area, Dirks said he has spent nearly 35 years watching and studying movies. He created his website nearly seven years ago as "an educational, inspiring resource."
While he acknowledges war films are not his favorite genre, nonetheless Dirks has chronicled the evolution of the war movies in exhaustive detail on the site.
The first war film to be documented was a one-reel, 90-second propagandist effort, "Tearing Down the Spanish Flag." Produced in 1898, the year the war was waged, the fictional film portrayed a reconstructed version of the seizure of a Spanish government installation in Havana by U.S. Army troops, who removed the Spanish flag replacing it with the American Flag.
Also, both the first and third Best Picture winners were war films: 1927's "Wings" and 1930's "All Quiet on the Western Front," which has the distinction of being the first major anti-war film of the sound era.
War films fell out of favor with the public in the '30s, as the an increasing sentiment of political isolationism swept through the country.
As the decade wore on, Hollywood responded by making fewer and fewer war films. And those that were produced, Dirks said, "were action-adventure features with caricatures of fearsome Germans and Japanese, and clean-living, all-American soldiers."
Then the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor and the medium changed.
"Once the war began the U.S. film industry bolstered American support by churning out many war-themed movies," Dirks said. "Most of the films were propaganda depicting the U.S. entry into the war as a noble cause, but some displayed the human side as well."
Some of the more substantive war movies dealt with the homefront ("The Human Comedy" and "Since You Went Away"), while others were known for their realistic portrayal of the war ("Wake Island"). A few depicted the effects of the war on returning veterans ("The Best Years of Our Lives").
There were even rousing musicals, such as "Yankee Doodle Dandy," starring James Cagney as Broadway showman George M. Cohan, for which he won a Best Actor Oscar.
With the patriotic fervor at an all-time high, almost any film involving the war effort proved popular. And it has remained that way. World War II is easily the most popular war for Hollywood, in large part because of its lack of political complications and clear-cut villains.
In 1998 alone there were three highly popular World War II films, all of which were nominated for Best Picture:
"Life is Beautiful," Italian filmmaker Roberto Benigni's sweetly comic movie set in a concentration camp; "The Thin Red Line," acclaimed director Terrence Malik's first movie in 25 years, itself a remake of the 1964 film; and "Saving Private Ryan," director Steven Spielberg's gripping tribute to the D-Day invasion.
The '90s also produced Spielberg's Holocaust epic, "Schindler's List." Voted No. 9 on the American Film Institute's list of 100 greatest U.S. films, "Schindler's List" also won seven Oscars, including Best Picture and Best Director.
Other recent WWII films, however, have not received such acclaim, including "Enemy at the Gates" in 2001, "Hart's War" in 2002 and the critically maligned "Pearl Harbor," from 2001.
"For the most part, these are action films disguised as war films with big stars and dazzling special effects during war sequences ... they could use more talented scriptwriters and more complex characterizations and acting performances," Dirks said. "And there has been the tendency to modify the war-historical events in order to fit the story into the Hollywood mold of war films to tell a story of heroic courage, or to praise Americanism under fire, etc., and make a commercially viable film."
The ignored war
As popular as World War II has been with Hollywood, studios have looked less favorably toward the other major U.S. conflicts of the 20th century.
During the '50s, for example, filmmakers largely ignored the Korean War in favor of more analytical films from earlier wars.
These treatise ranged from Stanley Kubrick's anti-war drama, "Paths of Glory," which was set in both the trenches of World War I and the courtroom; to an intense character study, "Bridge on the River Kwai," which involved British POWs forced to build a bridge for their Japanese captors.
Of the few movies set during the Korean War, many had a distinctly anti-war sentiment.
"Pork Chop Hill," from 1959, starred Gregory Peck as an army lieutenant who, in a no-win situation, is ordered to take his platoon on an assault of a heavily fortified hill that is of little to no strategic importance.
And in 1970 Robert Altman released his black-comedy masterpiece, "M*A*S*H," which, while set in Korea, was clearly expressing the views of those frustrated with the escalating war in Vietnam.
A mobile army surgical hospital in Korea was also about as close as Hollywood wished to come to Vietnam.
With student-led protests around the nation, filmmakers chose to mostly avoid the Vietnam War in the '60s and much of the '70s.
Instead, studios turned to the safer and more comfortable confines of World War II for its stories with both epics ("The Longest Day," "Patton," "Midway") and buddy films ("The Guns of Navarone," "The Dirty Dozen," "The Great Escape").
One notable exception to the moratorium on Vietnam films was John Wayne's "The Green Berets." Released in 1968, Dirks called the Vietnam War movie "a jingoistic, heavy-handed, gung-ho action film."
"Hands down, one of the worst war films," Dirks said.
It wasn't until the Vietnam War ended on April 29, 1975, with the final withdrawal of U.S. troops from Saigon, that Hollywood began to accurately focus on the war and its effect on the soldiers, both in 1978's "Coming Home" and "The Deer Hunter," and "Apocalypse Now" a year later.
"After the Vietnam War was over, the film industry released films of greater substance and violence on the subject of Vietnam, and realistically examined the disturbing effects of the war," Dirks said.
By the mid-'80s, though, the careful examination of Vietnam had been replaced by feel-good action films, most notably the "Rambo" series starring Sylvester Stallone.
"Sylvester Stallone provided a superhero, self-righteously portrayed as a revenge-seeking, brooding ex-Green Beret Vietnam veteran named John Rambo who battled against a variety of enemies and provided a shallow commentary on the real U.S. conflict in Vietnam," Dirks said.
The films were immensely popular, creating a wave of pro-military films: "Iron Eagle," "Top Gun" and "Missing in Action," among others.
But it was a Vietnam vet-turned-filmmaker, Oliver Stone, who provided a new viewpoint on war with "Platoon" in 1986.
Writer-director Stone's semi-autobiographical masterpiece took neither a pro- or anti-war stance, instead offering an ultra-realistic soldier's view of the balmy battlefields of Vietnam. It also made a star out of actor Charlie Sheen.
This led to a series of gritty Vietnam War movies, including Kubrick's "Full Metal Jacket" (1987), "Hamburger Hill" (1987), Brian DePalma's "Casualties of War" (1989), and "We Were Soldiers" (2002).
Stone himself would return to the war twice more as part of his Vietnam "trilogy": "Born on the Fourth of July" in 1989 and "Heaven and Earth" in 1993.
Other war films
In its increasing reliance on wars as a backdrop to a good story, Hollywood has explored beyond the four major U.S. conflicts of the 20th century.
There have been movies centered on the 1983 invasion of Grenada ("Heartbreak Ridge") and 1991's Desert Storm ("Courage Under Fire" and "Three Kings"), along with military actions gone awry in war-torn Bosnia ("Behind Enemy Lines") and Somalia ("Black Hawk Down").
And it's probably only a matter of time before Hollywood adapts a movie about the current war against Iraq.
But don't look for "Operation Iraqi Freedom" anytime soon in theaters. Dirks said it's far too early for studios to consider a movie based on the ongoing conflict.
"Remember that only recently, after Sept. 11, films that realistically portrayed terrorism, such as 'Collateral Damage' in 2002, were postponed and delayed in release -- and then did poorly at the box office.
"It appears that American audiences do not want realistic war dramas -- war is the ultimate 'reality TV' -- at the moment. They may want to go to the movies to escape, but not to be reminded of the war effort."
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