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Ricochet Movie Fight Club: Week 15
According to Miffed White Male, the quintessential American movie was The Right Stuff. Enough of you agreed to give him the win, and the right to ask: What’s the most entertaining movie set during WWII?
The Rules:
- Post your answer as a comment. Make it clear that this is your official answer, one per member.
- Defend your answer in the comments and fight it out with other Ricochet member answers for the rest of the week.
- Whoever gets the most likes on their official answer comment (and only that comment) by Friday night wins the fight.
- The winner gets the honor of posting the next question on Saturday.
- In the case of a tie, the member who posted the question will decide the winner.
Notes:
- Only movies will qualify (no TV shows) however films that air on television (BBC films, a stand-alone mini-series) will qualify.
- Your answer can be as off-the-wall or controversial as you’d like. It will be up to you to defend it and win people to your side.
- Fight it out.
The Lives of Others.
Next.
My apologies. I was voting for his choice.
Tim
No one is going to pick 1941? My troll powers aren’t strong enough to defend a pick like that. Although, I saw it in high school and remember it being funny. At least not as bad as all the hate it receives. Could be that not-yet-fully-formed teenage brain that thought it was good.
I’m going in a completely different direction. I nominate “Father Goose.” If you’ve never seen it, highly recommended. For starters….Cary Grant. Co-starring Leslie Caron. Sweet, funny, and yes, entertaining!
Final answer.
Finally, some traction! I’m coming for you Arahant. You too, Miffed.
You may think so. 😉
Favorite ww2 movie – “Sink the Bismarck”. 1960 movie based on the May 27, 1941 sinking of the Bismarck by the British Navy. Outstanding acting. “Sink the Bismarck” is available at Amazon for renting/dvd purchase. Youtube has a poor image quality copy for free viewing.
One of my guilty pleasures.
Anachronisms aside, I choose Kelly’s Heroes as my fave.
Then like when it was first mentioned by Sisyphus on page one, if you haven’t already.
Those are all good, but 12 O’Clock High is probably the greatest movie of all time, regardless of genre. It’s a war movie that isn’t anti-war, and I find anti-war movies very tiresome.
Entertaining doesn’t imply comedy. But I get your point for your perspective.
Not even close. What was missing in that movie was the terror and it was preposterous that one man would have had so much freedom to surveil without being supervised. I found it too pollyannaish.
Cold war movie might be “The Spy Who Came in From the Cold.” I watched it for the first time a month or two ago and really liked it.
No worries. And I’m a she (the name is kind of gender neutral, you’re not the first person to have made that mistake).
That reminds me of a discussion I had with one of my professors last year. He taught my 100 level IR module, but invited anyone who wished to join his master’s class on small war during the Thursday night movie and discourse classes. Most of the movies, by the nature of the class, were about conflicts in colonial or immediately post-colonial settings, and there was a lot of talk about paternalism, racism, etc. But, when we were talking about some anti-Vietnam war movie (can’t remember which one), the point was made that it was really no better than any of the other, more straightforward/hurrah films, because it was just using a colonial setting as a place for a Western man to realize the wrongness of the conflict he was fighting, without any real focus on the hardships or right and wrong for the actual Vietnamese people. So not only are a lot of those explicitly anti-war movies tiresome, but a good number feed into the same tropes that they try to criticize is more nuanced or positive portrayals of war.
Oh no. I’ve been saving it, because I really like old war movies and old Hollywood (especially Rickles and Eastwood), but maybe I’ll just skip it altogether.
I got the impression, from having done some WWII adjacent stuff in college and having read a fair amount of books about it, that Savage probably would have been treated as kindly as he was in the movie when he was unable in fly in real life. What you wrote about Arthur Harris reminds me of a Noel Coward song, Don’t Lets Be Beastly to the Germans; it was a very sharp retort to some in England who started to feel undue sympathy for the Nazis near the end of the war. In the sense of entertaining, I meant more that it keeps one riveted to the screen and wanting more, and gives a range of emotions, but I do think that if the film lacked a lot of the humor and humanity that it has in the interactions between the senior officers, and just focused on the conflict and the effect it had on the soldiers, it wouldn’t be anywhere near as watchable. Thanks, I’m glad you like them.
Think of the movie as a parody instead of a serious WW2 flick . . .
And the movie had more stars than the Milky Way . . .
For me, the word “entertaining” did imply, or at least prioritized, comedy.
I really enjoyed Cross of Iron but for watching again and again it has to be Where Eagles Dare.
I am compelled to vote for Twelve O’Clock High because my wife’s great uncle played Gen. Pritchard.
Just as well because that movie is part of the pantheon of my favorite WWII pics from which it is near impossible to choose:
Longest Day
Patton
A Bridge Too Far
Midway (1976)
I loathe the Donald Sutherland 1960s hippie character in Kelly’s Heroes. It was so grossly anachronistic as to spoil the movie, though not as anachronistically stupid as Inglourious Basterds in which the American actors thought they were in a cartoon satire while the European leads played it straight and vastly better.
Casablanca is in a class by itself.
To me “entertaining” would preclude “Midway.” It was very accurate, but not as entertaining.
I’m surprised no one has named “Saving Private Ryan,” It doesn’t get my vote, but it was very popular.
You can vote for more than one.
I’m not.
One of the reasons I worded the question as “most entertaining” instead of “best” was to preclude movies like Schindler’s list and Saving Private Ryan.
There’s a lot to be said for those movies. “entertaining” isn’t one of them.
Award winning Letters from Iwo Jima. The story from the Japanese side directed by Clint Eastwood. The only American war film that truthfully depicts Japanese society during the time of the war and eschews the use of stereotypes. The companion piece to this movie, Flags of Our Fathers, tells the same story by the same director from the American side along with the sometimes tragic fate of the men who raised the flag on Iwo Jima.
I’ll chime in with The Best Years of Our Lives.
It would be The Best Movie in several categories, and, even though it takes place just after the war, sometimes you have to see what happened after to understand what it was like during.
Yes, the Donald Sutherland character is a real drop out character with long hair and a beard who is called Oddball and who chastises
Murray SlaughterCaptain StubbingMoriarty for telling him the unvarnished truth, chastising him for making “negative waves”. Watching it today, Oddball’s bullying of Moriarty for trading in truth is a perfect shot through the hearts of Schiff, Pelosi, Durkan, Kimberly Gardner, and, yes, the orange man when, for instance, he talks about the attendance at his inauguration.The motivation in Kelly’s Heroes is sheer avarice, and the running joke is that these undisciplined, unled, and much abused cogs in the machinery of the US Army earning $50 a month ($728.50 adjusted for inflation) suddenly become the most effective fighting force in the theater when galvanized by a bit of “easy” money. Was Oddball written to resonate with a 1970 audience? Yes. Was he an idolization of a hippy, a Captain Woodstock? Watch Clint Eastwood’s Kelly roll his eyes as he tries mightily to funnel Oddball into productive avenues. In fact, I challenge you to find one character in the film that has a nice thing to say about Oddball beyond how useful his tanks could be.
Given how much wealth disappeared as armies rolled back and forth across Europe, Kelly’s Heroes addresses, as fiction, an element of the war that the preceding 35 years of heroic epics and human interest stories piously underserved. It is a heist movie set in a war that was remarkable for its many, many heists.
Some fun nominations here. I’ll toss this one in – so late it hasn’t got a prayer. But – it is truly entertaining – to the point of slapstick comedy: What Did You Do in the War, Daddy?
Have you seen this one? It’s been years, but it’s really funny.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/When_Willie_Comes_Marching_Home