The Sunday Times (London)
May 18, 1997, Sunday
Back to the front
Stephen Amidon
Hollywood is going into battle, armed with a second world war rifle, not a light sabre. And suddenly there’s room for a new generation of old-style heroes, says STEPHEN AMIDON.The second world war ended late for Hollywood. Like a squad of Japanese marines hiding out for decades in the jungle, the film industry’s commanders refused to give up the fight until the summer of 1977, with the release of A Bridge Too Far, Sir Richard Attenborough’s ill-fated epic about the allied invasion of Holland. Finally, after four decades, the greatest of all wars had lost its celluloid appeal, and Attenborough’s big-budget, star-studded film suffered a defeat eerily similar to that of the heroic paratroopers it set out to depict. The audience supply-lines had been cut; the creative ammunition had run out.
Before that, the war movie rivalled the western and the gangster film as cinema’s most beloved and most profitable genre. In the first wave of second world war films to hit the beach, Hollywood served as a sort of adjunct to the allied imagination, churning out stories that cemented the public’s moral certitude about the justice of the conflict, while paying homage to those who served. These ranged from overtly propagandist vehicles cranked out in the heady final days of the war to the more artistically accomplished efforts appearing somewhat later, such as Clark Gable’s Command Decision (1948), Gregory Peck’s Twelve o’Clock High (1949) and John Wayne’s prototypical Sands of Iwo Jima (1949). In nearly all of these films, unflinching patriotism, selfless camaraderie and stoic bravery (even among those who stayed at home) were posited as absolute values whose possible existence in the enemy was never really entertained.As the war grew more distant, Hollywood’s treatment of it began to change. The same heroic values were still intact, but the vividly human dimension was gradually sacrificed for an epic scale that often dwarfed the individual. The Longest Day (1962), Battle of the Bulge (1965) and Battle of Britain (1969) saw the war as being a huge historical pageant rather than an immediately personal drama. The vivid intimacy of the earlier efforts was lost. Indeed, this widening of the screen often led to the outright kitsch of The Dirty Dozen (1967) and Kelly’s Heroes (1970). By the time of Attenborough’s debacle, this screen inflation had blown the genre right off the screen. Hollywood had said everything it could about the second world war.
Or so it seemed. Two decades later, a sort of cinematic break-out is underway. A regiment of films dealing with that conflict is now in development, involving some of the industry’s biggest names. Tom Hanks, fresh from his successes as an idiot and an astronaut, is scheduled to star in Steven Spielberg’s Saving Pvt Ryan. Tom Cruise, meanwhile, will appear in Earth, Wings and Fire, the story of the US army’s celebrated Flying Tiger fighter pilots. Brad Pitt has signed up for the Coen brothers’ adaptation of James Dickey’s astonishing and undervalued novel To the White Sea, which tells the story of a bomber pilot’s attempts to escape Japan after his plane is shot down. Bruce Willis looks set to appear in the inevitable big-screen adaptation of the television series Combat!, while the Austrian-born Arnold Schwarzenegger has shown interest in portraying a German officer who shields a group of allied PoWs from retribution, in With Wings as Eagles. Perhaps most fascinating of all is the return of the enigmatic Terrence Malick, director of Badlands and Days of Heaven, with his adaptation of Jack Jones’s epic novel The Thin Red Line, his first film in nearly 20 years.
The renaissance of GI drama is all the more surprising considering just how thoroughly the second world war went out of vogue in the 1970s, a process fuelled by the fact that the filmgoing public had just experienced an event that utterly changed its expectations of what a war film should be: Vietnam. That messy “police action”, beamed directly into the living rooms of America’s cinemagoers via television, taught audiences to see war as a morally ambiguous, thoroughly dispirit-ing undertaking. The urgently patriotic, relentlessly black and white ethos that had pervaded Hollywood’s second world war films had been replaced by audience expectations coloured 100 different shades of grey.
By the time the Vietnamese war had sunk into the American psyche, even films that still chose the second world war as their subject, such as Patton (1970) and Catch-22 (1970), were ambivalent about both the war and its heroes. Straightforward action pictures, meanwhile, tended to display an even-handedness toward the enemy unthinkable a generation earlier. Tora! Tora! Tora! (1970), for instance, humanised and even, at moments, romanticised the Japanese pilots who nearly destroyed America’s Pacific Fleet at Pearl Harbor. The days of John Wayne leading a ragtag platoon to victory against a faceless, utterly evil foe were gone, a truth underlined by the failure of the Duke’s The Green Berets (1968), which bombed miserably in its attempts to graft the values of WWII films onto the Vietnamese debacle.
So it is little surprise that by the time the American embassy in Saigon was evacuated in 1975, the desire to make films about the second world war had just about evaporated. With a public demand that celluloid campaigns be fraught with moral ambiguity, the great crusade against Nazism and the Rising Sun soon vanished from the American filmgoer’s imagination. In fiction, meanwhile, a similar process was occurring, with the high seriousness and great passion of such immediately post-war literature as Norman Mailer’s The Naked and the Dead (1948), John Hersey’s Hiroshima (1946) and Jack Jones’s From Here to Eternity (1950) giving way to the extravagant and alienating comic posturings of Joseph Heller’s Catch-22 (1961) and Thomas Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow (1973).
On American television, meanwhile, once-popular war programmes were disappearing as fast as German regiments in the spring of 1945. Where, just a few years earlier, programmes such as Combat! and The Rat Patrol had won huge network audiences, by the 1970s the nation’s couch potatoes, having overdosed on shaky hand-held news shots of atrocities and military confusion on the other side of the globe, wanted nothing to do with GIs. The purge filtered to the outermost reaches of popular culture, with comic books such as Sgt Rock dropping in circulation, while the famous GI Joe doll, staple of American boyhood under Eisenhower and Kennedy, became distinctly unfashionable.
The two decades that followed saw the American war film undergo a remarkable transformation. The year after Field Marshal Attenborough was so comprehensively routed, Hal Ashby won critical acclaim and a big box office with Coming Home, the story of two harrowed Vietnam veterans and the woman they loved. This was followed closely by Francis Ford Coppola’s remarkable and exhausting Apocalypse Now (1979), which looked and sounded like a big-budget war film, but was actually, in its heart of darkness, something nihilistically new. These pictures struck a collective chord that continued to sound throughout the following decade, reaching a crescendo in 1986 with Oliver Stone’s Platoon. Throughout this time, films such as Michael Cimino’s The Deer Hunter (1978), Stanley Kubrick’s Full Metal Jacket (1987) and Stone’s Born on the Fourth of July (1989) were intent on demonstrating that while individual soldiers might be capable of nobility and heroism, war itself was corrupt and soul-destroying. And those occasional films made during this period that dealt with the second world war, such as Spielberg’s Empire of the Sun (1987), seemed to have a lot more to do with the spirit of Khe Sanh than Iwo Jima. Occasional traditionalist efforts, such as Memphis Belle (1990), however well made, seemed like little more than exercises in nostalgia. Attempts to romanticise war, meanwhile, were demoted to the mindless depths populated by Chuck Norris smash-ups and Sylvester Stallone revenge fantasies.
What accounts for the re-emergence of a second world war cinema? Why, when it seemed that Hollywood’s take on war films would preclude stories dealing with that most black and white of conflicts, are its biggest names suddenly answering the call? The most obvious reason may be that the Vietnam era is now well and truly over. With the victory over Saddam and the end of the cold war – that mutant offspring of VE-day – American film-makers are no longer faced with the necessity of mirroring a wounded, fractured national psyche. Given this, the conventional dichotomies of the second world war provide a much more tempting canvas to work upon. As Adam Merims, a producer developing a second world war project, points out: “In a post-cold-war era where there are no real antagonists, second world war films offer politically correct enemies.”
This yearning for a simpler world is echoed by the producer Michael Flynn: “With the exception of the Gulf war, it’s almost 30 years since Americans fought in a war, so the rite of passage that young American men went through doesn’t happen now. Perhaps Hollywood is providing a fictional replacement – virtual war, virtual heroism.”
Hollywood’s recruitment of the GI comes at a moment when it is fresh out of heroes. In the post-Vietnam era, the American film industry fostered male stars whose appeal was primarily countercultural. Jon Voight might appear as a soldier, and a very heroic one at that, though his battles were fought against paralysis and national indifference, not a foreign army. Instead of charging machine-gun nests, he chained his wheelchair to the gates of a military base to fight for peace. Similarly, Robert De Niro’s spell in military fatigues saw him as a deeply flawed soldier whose stoicism and undeniably heroic actions masked a horribly conflicted soul. Neither these actors nor their contemporaries were willing to pick up the flag once carried by John Wayne or Gary Cooper. In a war that ended in ignominious defeat, their heroes could be nothing other than beautiful losers.
The next generation carries no such countercultural baggage. Tom Cruise may have gained stature and maturity by playing the disabled veteran Ron Kovic in Born on the Fourth of July, but subsequent roles have proven him to be more Audie Murphy than Jon Voight. Similarly, Willis’s wisecracking loner persona is more suited to playing a D-day sergeant than an embittered grunt torching a Mekong village. And Tom Hanks has second world war written all over him – never more so than when he was slogging through Vietnamese rice paddies in Forrest Gump. For all these charming grinners, the khaki of the US army circa 1943 fits a lot more comfortably than that issued in 1967.
The death of the cowboy as a viable persona for Hollywood‘s A-list actors means there is no archetype left that allows latter-day Coopers, Waynes and Fondas to act with exemplary courage and yet remain regular guys. Of late, any actor wanting to be a hero has, more often than not, found himself playing second fiddle to a piece of technology in a distant precinct of space or the future. Acts of great bravery have become more and more divorced from common experience. Everyday valour, in which an average Joe armed with little more than his guts and wits does battle with an intractable foe, is in danger of becoming a thing of the past.
The rebirth of the screen GI will provide the type of protagonist who might be able to turn A-list stars into deathless icons. Bruce Willis might be able to blow up skyscrapers and travel through time, but he will never rival Cooper until he walks down main street armed with nothing more than a six-shooter, never measure up to the Duke until he storms the machine-gun nest with only a carbine. Playing a GI will allow him and his peers the chance to be heroes on a human scale.
Of course, there is always the possibility that Hollywood might surprise us, using values digested during the Vietnam era as a means for reimagining the earlier conflict. After all, the Coen brothers’ transcendently ironic sensibility seems hardly likely to create rehashed John Wayne films, while Malick, whose Badlands was a study in violence and nihilism, should also prove to be something of a loose howitzer. And Spielberg, with both Empire of the Sun and Schindler’s List, has already proved himself capable of depicting the second world war’s less celebratory aspects. Then there is the potentially embarrassing land mine inherent in doing any story about the second world war in an era when both Germany and Japan have huge cultural and financial stakes in America, with Japan literally owning a significant segment of Hollywood. The cardboard villainy of Curt Jurgens and Peter Lorre might be hard to come by in a film directed by Roland Emmerich and financed by Sony.
Still, it is hard to believe that the net result of this new wave of second world war films will be anything but more of the same – only, this time, with the latest technology. After all, there is no money in being revisionist about a war you have won. After two decades of showing the home team lose, Hollywood seems ready to back the winners again. Moviegoers, after all, will never grow weary of war – as long as they don’t have to go too long without a victory.
