The Big Screen (31 page)

On its first run, through 1943,
Casablanca
had rentals of $3.05 million. But in 1942, for Paramount,
The Road to Morocco
brought in $4.0 million. You will say there is no comparison: the Hope and Crosby picture is a silly comedy, whereas
Casablanca
is played in earnest. Maybe they're closer than anyone thought in 1942, and let us remember that the number one box office attraction in the war years, and a man who endangered his own health by going to remote and dangerous places to entertain the troops, was Bob Hope.

The sight of movie celebrities in uniform, or on the road with the USO, became common. Jack Warner and Darryl Zanuck persuaded themselves into being honorary “colonels.” Bette Davis helped organize the Hollywood Canteen. Gable put on an air force uniform and missed four years of moviemaking. Jimmy Stewart flew on twenty bomber missions and had a nervous breakdown as a result. David Selznick was mortified that no service would risk taking him, so he wrote and produced his home front movie,
Since You Went Away
, in which Claudette Colbert, Jennifer Jones, and Shirley Temple are women left at home, doing their bit, but really doing far too little for 172 minutes. It's a film from the heart, lovingly made and unquestionably respectful of its subject, but then real-life melodrama intruded. In the movie, Ms. Jones has a soldier sweetheart going off to be killed. He was played by Robert Walker (Mr. Jones in life). Behind the scenes, Selznick was having an intense affair with Jones that would ruin both their marriages. In truth, that was a more interesting scenario than
Since You Went Away.

At the end of the war, the realities of combat and service crept onto the screen—or if not quite the realities, then the smooth version of them.
The Story of G.I. Joe
(1945; by William Wellman, an air force veteran from the first war) had Burgess Meredith as war reporter Ernie Pyle, and Robert Mitchum at his best as a fatalistic soldier.
A Walk in the Sun
(1945) was one of the first dogged tributes to the foot soldier. And John Ford's
They Were Expendable
(1945) was a melancholy account of the holding action in the Pacific as MacArthur withdrew. It was based on real figures, and it stressed how Ford was always going to be more moved by defeat than victory. Of course, this feature film grew out of Ford's actual service making documentaries.

A group of the guys, the manly directors, did the same sort of thing. Ford made
The Battle of Midway
(1942) and
December 7th
(1943). Frank Capra and Anatole Litvak did a series of documentaries, and John Huston made wartime reports and
Let There Be Light
(1946), the first halfway-candid account of shellshock, breakdown, and fear and the mess such things made of the real guys who were trying to be like John Garfield (
Pride of the Marines
, 1945) or Errol Flynn (
Objective, Burma!
, 1945). Five years later, John Wayne was the marine sergeant in
Sands of Iwo Jima
(1949), as if to say he knew what hell was like. Yet the Duke had carefully missed the war.

Once the war was over, a deluge of war films began. In the bad years, Britain had made a series of responsible documentaries and feature films under the shadow of the real thing:
In Which We Serve
,
The Way to the Stars
(scripted by Terence Rattigan, based on his play
Flare Path
),
The Way Ahead
. There was a looseness in such films, as if to suggest the real untidiness of war. But secure in victory, the stiff upper lip turned to timber as the British film business sought out every positive incident from the war:
Morning Departure
(1950),
The Wooden Horse
(1950),
The Cruel Sea
(1953),
The Dam Busters
(1955),
The Colditz Story
(1955),
Reach for the Sky
(1956),
Carve Her Name with Pride
(1958),
Ice Cold in Alex
(1958). It was to ambush that advancing column that David Lean made
The Bridge on the River Kwai
, about different kinds of duty and military preoccupation, in which Alec Guinness's colonel is recognizably a version of that husband, Fred, we met in
Brief Encounter
.

Whenever the British made group films about the war, team spirit got in the way. But there are lonely individuals worth remembering. What about Trevor Howard's brusque Calloway, the military policeman in
The Third Man
, and his gradual revelation that Harry Lime's boyish charm may mask real evil and plots to give drugs to children? There isn't another British film that catches the postwar European mood so well, not to mention the dirty smile on the face of Vienna. But Orson Welles was so seductive as Harry Lime that within a year of the film, he was playing Lime in a radio series where the black marketeer had become a hero.

Or remember Richard Burton's Leith in Nicholas Ray's
Bitter Victory
(1957), a film that has precise desert action, the tragedy of killing your own wounded as you try to save them, and the sense of courage and philosophy being lost in a sandstorm. There is Alec Guinness's George Smiley, a cold war fighter, to be sure, but a man who has seen his own faith and life erased by duty and its duplicities. Let me add another figure: Susan Traherne, the woman Meryl Streep plays in
Plenty
, adapted from David Hare's smoldering play, a young heroine of the resistance who nearly goes mad in the subsequent betrayal of so many wartime rules.

The wartime scenes in
Plenty
take place in France, and they involve a war of occupation. French cinema goes numb in the war years and comes back to life only with René Clément's
La Bataille du Rail
(1946), which is not that far removed from the spirit of Italian neorealism. For France, the war was a devastating experience, not just the rapid defeat of the French army and the subsequent insignificance of French leadership. The war is a matter of resistance and its opposites, degrees of collaboration or compromise that reached as far as such leading filmmakers as Arletty and Marcel Carné.

Over the years, a number of French films have observed the war years at home and found disturbing complexity. As early as 1947–48, in his debut film, Jean-Pierre Melville turned to
Le Silence de la Mer
(1949), Vercors's novel about a smothered love affair between a French girl and a German soldier posted to her village. Melville had served in the Resistance, but
Le Silence
is remembered for its fairness and its view of the German as a human being. Decades later, in
Army of Shadows
(1969), Melville would deliver one of the classic films about the Resistance, in which there was no room for a sympathetic German. Instead, it is a cruel war in which the men determine that they must execute one of their own, played by Simone Signoret. There is another good German in Alain Resnais's
Hiroshima Mon Amour
(1959), a war film and a peace film, and one of the first movies to grasp the international level of the conflict. There is also Bertrand Tavernier's
Safe Conduct
(2002), which concerns the film industry during the war years and benefits from Tavernier's research in that period.

There are two other films that must not be forgotten and which are both marked by the impact of war and its consequences. Joseph Losey's
Mr. Klein
(1976) concerns an art dealer in wartime Paris (played by the impassive but imperturbable Alain Delon). He is sure of himself and his tranquil life until he realizes there may be another Klein who is Jewish and who is being hunted.
Mr. Klein
is about paranoia and insecurity and the idea of doubling—almost as abstract things—but Losey knew how far those conditions, the modern terror, were a legacy of the war. Few countries suffered a more depleting self-exposure than France: to be occupied is a severe test and one that continues to help define America's innocence or inexperience.

The other unforgettable film is
A Man Escaped
(1956), by Robert Bresson. This is a film of hands, glances, bars, rope, sounds, and music. It is Bresson. But it is a war film, too, about a man who is being held by the German authorities and who faces execution. When he escapes finally, the effect is of sublimity—keyed to Mozart's C-minor mass. It is a spiritual release, and one of the least-flawed moments of glory in the French war film.

Alas, war films piled on that lacked Bresson's tact. Robert Aldrich's
The Dirty Dozen
(1967) was a big hit, but it did not bother to conceal its own exploitation of stereotypes, heroism, action, and brutality. This was all the sadder in that Aldrich had made an earlier film,
Attack!
(1956), filled with authentic anguish. But
The Dirty Dozen
was much more influential, and one can feel its ugly gusto behind
Inglourious Basterds
(2009), one of the first films that did not seem to understand what happened in the Second World War but took the crudest films as a matter of record. One day that reality will be offset, because there will be no one left alive who was alive in the war years. Already the firsthand experience of the Great War has passed on. In which case, who can say that the effective record of the Second will not depend on films as mediocre and complacent as
The Longest Day
(1962),
A Bridge Too Far
(1977),
The Guns of Navarone
(1961),
The Dirty Dozen
(1967), and
Patton
(1970)—instead of, say,
Bitter Victory
(1957), Anthony Mann's
Men in War
(1957), John Boorman's
Hell in the Pacific
(1968), or Bertolucci's
The Conformist
(1970), all of which are less known than the “blockbusters.”

Men in War
is the Korean War, but that film is so distilled a study of a platoon on patrol (with an unseen enemy) that it could be any war, anywhere. A larger issue arises with
The Conformist
(in which there is a political assassination—one of the most distressing murders on film), but Bertolucci's film mines the uneasy ground of what happened in Italy under fascism, and of the way weakness and ambition let tyranny thrive.

War is combat now; the cult of military hardware is married to film's code of special effects.
Saving Private Ryan
(1998) is unmistakably D-day (as if shot by Robert Capa), and the rifles made the correct noises. Whereas
The Deer Hunter
(1978) was a version of Vietnam vulnerable to charges of inaccuracy. The fact remains that both pictures see conflict isolated from politics. In this light, the scary immediacy of
Saving Private Ryan
is let down by Spielberg's muted but painfully proper political sensibility, while
The Deer Hunter
is colored by Michael Cimino's feeling of what a self-determined ordeal had done to America.

Saving Private Ryan
trusts that its audience will agree—yes, this was a just war, and like Ryan, we need to deserve its sacrifice. But
The Deer Hunter
is braver in that, only a few years after actual withdrawal, it says we should not have been there and were there only because of our ignorance and the way that fed bellicosity. This is where we can see how far war and its links to modern terror are not going away. For just as in, say,
The Best Years of Our Lives
as much as in
Saving Private Ryan
, no one thinks to say Americans should not be fighting, so many modern films are still driven by the history that treats war and film as inseparable. The virtue or energy in
Inglourious Basterds
is Tarantino's assurance that today the war cannot be contemplated without the song and slaughter of its movies—and the increasingly weird realization of how obedient, how accepting the public was then. War films today have yet to deal with the public's loss of faith in movies themselves, and the comical yet hideous notion of how tidily battle can be handled. How do we retain patriotism, or anything that carries the same conviction? How do we see combat except as a war game?

So war has become, on-screen, a metaphor for uncertainty and disorder. The magnificent lucidity of the battles in
Saving Private Ryan
is also youthful. How can anyone believe in such accuracy in shooting and tactics? The last battle in that film is wonderfully exciting, but its precision probably inspired some video games. Can we still believe in heroes and expertise in war? We know that war is confusion, panic, friendly fire, mistakes, and nothing fit for lucidity. It is just as Tolstoy said of the Battle of Borodino. Ridley Scott's
Black Hawk Down
, in which a high-tech American mission is disrupted by Mogadishu rabble, is a more honest combat film, and accurate in its explanation of America withdrawing from Somalia. We have lived long enough to see that the vaunted heroics of the war movie can be a disguise for our political ignorance and helplessness.

Beneath this growing chaos, we are more than ever haunted by the terror that started with the Nazis and the fearsome test between resistance and collaboration that emerged from the French experience of war. We go back to those stories because they are not settled yet, and we wonder if such issues will come again. In his old Germany, Billy Wilder in
A Foreign Affair
(1948) gazed down at the ruins of Berlin with the music playing “Isn't It Romantic?” That felt rueful, not superior. Very little known is
Der Verlorene
(1951), the film Peter Lorre went back to Germany to direct, in which he gives an agonized performance as a doctor who may have been involved in Nazi experiments. That is only a few years before
Night and Fog
, Alain Resnais's stringent documentary on Auschwitz, the testament that would be shown in schools in so many countries and which stood for the world's belated recognition of what concentration camps had been, and what meanings they left.