page_title: War film
section_title: Postwar
hierarchical_section_title: War film / Second World War / Postwar
caption_attribution_description: English: Commemorative Air Force Gulf Coast Wing's Tora! Tora! Tora! Gang flying a Zero, Kate, and Val, break over wall of fire created by the Tora Bomb Squad
context_page_description: War film is a film genre concerned with warfare, typically about naval, air, or land battles, with combat scenes central to the drama. It has been strongly associated with the 20th century. The fateful nature of battle scenes means that war films often end with them. Themes explored include combat, survival and escape, camaraderie between soldiers, sacrifice, the futility and inhumanity of battle, the effects of war on society, and the moral and human issues raised by war. War films are often categorized by their milieu, such as the Korean War; the most popular subject is the Second World War. The stories told may be fiction, historical drama, or biographical. Critics have noted similarities between the Western and the war film.
  Nations such as China, Indonesia, Japan, and Russia have their own traditions of war film, centred on their own revolutionary wars but taking varied forms, from action and historical drama to wartime romance.
  Subgenres, not necessarily distinct, include anti-war, comedy, animated, propaganda, and documentary.
context_section_description: According to Andrew Pulver of The Guardian, the public fascination with war films became an "obsession", with over 200 war films produced in each decade of the 1950s and 1960s. War film production in the United Kingdom and United States reached its zenith in the mid 1950s.  Its popularity in the United Kingdom was brought on by the critical and commercial success of  Charles Frend's The Cruel Sea (1953). Like others of the period, The Cruel Sea was based on a bestselling novel, in this case the former naval commander Nicholas Monsarrat's story of the battle of the Atlantic. Others, like The Dam Busters (1954), with its exciting tale of the inventor Barnes Wallis's unorthodox bouncing bomb and its distinctive theme music, were true stories. The Dam Busters became the most popular film in Britain in 1955, and remained a favourite as of 2015 with a 100% score on Rotten Tomatoes, though, partly because it celebrated an "exclusively British [victory]", it failed to break into the American market. A large number of war films were made in the 1955–58 period in particular. In 1957 alone, Bitter Victory, Count Five and Die, The Enemy Below, Ill Met by Moonlight, Men in War, The One That Got Away and Seven Thunders, and the highly successful, critically acclaimed pictures The Bridge on the River Kwai, which won the Academy Award for Best Picture that year, and Paths of Glory were released. Some, such as Bitter Victory, focused more on the psychological battle between officers and egotism rather than events during the war. The Bridge on the River Kwai brought a new complexity to the war picture, with a sense of moral uncertainty surrounding war. By the end of the decade the "sense of shared achievement" which had been common in war films "began to evaporate", according to Pulver.
  Hollywood films in the 1950s and 1960s could display spectacular heroics or self-sacrifice, as in the popular Sands of Iwo Jima (1949) starring John Wayne. U.S. Marines considered Sands of Iwo Jima visually authentic, but found Lewis Milestone's Battle Cry (1955), with its attention to the lives of the men, the more realistic film. The formula for a successful war film consisted, according to Lawrence Suid, of a small group of ethnically diverse men; an unreasonable senior officer; cowards became heroic, or died. Jeanine Basinger suggests that a traditional war film should have a hero, a group, and an objective, and that the group should contain "an Italian, a Jew, a cynical complainer from Brooklyn, a sharpshooter from the mountains, a midwesterner (nicknamed by his state, "Iowa" or "Dakota"), and a character who must be initiated in some way". Films based on real commando missions, like The Gift Horse (1952) based on the St. Nazaire Raid, and Ill Met by Moonlight (1956) based on the capture of the German commander of Crete, inspired fictional adventure films such as The Guns of Navarone (1961), The Train (1964) and Where Eagles Dare (1968). These used the war as a backdrop for spectacular action.
  Darryl F. Zanuck produced the 178 minute documentary drama The Longest Day (1962), based on the first day of the D-Day landings, achieving commercial success and Oscars. It was followed by large-scale but thoughtful films like Andrei Tarkovsky's Ivan's Childhood (1962),  and quasi-documentary all-star epics filmed in Europe such as Battle of the Bulge (1965), Battle of Britain (1969), The Battle of Neretva (1969), Midway (1976) and A Bridge Too Far (1977). In Lawrence Suid's view, The Longest Day "served as the model for all subsequent combat spectaculars". However, its cost also made it the last of the traditional war films, while the controversy around the help given by the U.S. Army and Zanuck's "disregard for Pentagon relations" changed the way that Hollywood and the Army collaborated.
  Zanuck, by then an executive at 20th Century Fox, set up an American-Japanese co-production for Richard Fleischer's Tora! Tora! Tora! (1970) to depict what "really happened on December 7, 1941" in the surprise attack on Pearl Harbor. The film, panned by Roger Ebert and The New
caption: Supposed realism: the Commemorative Air Force's Gulf Coast Wing's Tora! Tora! Tora! team simulating the attack on Pearl Harbor with a wall of fire instead of explosions, using planes such as T-6 Texans converted to resemble Mitsubishi A6M Zeros, and generating smoke[88][b] 2008
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