The most representative sitting-around-futility-of-war story is probably Mister Roberts, although the movie and the play from which it derives are not nearly as dark as Thomas Heggen’s fine original novel. (Joshua Logan, defending himself against accusations that he had softened the material, did say that Heggen, with whom he collaborated on the stage adaptation, willingly aided and abetted him.)

The movie does have that superb cast – Fonda, Lemmon, Powell, and Cagney.

” ‘what kind of drama is history?’

Pretty limp. Long story short: not enough happens in history.

I doubt it.

In fact, I’d say that the real question is: ‘what kind of drama is history?’ How you might answer that goes a long way to defining the culture, and who you are as an individual member of the culture.

As Petronius says, ‘quod fere totus mundus exerceat histrionem.’

The one thing that particularly sticks out for me is the scene where the just-bereaved girlfriend of the female member of the team effectively dictates the heart breaking letter to The Man. For my money, there really aren’t many films that touch on the heartbreak of the people left behind.

Perhaps it’s my stiff upper lip, but I prefer films that take the meaninglessness and horror & move on. As in the old Forces saying, “if you can’t take a joke, you shouldn’t have joined” – which was memorably explained by a newsgroup regular, years ago, in these terms:

When it is raining and dark, your feet are giving you hell because they have been wet for two weeks, when you are carrying a pack weighing your own weight, when you are on the edge of a minefield, aware that, well within range, are more people than you who want to kill you, and they have the capacity to do so, when your best friend standing ten feet from you gets hit, and you have to wipe his brains from your face so that you can see, and when the instruction is given to go forward, if you can’t take a joke, you shouldn’t have joined.

The post, in other words, seems to treat the fact it points out as somewhat inevitable, and the reasons for its existence either opaque or uninteresting. It seems to think that what we can learn from the fact itself is interesting, but not so much what we can learn from why it came to be that way.

Also re my @93 although I’ve heard this, the two members of my family who served in WWII, who both saw combat, were both sent to Europe, and one was the brother-in-law of a Communist Party member, though both were born in the US and one was regular Army. (Don’t know where the one who served in the US in WWI was stationed.)

Chitty Chitty Bang Bang seems to be a kids’ parody of a WWII movie, with comic quasi-Nazis (the leader strangely resembling Donald Rumsfeld) invading by U-boat, all mixed up with Prussian aristocrats in a Rhineland castle.

That’s probably because “especially early in the war” there hadn’t been many heroic US victories to make films about. Think about the lag that film production imposes too.

Absolutely. And I’d add that the lack of early victories was important both in terms of what (more or less true) narratives were available and in terms of what narratives were necessary from a propaganda perspective, especially early in 1942. Nevertheless, this early foundation of the WW2 combat genre had an impact on the tone of later efforts, when there were victories to tell stories about,

Well, I wasn’t going to say anything, but I did review my Sartre, and existentialism is a pretty solitary thing, to put it mildly. Being-for-others, the look, master/slave frankly when there are two subjects you aren’t existential anymore. That’s the whole point. If the story is about friend/enemy, or just I/enemy, you are instantly in the social or political.

I would say most of the movies listed here are anti-political movies. “Caring more about my buddies in my platoon than about what the brass wants” kind of thing. And yet they still march on and shoot. Maybe these are bourgeois movies, social reproduction, late capitalist movies.

I will stick with Fires on the Plain which is mostly about one guy, starving and walking to nowhere, deciding against cannibalism for no particularly good reason.