Comments on: 40’s movies marathon – part 73

By: 40′s movies marathon – the most memorable movies of the decade « Bjørn Stærk's Max 256 Blog

Mon, 08 Nov 2010 04:48:11 +0000

[…] Story of G.I. Joe (1945), and A Walk in the Sun (1945), for setting the standard in war movie […]

By: 40’s movies marathon – best of 1945 « Bjørn Stærk's Max 256 Blog

Thu, 18 Feb 2010 18:53:26 +0000

[…] A Walk in the Sun […]

By: Konrad

Konrad — Wed, 10 Feb 2010 20:15:49 +0000

Ah, Charles Laughton, that wonderful and great actor (and director), large forgotten, sad. Watching him in Spartacus (Kubrick) is a sheer delight.

By: Adam Lounsbery

Adam Lounsbery — Mon, 08 Feb 2010 20:47:54 +0000

I also liked Band of Brothers, and didn’t mean to seem as if I was dumping all over it. I was mostly thinking of Saving Private Ryan when I alluded to modern WWII films that got all the technical details right but missed something basic and seemed really anachronistic. Band of Brothers was about as good as one could hope for after so many decades of collective mythmaking.

I still haven’t seen The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp. Shame on me.

By: Bjørn Stærk

Bjørn Stærk — Mon, 08 Feb 2010 18:11:06 +0000

I guess with a war like that there's bound to be a struggle between the mythic approach and the realistic approach. Nobody who made movies in the decades afterwards could approach it like it was just some war. It was the defining conflict of a generation. But the people who were there knew what it was like. Later, the mythic approach became dominant, and today it's a mix of myth, realism and revisionism. I liked Band of Brothers, (didn't see Saving Private Ryan), but I notice that almost everything I liked about it - and the Iraq series Generation Kill - was also present in the best of these wartime movies. That surprised me. Btw, there were many great British war-related movies as well: The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp, The Way Ahead, A Canterbury Tale, Perfect Strangers, The Way to the Stars. Their strength was not so much the battle aspects of the war, but the cultural aspects.

By: Adam Lounsbery

Adam Lounsbery — Mon, 08 Feb 2010 17:47:08 +0000

Nice capsule review of “A Walk in the Sun.” I agree with you that war films from the ’40s are more “authentic” than modern viewers give them credit for being. People who think “Band of Brothers” and “Saving Private Ryan” are the apotheosis of World War II movies cite the lack of bloodshed and cursing, and the sometimes inauthentic ordnance and uniforms of ’40s war movies. Horse feathers. The discussion among the men in “A Walk in the Sun” of how torn up the lieutenant’s face is from a shell blast, and the fact that they can’t tell if his eye is missing or not, gives you all you need to know. Your imagination fills in the rest. I’d rather watch a ’40s movie with an American half track filling in for a German one than a mediocre, revisionist WWII movie made recently that has all authentic equipment.