If you were a movie director, and were making a WWII film, what would it be about and why?

The thing is - it's actually remarkably hard to make battles as such both interesting/entertaining....AND keep audiences engrossed enough in the detail of what's happening where.

There have been notable failures - look at The Batttle of Midway for example...as well as amazing successes like The Battle Of The River Plate (a personal favourite) or Sink The Bismarck!

To do it you EITHER have to chop the story up SO much and leave out SO much detail....The Battle Of The Bulge, for example - and create through-stories or vignettes that keep people interested - usually at the expense of historical accuracy! Waterloo! only just about managed to get through the events in historical/cohronologically accurate by being visually stunning.

The reason for this is simple - and was enlarged upon in deail in a documentary on great british war films I saw a couple of months ago. The 1940s and 1950s were the era of films made about wartime events the audience wanted to see. Events THEY lived through at home or somewhere else in the armed forces.

Once we passed that period, once we had made the films people wanted to see - the film industry had to start making and marketing films they could get people to want to see...from the late 1950s/early 1960s it was an increasingly uphill struggle; we had to go to outright fiction to get classics like The Guns Of Navarone.

And when you get right down to it - very often studio management, the ones allocating the big bucks, get sold on just a one-sentence precis of a plot....how on earth do you keep THEM interested in this pitch...

...it's about 20 times THEIR attention span!

Which is why the best movies often turn out to be ones where leading actor/directors have ploughed in most of the funding themselves, to make a film they WANT to make...or put together their own funding consortium outside of the "studio system".

 

I like the idea of Cassino, but I think it might be better suited for a cable miniseries format. With four battles and so many countries and units involved, it would be impossible to do it justice in a 2 hour film.

 

The problem (in my mind) is that most battles are sprawling, lengthy affairs involving numerous units on both sides. They are simply too complex to condense into a 2 hour film without losing all historical accuracy. You mention River Plate and Bismarck, which in my opinion make fine films simply because of the limited units involved, whereas Midway involving entire fleets, becomes a caricature of the actual battle.

My interest is more in land warfare in western Europe, but because of the size of those battles it is difficult to find a good case of limited size and scope. A Bridge Too Far captures that because the limited scope (the single road) brings the events into the grasp of the average person, who isn't a student of WWII. Of course it took a guy like Richard Attenborough to drive that project to completion.

Mortain fits the limited size and scope that would make it possible to produce a good (and accurate) film. I'm sure there are other examples. The Brits and Canadians up against the 12th Waffen SS around Caen might make a stunning film.

 

Here's a couple of candidates, naturally (!) from Finland...:

Battle of Suomussalmi

A great surprise victory against all odds, which really changed the picture of the Winter War. The underdog could fight back. A classical battle between David and Goliath, in an exotic environment. A great tragedy for the soviet divisions, which were unprepared for - well - everything.

"The Battle of Suomussalmi was fought between Finnish and Soviet forces in the Winter War. The action took place from around December 7, 1939 to January 8, 1940.
The outcome was a major Finnish victory against vastly superior forces. In Finland, the battle is still seen today as a symbol of the entire Winter War itself."

"On December 7, 1939, the Soviet 163rd Division captured Suomussalmi, but found itself trapped deep inside Finnish territory, and the Soviet 44th Rifle (Ukrainian) Division was sent to aid the 163rd. Over the next week, Colonel Hjalmar Siilasvuo's outnumbered 9th Division stopped and decisively defeated the Soviet forces on the Raate-Suomussalmi road. Finnish motti tactics proved to be very effective in this battle."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Suomussalmi
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Raate_Road

Batlle of Tolvajärvi

Much of the same as the one above, except this one was the first.

"The Battle of Tolvajärvi ['tol.va.jær.vi] was fought on 12 December 1939 between Finland and the Soviet Union. It was the first large offensive victory for the Finns in the Winter War."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Tolvaj%C3%A4rvi

 

This is quite true....and it SHOULD apply to any film....that once you start addressing TOO many issues and event streams and factors not only do you loose the attention of the audience, but you stray into territory that requires a decent strategic grasp of events and how they DID play out to know what's happening...

I.E. you start making films just for history buffs!

But yet - it hasn't ALWAYS worked out that way; it depends HOW you have the audience view the greater picture; in Dunkirk, for example, the "bigger picture" was mostly done through the filter of a small squad's perception of what was going on around them...AND also by Bernard Mill's journalist's POV of what was happening. Ditto for The Desert Rats, another unsung great...

Likewise, The Battle of Britain managed far better than most to bring across the "strategic view" of what was happening...

I don't want to be jingoistic here, so just a bald statement - is it just me, or did the British movie industry manage to do that better than Hollywood? Hollywood always seemed to drill down TOO far - I didn't need to know about Telly Savalas' chickens in The Battle Of The Bulge, for example, there's a point you can go too far at getting the "common man's viewpoint" on what's going on around him.

 

No, you're definitely on to something. Not only the British film industry, but look at some German films like Downfall or Das Boot. I suspect that on that side of the Atlantic the events were real and immediate and involved a much higher percentage of the population. Even later generations heard the stories first-hand from multiple sources. A British director had better get it right...

I thought both of Eastwood's Iwo Jima films were very good. The Hurt Locker is another pretty good war film by an American director.

Yet, probably the best recent war film is Blackhawk Down, and again a British director; Ridley Scott.

 

Actually, the Battle of the Bulge was so lame, Telly Savalas's story saved it from being a total loss. I just wished that they could've scrounge up a couple of Shermans and Stuarts for the US tanks.

I can only speak for myself, but I kind of appreciate the common man's viewpoint. The officers and politicians get all the glory. The groundpounder gets all the hard work.

 

...but whose cinema career has been virtually all in either Hollywood - or for Hollywood productions and studios. He might at times shoot in Britain...but he's not making "British" films.

And as far as Hollywood is concerned, Scott has a magic touch...

If you widen your definition of "war" films to the historical, for example - he managed to make a bums-on-seats blockbuster out of Kingdom of Heaven...definitely the most unpromising of source material for a 21st century blockbuster!

But one man's midas touch does not necessarily guarantee a success in the cinema - look at the start-stop history (sic) of Peter Jackson's Dambusters, for instance...

 

When it works - which it doesn't always. It worked in Band of Brothers and SPR...but didn't work so well in The Pacific. I just found that so insipid and unengaging.

But I meant the common man's viewpoint of the bigger picture...not just the common man's viewpoint. More....a filter, an artifice by which WE get the bigger picture explained at the common man's level...

God, that sounds bad LOL but you know what I mean - it's a way of filtering the strategic-level stuff out to the audience down at a common denominator that everyone in an auditorium can grasp.

 

Funny you should mention that film. I thought the theatrical release was a fairly miserable historical film. Then, on DVD, Scott released his much longer directors cut and I thought it was one the best historical films I'd ever seen. The studio, Hollywood, had gone in with a chainsaw and chopped out all the background that made sense of the events in the film.

If you haven't seen the directors cut of Kingdom, it's worth looking at. It's an entirely different film. A much smarter film.

 

Well said. I can appreciate that.

Maybe it's just me, but I always get tied up in the "rich man's war, poor man's fight" premise, since me and mine were always tied to the "poor man's" part of that axiom. I've always identified with Col. Reismann (The Dirty Dozen), Kelly (Kelly's Heroes), Captain Ben Tyreen (Major Dundee) and the like.

 

I doubt it is a question of if "Dambusters" will be a success, however it pales in comparison to the success of "the Hobbit", and likely Jackson's next venture "Tintin 2."

From this passage

it sounds more like you are talking about George Lucas and "Redtails."

 

I've just been thinking more about that...and something I posted about quite a long time ago now on ww2talk...

LOOK at the postwar "war film" - somehow they ALL relate either directly or indirectly to historical events; some more so than others...but the link is there -

The Battle of Britain - The Battle of Britain
The Battle of the River Plate - the career and demise of the Graf Spee
The Dambusters - CHASTISE
A Bridge Too Far - MARKET GARDEN
The Gift Horse - the St Nazaire Raid...which is also the core of The Attack On The Iron Coast
They Were Expendable - the fall of the Philippines...but also the withdrawal of MacArthur to Australia
Dunkirk - DYNAMO
Sink The Bismarck! - the Battle of the Denmark Strait and the pursuit and sinking of the Bismarck
Operation Amsterdam - was in fact a real-life mssion to withdraw industrial diamonds from the Netherlands in 1940
The Heroes of Telemark - the raid on the heavy water plant at Vermork
A Town Like Alice - the fall of Malaya
The Silent Enemy - the career of Cmdr. Crabbe and the "frogman" war at Gibraltar
Anzio - the Ranger's ambush that's also the culmination of Darby's Rangers with James Garner.
Valkyrie - the July 20th plot
Das Boot - the Battle of the Atlantic
The Cruel Sea - the Battle Of The Atlantic
The Longest Day - OVERLORD
Mosquito Squadron - HI BALL
One Of Our Aircraft is Missing - the early Bombing offensive....and escape&evasion.
Memphis Belle - the USAAF daylight strategic bombing campaign
Sea Of Sand - the LRDG
The Eagle Has Landed - cooperation between the IRA and the Abwehr
The Big Red One - TORCH, and several others...
1941 - the Battle Of Los Angeles
D-Day The Sixth Of June - the Mervile Battery operation
The Red Beret - the Bruneval Raid and British Airborne attack on Bone in North Africa.
The Bridge At Remagen - the Dash for the Rhine
A Matter Of Life And Death - the RAF night bombing campaign and the US presence in the UK
The Train - the Allied tactical interdiction campaign against the French rail network after D-Day, and the Fall of Paris
Is Paris Burning? - the fall of Paris...and the many political strains that made up the "French Resistance"
They Who Dare - the SAS raid on the Rhodes' airfields
Ill Met By Moonlight - the Kreipe kidnapping....but also SOE activities in the Aegean
In Which we Serve - the Battle of the Atlantic...but also Dunkirk, AND the actions off northern Crete in 1941!
13 Rue Madelaine - OSS activities in Occupied France
Tora Tora Tora - Pearl harbour....but also Yamamoto as a strategist
We Dive At Dawn - the RN submarine patrol regime in the North Sea off the Scandanavia coast
The Great Escape - the Stalag Luft III escape and the career of Roger Bushell
Ice Cold In Alex - the 2nd Siege of Tobruk and the retreat to El Alamein
Thirty Seconds Over Tokyo - the Doolittle Raid
Pearl Harbour - Pearl Harbour...but also the Eagle Squadron of the RAF in the BoB and the Doolittle Raid
Von Ryan's Express - the Italian volte-face

And even my old favourite -

The Guns Of Navarone - the failed 1943 Aegean campaign, and SOE operations in the Aegean!

If I was to sit down and look through the OTHER shelves in the DVD collection I could find more...but what characterises ALL of the above is that they have SOME element - either huge or even just a little - of the history of the Second World War expressed in them - and in many cases to events, as you can see, that the vast majority of audiences had never heard of....or knew just the faintest rumour or hint of...

But it was enough of a "hook" to get them in the doors, to get their bums ON the said seats...

If I had to make a prediction...we won't actually see another REAL WWII blockbuster. Those veterans amongst us, military AND veterans of the Home Front - are dwindling with each year...and don't really do "cinema" much now anyway. Just like the "cowboy" film genre died a death when it became just too separated in time from the actual period 1870-1910...

There's no longer that "hook" in the current cinema-going generation to drag them into the cinema to a WWII war film. They might come because there's a particular star, or a particular director or something....but the "history"? No. it's not their history...

 

Oh, It's on the shelf Not just smarter, but yes also more historically accurate - the survival of Guy de Lusignan, for example...

Ditto for The Big Red One - the extended version "hangs together" far better than the original.

But it doesn't ALWAYS work like that; Apocalypse Now Redux was abysmal LMAO

 

Well, more Scott's own Robin Hood...which was just dog poo LOL

I still shudder at the thought of those Angevin French wooden landing craft with their bow ramps...

 

By far, far and away, the most powerful words I have ever read were right here on WW2f.com, Written by Ron Goldstein.

If I were to write or direct a WW2 movie, this would be the opening scene, setting the tenor for the film.

See; http://www.ww2f.com/topic/51211-why-wwii/?hl=%2Bnorth+%2Bafrica#entry563649

 

For more from Ron, see his Peoples War Articles at:
http://www.ww2f.com/topic/48913-the-bbc-ww2-peoples-war-archives-as-seen-by-ron/
________________

Jack Goldstein Loss Record at: http://lostaircraft.com/database.php?mode=viewentry&e=9050

Detailed crew stories at: http://ww2talk.com/forums/topic/36770-the-last-flight-of-lancaster-rf154-as-b/
See also: http://www.bbc.co.uk/history/ww2peopleswar/stories/90/a8452190.shtml

 

Those are good points and I do agree with you, but still, it would be great to see the brave men of Taffy 3 and their heroic struggle in the face of seemingly insurmountable odds on the big screen.

 

Agreed, the struggle of these two vessels deserves greater recognition.