Looks like Many WW2 Movies Coming!

[Paper Tiger]

Regarding Japanese war movies, 'Tora Tora Tora' was interesting because the Japanese-directed scenes were so much more visually appealing than the US-directed scenes. Not submitting this as my favourite war movie though.

Agreed that SPR was the most harrowing war movie of its time. Otherwise, most war movies suck balls as far as movie entertainment goes. The 5-hour TV version of 'Das Boot' is also my favourite, by a long way. It still sends shivers up and down my spine thinking about it and I was rooting for the Germans too! Now that accomplishment alone makes it an astonishing achiement in my book. But please, please, please do not mention the egregious 'U-571' movie <spits noisily> in front of any Brits or indeed any educated movie-goer. That was so offensive! The US contribution to WW2 was absolutely decisive but that was not one of them. There are plenty of other US achievements to honour in the cinema without stealing a British one and fobbing it off to gullible Americans as a US one and then adding a footnote at the end when most viewers have already left the cinema to avoid the rush.

[Broadsword56]

Well, better a tangential love interest whose scenes you can FF through than to have women inserted directly into the action as minor characters or outright sex objects (often with creepy sadistic overtones) who are then usually killed because they're inconvenient plot baggage: e.g. Stalingrad, Cross of Iron, Guns of Navarone, Dirty Dozen, etc.

Remember, the "box office" take that these films rely on to turn a profit is heavily couples: "date night". And in exchange for subjecting Him to another Drew Barrymore romantic comedy, She consents to see an "action" movie as long as it's not TOO violent, and there's a cute guy in it. Also, the Titanic phenomenon has warped Hollywood horrifically -- everyone is jonesing to repeat that magical "star crossed lovers plus stuff blowing up (or sinking)" epic formula that crosses gender lines. With risible results.

Well, here's a true WWII story where -- if they made a good movie about it -- the love interest really happened and wouldn't be artificially inserted into the plot:

Tomorrow to Be Brave: A Memoir of the Only Woman Ever to Serve in the French Foreign Legion

I'm reading it now, and it's a great tale of the amazing Free French outnumbered holdout against Rommel + the Ariete Division at Bir Hakeim in May '42. Susan Travers was nominally French Gen. Koenig's driver, but actually they secretly were lovers too. She stuck it out in the foxholes right alongside the men and got the Legion of Honor and the Military Medal for her actions. (She's even got her own hero counter in the MMP grand tactical boardgame No Question of Surrender!)

[John Kettler]

Bigduke6,

The guy who was mistaken for Russian was, in a supreme bit of irony, a U.S. citizen of Germanic extraction! This guy has the kind of full face I mentioned. He's by no means fat, but the Slavic facial features are fully displayed.

http://metaldetectingworld.com/photogalary/ww2_relics/pages/47-%20Russian%20Soldier.htm

Note, too, some of the beefy guys from Soviet Naval Infantry, an elite unit. The other guy was a typical Russian infantryman.

http://www.soviethammer.info/img/upload/soviet-naval-01.jpg

Here's one of the iconic photos of WW II Russian infantry. Another plump face on display.

http://ww2total.com/WW2/Weapons/Infantry/Firearms/Russian/PPSh-41/images/SovietSubmachineGunners-px800.jpg

Behold the happy flamethrower man, and be sure to study his chin. I see a second one.

http://gunrunnerhell.tumblr.com/post/17288426395

Please know that I'm not cherry picking, it's that there is so much stuff on Google Images portraying Russian soldier models and action figures it's hard to find photographs. Almost fell for a reenactor group shot in my desperation!

eltorrente,

As I said, the object wasn't to provide accurate depictions of how the Navy really operates it's subs, but to provide a sense of it to the viewer, while absolutely prioritizing protecting the real deal over technical accuracy. For the record, BLIND MAN'S BLUFF

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blind_Man's_Bluff:_The_Untold_Story_of_American_Submarine_Espionage

does describe, repeatedly, trailing ops in which the Crazy Ivan was employed. Memory's hazy, but I think that term may've been used. If you haven't read it yet, I think you owe it to yourself to do so.

I absolutely agree that sonar isn't like radar and doesn't provide instant information. Kind of gagged over that. But from a viewer's standpoint, who would sit through, say, four hours of waterfall analysis, depth changes, heading changes, speed changes and everything else it would take to passively work up the level of information depicted in the movie as effectively instantaneous? The only way to get that information stat is to go active, and even that occurs at only the speed of sound in water.

Regards,

John Kettler

[LongLeftFlank]

Well, here's a true WWII story where -- if they made a good movie about it -- the love interest really happened and wouldn't be artificially inserted into the plot:

Tomorrow to Be Brave: A Memoir of the Only Woman Ever to Serve in the French Foreign Legion

I'm reading it now, and it's a great tale of the amazing Free French outnumbered holdout against Rommel + the Ariete Division at Bir Hakeim in May '42. Susan Travers was nominally French Gen. Koenig's driver, but actually they secretly were lovers too. She stuck it out in the foxholes right alongside the men and got the Legion of Honor and the Military Medal for her actions. (She's even got her own hero counter in the MMP grand tactical boardgame No Question of Surrender!)

Well, what do you want, it's the FRENCH. (Actually, didn't Marlene Dietrich allegedly come somewhat close to being captured in the Bulge because she refused to leave "her boys"? Or maybe that was just another rumour inflated by panicky REMFs; the same kind that had Otto Skorzeny's infiltrators cutting phone wires all the way to Paris)

Now GREEKS, if you want to talk about seriously badass "With Your Shield or On It" ladies! In their wars of liberation against the Turks, half the partisan actions seem to be led by women. The Founding Mothers of the Hellenic Republic. And that's consistent with what (little) I've known of Greek women....

(Just trying to steer this thread away from the disturbing mental picture of beefy Russians)

[Michael Emrys]

For one thing, I'm sooo tired of WW2 women being portrayed to look like modern college coeds or someone you want to meet on match.com.

Ha! I remember when Baa Baa Black Sheep began its run noticing that all the women (nurses mostly) were wearing their hair in the then-current Farrah Fawcett hairstyle. I figured that if they were selling out to that extent, there was probably no limit to what else they got wrong (oh yes, the Corsairs in bright shiny paint jobs didn't help either). I never watched another episode and don't feel like I missed a thing.

Michael

[Michael Emrys]

OK, how many war movies are there out there, where the officers have their act together and the sergeants and privates are a bunch of uneducated cowards whose lives wouldn't be worth much, without some decent leadership?

Sharpe's Rifles, etc.? Not that I regard that as a good movie/show, but you did ask.

Michael

[Michael Emrys]

But movies based on war history can be profitable and also focused on the history/story. ... without having a worried producer JAM a Love Story into it.

- Letters from Iwo Jima

- Band of Brothers (not a movie I know ... but even better!)

- Saving Private Ryan ... maybe left some things to be desired .. but at least it stayed focused.

- A Bridge Too Far

- Platoon ... lots of drama sure ... but again focusing on the situation at hand

- A Piece of Cake (BBC Series ... fantastic BTW) ... focuses on the pilots in a Hurricane/Spitfire Squadron in the Battle of Britain ... a little love, but not a distraction.

All I'm saying is that you can do GREAT movies and have drama that is related to the context of the situation ... that can still jerk a tear ... without forcing a love story into it.

And we should not forget that wartime romances were anything uncommon. Scenes in The Pacific I thought were well handled. What counts is how true to life the subject is handled. Obviously the kind of thing people are objecting to here is the kind of romance that is just grafted on artificially so that actresses who will be box office attractions can be injected into a plot in which they have no real role.

Michael

[eltorrente]

eltorrente,

As I said, the object wasn't to provide accurate depictions of how the Navy really operates it's subs, but to provide a sense of it to the viewer, while absolutely prioritizing protecting the real deal over technical accuracy. For the record, BLIND MAN'S BLUFF

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blind_Man's_Bluff:_The_Untold_Story_of_American_Submarine_Espionage

does describe, repeatedly, trailing ops in which the Crazy Ivan was employed. Memory's hazy, but I think that term may've been used. If you haven't read it yet, I think you owe it to yourself to do so.

Yup - I have the book. I think I read it about 7-10 years ago. Anyway, every sub is basically blind to the rear, so a common procedure for every sub is to "clear baffles". It's just a 90 degree or more turn, stabilize on a course for a while, and look for new contacts. Nothing crazy about it. I don't remember in the book, but regardless I don't doubt that that term was actually used somewhere at sometime on some crazy mission. I'm just saying I've heard it only used as a joke, and noone I ever talked to ever heard of it in a serious way. It would be CRAZY to NOT clear baffles on a submarine.

I absolutely agree that sonar isn't like radar and doesn't provide instant information. Kind of gagged over that. But from a viewer's standpoint, who would sit through, say, four hours of waterfall analysis, depth changes, heading changes, speed changes and everything else it would take to passively work up the level of information depicted in the movie as effectively instantaneous? The only way to get that information stat is to go active, and even that occurs at only the speed of sound in water.

Regards,

John Kettler

Yeah, I have no problem with that and I love the movie. I expect that, and it doesn't really bother me. I take note of it though, because I can't help it. Plus it's fun to make fun of.

Here's another random thing about the movie: The Alpha that was speeding toward them at full power, would have been so unbelievably loud that both the October and the Dallas would have heard it coming from hundreds to thousands of nautical miles away. It wouldn't have just appeared like that lol - plus it would have been blind at that speed (45+ knots).

Most sub movies have a sonar ping sound when they show a sub underwater lol. We never once used active sonar while on-station, because it advertises your position to everyone.

[Stele]

White Tiger?

Isn't that like the 1977 movie White Buffalo with Charles Bronson?

[Michael Emrys]

I have mentioned elsewhere that MY WAY is a very impressive depiction of Japanese fanaticism in a HUGE war film that starts in China, travels to the East Front and ends in Normandy. Great relationship drama as well as amazing set-piece battles. You never heard of it cos it was made by Koreans(!). Seen it and it is amazing.

On your recommendation I watched this last week, but was very disappointed with it. I'm not going to drag out a list of all the nits I could pick, but I have to say that I found the relationship between the two main characters, especially at the end, completely unconvincing. That would pretty well shoot down the whole movie even if otherwise they got all the details right. I will grant that there were a few things well done, but mostly it was just one big pile of horse manure.

Michael

[Michael Emrys]

Like I said earlier, I am an ex-submariner and every single sub movie I see is filled with so many crazy inaccurate things, but whatever. It's just a movie. Even if the writer wrote it totally accurate, it would get changed around for dramatic effect to appeal to the masses.

Just curious then about your opinion of Run Silent, Run Deep. More particularly, I would like to know if you have an opinion of the novel it was based on. Personally, I regard the movie as so-so, but basically okay. The novel I regard as superb and have read maybe three times over the years. I've read many memoirs of submariners and several novels written by WW II sub vets and regard RSRD as the outstanding best in the fiction category. But I never served on a sub and have no personal experience to compare it to.

Michael

[eltorrente]

Just curious then about your opinion of Run Silent, Run Deep. More particularly, I would like to know if you have an opinion of the novel it was based on. Personally, I regard the movie as so-so, but basically okay. The novel I regard as superb and have read maybe three times over the years. I've read many memoirs of submariners and several novels written by WW II sub vets and regard RSRD as the outstanding best in the fiction category. But I never served on a sub and have no personal experience to compare it to.

Michael

Ha - funny you should ask. I read that book while I was at sub school. I loved it, though I read it before I was actually on a sub. I didn't really like the movie much, either, if I remember correctly. It's been a very long time since I've seen it though.

One of the best books I've read in a long time was Iron Coffins http://www.amazon.com/Iron-Coffins-Personal-Account-Battles/dp/0306808420

Really, really excellent. I couldn't put it down. It was like reading Das Boot in real life.

[Sakai007]

One book, well two now that I think of this, I would like made into movies are "Samurai" by Saburo Sakai and "The Jolly Rogers" which was written by Blackburn iirc. We have such amazing CGI capabilities that the air combat scenes could really be done right. Take the air to air scenes from Pearl Harbor, add the good ones from Red Tails, with a historically accurate story (Samurai would be most excellent for that) and you would have the best WWII air arm movie ever made. Heh, Kickstarter here I come!!! ;D

If no one has mentioned this yet, at the youtube page for the "Grace and Danger" trailer there is a disclaimer that states the footage used isn't even from the movie, but from pre-production days to drum up interest in the movie. I hope their right cause it does look like it could be decent.

[Michael Emrys]

One book, well two now that I think of this, I would like made into movies are "Samurai" by Saburo Sakai and "The Jolly Rogers" which was written by Blackburn iirc.

Be careful of the edition of Samurai that Martin Caiden was involved with. I have heard that Sakai himself disowned it.

Jolly Rogers is a jolly good read and a real eye opener on air operations both carrier and ground based during the later stages of the Solomons campaign.

Another pair of books that should lend themselves to good filmography if anybody ever wanted to seriously undertake it would be The First Team and The First Team and the Guadalcanal Campaign, both by John B. Lundstrom.

Michael

[John Kettler]

Thin Red Line--the film that couldn't decide whether it was a travelogue or a war movie. Ultimately, it succeeded as neither.

eltorrente,

IRON COFFINS was great. If you like that, you really need to see this.

U-Boats Under the Swastika, Mallmann-Showell He has a whole page of U-Boat books on Amazon.

Turning now to my direct submarine experience, as a kid, I almost sank your ancestral namesake. Was touring the U.S.S. Drum back when she was still afloat, rather than on concrete blocks, and got to the diving control board. There was a chain loosely run through the valve controls, and on a whim, I decided to try the Kingston valve lever. It moved--a lot! I froze, Dad freaked, then moved swiftly and decisively, slamming the valve control lever back to the Closed position. I could've sunk her, along with everybody aboard. Wouldn't that have been ironic? Survives the war, only to be sunk by a kid! Had she gone down, it would probably have been barely decks awash, but still...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USS_Drum_(SS-228)

This was after touring the U.S.S. Alabama, while she still had OS-2Us on the fantail. That was before the hurricane hit.

Regards,

John Kettler

[Steiner14]

SPR was the most moving war movie I've ever seen. I think it was because it was the first of its kind. I saw it in a theater with my girlfriend and some other friends. We were all blown away by the experience. I liked the story, also. No love triangle - just a war weary squad charged with risking their lives for someone they didn't know. I wanted them to succeed and was invested in their characters. Great acting all around, too. I felt like I had been through a war when I walked out of the theater.

I'm puzzled how you are watching movies and afterwards even writing about them. You are consuming it, but not WATCHING. Watching means the logical thinking is not switched off. Logical means, to analyze the plot, the characters, the cast, the use of music, everything.

SPR is only a well handcrafted movie but it is extremely stupid. For example in reality in no military, not even in the US army i guess , it was allowed not to follow orders. IÄm wondering how anyone can judge a WAR-movie as good, if the most fundamental aspect, the chain of command, is ridiculed to a statistical role to make the main characters stand out?

And besides that, in what world are you living? Do you believe that a successful movie is not moving people?!

That's how the business works!!! The more you like a movie, the better it works. You make a movie people like, but you transport the propaganda, lies and garbage within and they will not even recognize it, how their minds are manipulated.

"The movie was good, because i liked it and it was moving." Incredible.

This works, because the masses are not thinking while watching. They are CONSUMING, not analyzing the intentions that the makers want to create.

But movie-makers are not consuming movies, they watch them like i described it.

Therefore only for the uneducated masses actors become stars while in reality the actors are the whores of the producers, directors and screenwriters.

You show the masses a crying wife a sad music and combine it with good lighting and camera and they start whining. Why? Because they do not think! They do not analyze, how this impression is created - and if it even makes any sense! They do not analyze how ridiculously the plot was constructed to come to a certain scene. They do also not recognize the subtext.

They do not understand HOW the impressions are created, they sit in front of it and are RECEIVERS of the intended impressions.

Therefore they do not recognize propaganda or ideological intentions of the whole "entertainment" complex. And therefore Hollywood is such a powerful propaganda machinery. The audience doesn't recognize how it is brainwashed and manipulated.

The movie was good, because i liked it and it was sooo moving. Nooo, really?!

[Boche]

Talk about paranoid.

[noob]

Steiner, believe it or not, human beings have different personalities, so to be crude to make a point, some are motivated by feelings, some by thinking, you are obviously a thinking type, but what you fail to grasp is that your type will generally be bewildered by feeling types, and vice versa, but being a thinking type, you should know better, so just accept that some people perceive the world differently, and they are not necessarily stupid because they perceive it differently to you, i mean, you might be the wrong and stupid one, that is, unless you can objectively prove your point, if not, it's just an opinion, and one that elevates you above others, surprisingly

[JonS]

For example in reality in no military, not even in the US army i guess , it was allowed not to follow orders.

Well, this is just flat out wrong, for starters.

[Bigduke6]

Steiner, I agree 100 per cent with what you say about the idiot consuming masses. I would say the only antidote is education, either in schools or real life.

But I very much disagree with you on this:

For example in reality in no military, not even in the US army i guess , it was allowed not to follow orders. IÄm wondering how anyone can judge a WAR-movie as good, if the most fundamental aspect, the chain of command, is ridiculed to a statistical role to make the main characters stand out?

The chain of command works in most militaries pretty well as long as there is no stress. The moment you add stress, the chain of command starts deteriorating. It doesn't take much, you deprive of private of sleep for a day or two and where he might not lip back to a sergeant if he was fresh, he will when he's groggy.

If the stress includes things like fear of death or dismemberment, noise, severe discomfort, that erodes the effectiveness of the chain of command even more. It doesn't have to be directly concerning the individual's own well-being. A junior officer who is unaware of how instructions from higher up can get his men killed for no reason, just stupidly, is more likely to disobey or undermine orders given him, than a junior officer who still believes his superiors know what they are doing and always have his best interests at heart.

One of the problems about war movies is, most of the people watching them have not been subjected to the stresses wars create. Movie audiences are generally young, and those that have limited experience in life have even less of a yardstick to judge, how men react under stress.

The whole point to organized militaries is to force the soldiers, who are people like every one else, to risk their lives, despite the stress. Teaching people to kill is comparatively easy; propaganda and distance and mechanization can overcome almost any person's inhibitions along those lines. But when people realize, I could die or get very seriously maimed if I follow that order, military discipline does not always prevail.

I think SPR did a good job of depicting that happening. Men go into combat, they kill and have their buddies killed, and they are told to perform a mission whose point is not clear but whose danger is.

John,

I'd say your first two pix prove my point, those Red Army guys are all sharp-jawed and boney. Look at the belts. The FF guy is admittedly well-fed looking. He is of course an engineer.

[noob]

Steiner, I agree 100 per cent with what you say about the idiot consuming masses. I would say the only antidote is education, either in schools or real life.

Aren't you one of the idiot consuming masses ?, didn't you buy Combat Mission ?, i know you watched SPR, that's consuming entertainment products is it not ?

And if you know the answer, what are you doing about it when your not playing Combat Mission and watching films ?

p.s. anyone that can use the term "the masses" without laughing needs help.

[Bigduke6]

I am not sure that's an example of war media showing competent leaders and useless subordinates. Sharpe, of course, is former enlisted, talks with a midlands (right?) accent and the other officers in the series are pretty much all poofty upperclass snobbish dolts.

Sharpe's enlisted mates, meanwhile, are hardrinking and womanizing when there is time, but in any case fine shots and they win their fights with marksmanship and their own fists.

What I am trying to get at is this problem almost all war shows/movies have in depicting the to-whom-it-may-concern flying metal. They don't. I guess in small firefights or hand-to-hand melees there could be times when the fight is something like man-to-man, but most of the time it's just a battle of who can send more flying metal in the general direction of the opposition. But you watch most movies and it's like every one picks their targets and has great fire discipline, and indirect doesn't do much except make the infantry stop shooting for a while.

Of course, it's kind of like CM. If we built scenarios that accurately reflected the kind of artillery the Allies brought to the table for most operations, especially 1944 onwards, the CM battles would just be a contest of whose FO could paste the other side of the map more effectively. War movies wouldn't be very interesting if you spent an hour or more developing a squad characters and giving them back histories and watching them go through training, and then in about a minute they get mortared in the open and half of them are dead, most of the rest are wounded, and the only guy that didn't get touched was the shirker who was hiding in a hole.

Sharpe's Rifles, etc.? Not that I regard that as a good movie/show, but you did ask.

Michael

[Bigduke6]

Noob,

Well then I need help. I consider most people woefully uneducated, and what's worse, a large portion of them appear to be perfectly happy in their ignorance. They literally do not want to inform themselves. I think the term "masses" is perfectly applicable. But if you prefer there are alternative terms like "the great unwashed" or "hoi polloi".

I am most certainly not pointing fingers here; it's very hard to find a properly uninformed person in these forums.

Indeed, that's one of the reasons I bought CM. It teaches me about a subject I am interested in. Which is, matter of fact, one of the reasons this is good forum. There are more than a few very intelligent people here, and I'm not talking just book-learning.

Consuming an entertainment product is not the same as allowing an entertainer to manipulate your feelings willy-nilly. It is possible to view or listen critically. All it takes is engaging one's mind. In my opinion, far too many people fail to do this. I hope I am not one of them.

Certainly a war movie, or any other form of art, need not depict "reality" perfectly, if for no other reason than one person's perception of reality will differ from another's. But I would say that, as war movies, SPR and Das Boot are very good art, because they get to a piece of what it is to force men to participate in war, and the human reaction to the situation they are in. This has much less to do with the accuracy of the equipment or the tactics depicted, although that's part of it, and more to do with the truthfulness of how humans and their behavior in war is depicted. Get the essence right, and you have a classic for the ages, look at the Iliad.

Likewise, a war movie with pretty explosions and the bad guys mowed down to me is a waste of time. That's not war, that's a first-person shooter just from a passive, cinematic viewpoint. If I want to entertain myself watching pretend things die and explode, I'll go replay HL2 or something.

Aren't you one of the idiot consuming masses ?, didn't you buy Combat Mission ?, i know you watched SPR, that's consuming entertainment products is it not ?

And if you know the answer, what are you doing about it when your not playing Combat Mission and watching films ?

p.s. anyone that can use the term "the masses" without laughing needs help.

[xian]

No image of a 'perfectly accurate panzer' ever brought a tear to my eye, but the butterfly scene at the end of "All Quiet on the Western Front' did.

[noob]

Noob, Well then I need help. I consider most people woefully uneducated,

What evidence do you have to make your assertions about the level of education of over 3.5 billion people ? (given a global population of 7 billion, which would make 3.6 billion most people)

Also, what do you regard as an "education" ?

and what's worse, a large portion of them appear to be perfectly happy in their ignorance.

So you are basing your opinion on appearances, so what "appears" to you to make you say that people are perfectly happy in their ignorance ?

They literally do not want to inform themselves. I think the term "masses" is perfectly applicable. But if you prefer there are alternative terms like "the great unwashed" or "hoi polloi".

Does dismissing the individuality of over 3.5 billion people not strike you as worrying ?

One more thing, the people that run the world and f###k it up are all educated, so where do you get the idea that education is the saviour of mankind ?