The Hollywood War Film

by Robert Eberwein

The Hollywood War Film offers readers a lively introduction to the theory, history, stars, and major films constituting this vital genre, from Hollywood's earliest days to the current moment

Genres: Nonfiction, War

192 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2009

Reviews

[Mike Smith · Rating 3 out of 5]

Somewhere between a textbook and a scholarly study, The Hollywood War Film looks at movies made in the U.S. about wars fought by U.S. troops, from the American Civil War to the Iraq war of the early 21st century. While it sometimes mentions more technical aspects of filmmaking, such as mise-en-scène, cinematography, and editing, it mostly focuses on content and narrative style.

The Introduction discusses the war film genre in general and tries to define its major characteristics. Robert Eberwein makes the interesting observation that, to define a film genre, you need to know which films are typical of that genre. But without knowing the genre's defining characteristics, you can't select films that represent the genre! In an era before television, Eberwein argues that the earliest American war films were made as attempts to inform and educate American citizens about the then-ongoing Spanish-American War of 1898. He suggests there were three main types of war film: "actualities" (real footage of recent events; what would later be called newsreels or documentaries), re-enactments (of real battles), and narratives (films that told a complete story, usually using actors and sets). These types could be combined. Some early war films had all three types of footage. Eberwein identifies some of the conventions of the war film. These include characters (such as seasoned veterans and raw recruits, often racially and culturally diverse, although such diversity was unrealistic until after the Second World War) and narrative elements (such as training, combat, off-duty activities, and the aftermath of war).

Chapter 1 is a historical overview of American war films, from the Civil War to the Iraq War, with mention of many films that stand out from each war. Many films about the two World Wars were made while those wars were still in progress. By contrast, films about the Vietnam War, a war that America lost, didn't start to appear until after the war was over. Many earlier films were, if not outright propaganda, at least supportive of the war effort. Later films were either anti-war or not shy about showing the more horrific aspects of warfare.

Chapter 2 examines some of the critical issues involved in discussing and studying American war films. This includes defining the genre, as mentioned above, and also the relationship of war films to real history, and the issue of realism in war films. Eberwein introduces here the idea that a war film is not necessarily about the war that it depicts, especially if the subject is a past war. For example, the movie M*A*S*H (1970) was set in the Korean War, but raised issues that really pertained to the Vietnam War. This chapter uses Saving Private Ryan (1998) as a model for for thinking about these critical issues.

The remaining chapters look at specific films as representative of their times and examines what they say about the evolving role of war films in society and art. These films includes All Quiet on the Western Front (1930), Destination Tokyo (1943) and other films of retaliation for Pearl Harbor, Platoon (1986) and Full Metal Jacket (1987), Glory (1989), Iraq War films (including Courage Under Fire, Three Kings, and Jarhead), and Clint Eastwood's Iwo Jima films, Flags of Our Fathers and Letters from Iwo Jima (both 2006). The book concludes with almost 30 pages of notes and index.

Eberwein doesn't seem to come to any grand conclusion, but probably no conclusion is possible about an art form that has been around for over a century, constantly changing with society and technology. The writing is mostly accessible, although the vocabulary and sentence structure is sometimes a bit too scholarly to make this a book for everyone. If there's a message here, it's that American war films tend to reflect Americans back to themselves, for better and for worse. Since so few citizens ever experience war directly, the war film is one of the only ways they have of coming to some kind of understanding of what this all too common human activity is like and what it means.

[Nat]

Contains informative discussion of Edison's early "wargraphs" documenting or reenacting events from the Spanish American war (all of which are available to watch on the National Archives website or on Youtube). Also helpfully points out that the boring, massive historical epics that feature tons of big-name actors representing a battle from both sides of the conflict (The Longest Day, Tora, Tora, Tora, Midway, A Bridge Too Far) function by invoking the rich generic war movie history of their famous actors (e.g., John Wayne and Henry Fonda in A Bridge Too Far).