If you want to learn more about WWII in a more comprehensive manner, sticking to Hollywood isn’t enough. A story of the blurred line between enslavement and collaboration, David Lean’s film drips with jungle sweat as Nicholson tries to protect his men from Japanese cruelty as they work to build a strategically important railway bridge. Timothy Bottoms, This insidious, softly-softly approach to the traumas suffered by the people of Paris during the occupation sets the tone for a riveting, steely-eyed chronicle of resistance. Director: The story is set in post-war Berlin, but was filmed in Los Angeles. | Drama, Thriller, War. Director: Ray Milland, It’s impossible not to love this extremely fictionalized but not-exactly-untrue story of how Burt Lancaster beat Nazis to a pulp to make sure French museums could never be beat. Somehow, Swedish director Tomas Alfredson condensed the intricate tale of moles in British intelligence and Gary Oldman gave a performance as aging agent George Smiley that somehow equaled Guinness' original portrayal. Kate Nelligan, TH, We’ve all been there. Bette Davis, Director: Anthony Franciosa, ), Alfred Hitchcock couldn't get Cary Grant (who was retiring from acting) and Eva Marie-Saint to reprise their North By Northwest chemistry for this spy thriller and had to make do with Paul Newman and Julie Andrews, who happened to be the two biggest movie stars on the planet. The decision to hire Tom Stoppard to adapt JG Ballard’s fictionalised memoir of his days in a Japanese internment camp pays off with a focused script and some wonderfully memorable characters. “Just following orders” is the standard old line, but what’s most striking about this story is seeing how so many can disagree with their government, yet find themselves still going along. Making the infamous opening of ‘Saving Private Ryan’ look like a Sunday stroll in the park, Elem Klimov’s hallucinatory masterpiece feels like the nearest cinema has ever come to recreating the ruthlessly discombobulating sensory experience of war. | Another is a Jew who escapes into the forests, linking up with Polish partisans who fight Nazis. 88 min (available to buy or rent from iTunes and Amazon Video. A disorienting, downbeat and unforgettable classic. Like us on Facebook and follow us on Twitter. Director: We look at decades of film history to answer just that, finding plenty of Bond, Bourne, and Hitchcock films along the way. Thomas Kretschmann plays a Nazi office leading a platoon into the crucible and, in the spirit of ‘Das Boot’ (with which this film shares producers), struggling to lead them out again. A number of films have humanized the German rank-and-file during the second world war. I love that film. The Spy Who Came in From the Cold (1965), John LeCarré was the Tom Clancy of his day and his 1963 novel The Spy Who Came in From the Cold was a runaway bestseller made into a highly anticipated 1965 movie starring Richard Burton as a downtrodden British spy seemingly recruited by the East Germans as a potential defector. Bruce Lester, Votes: As Farrell races to find a way to prove his innocence, he uncovers a murder conspiracy and coverup led by Brice's general counsel Scott Pritchard (a fantastic performance by Will Patton). TH Mitchell Leisen TH, Buy, rent or watch ‘From Here to Eternity’, Ten years after the liberation of the concentration camps, Alain Resnais made this mournful 32-minute documentary that offers as clear-sighted and painful an insight into the National Socialist mindset as any film before or since. | What are the best spy movies of all time? Laraine Day, | | Déjà vu! Directors: 123 min Michael Anderson The plot, in which a German parachutes into a sleepy English village and sets about clearing the way for a major invasion, may be fantasy, but it’s alarmingly powerful. Keith Gordon 93 min Wartime secret agents are on a mission to destroy a deadly new type of torpedo hidden in a Nazi stronghold in France. Not Rated Drama, War. Werner Peters, PG-13 Nemes’s camera stays – literally – right in Saul’s face, using as few cuts as possible to immerse the viewer in an all-too-believable vision of hell. Dreamlike and devastating, this was a new kind of war movie. Rachid Bouchareb’s drama shines a light on those North African soldiers drafted in to fight for the Free French after D-Day. Michael Apted | ALD, Famous for the cinema’s best ever punch-up on a moving cable car, this behind-the-lines romp is also reputed to clock up the highest body count of any Clint Eastwood film, with hundreds of Germans throwing themselves headlong into a storm of lead. (available to buy or rent from iTunes, Amazon Video, Vudu and Google Play. Denise Grey, Approved Edward Brophy, PG-13 Sombre and claustrophobic photography and Peckinpah’s clear understanding of a working platoon of men are all far removed from the monotonous simplicity of most big-budget war films.Quentin Tarantino says: ‘I’m a big fan of “Cross of Iron”, it’s really cool. Jack Hawkins, In the case of French Army Officer Henri Rochard’s autobiography ‘I Was an Alien Spouse of Female Military Personnel Enroute to the United States Under Public Law 271 of the Congress’, we reckon they had a point. | Potsdam is the first German city to be named UNESCO Creative City of Film — thanks largely to its Babelsberg Studios and a famous movie starring Marlene Dietrich. In this jolly gender-swap comedy from screwball master Howard Hawks, Cary Grant plays Rochard (mercifully eschewing a French accent), whose romance with chauffeur Ann Sheridan somehow leads to him dressing as a woman and smuggling himself into the US. TH, Spielberg, Hanks, all those Academy Awards. But while World War II, like all major conflicts, was characterised by destruction on an unfathomable scale, the films documenting the war have been endlessly creative. The documents shed light on the warship's early years and the young United States' first international conflict. Biography, Drama, War. Early in World War II, Danish sea captain Andersen, delayed in a British port, tangles with German spies. Do you agree with our list? In Europe at the start of World War II, a woman notices that wherever her husband goes, the Nazis seem to follow. Some lesser-known wartime stories, such as Japan’s The Burmese Harp and the German-made Generation War, rank alongside the classics, Last modified on Thu 22 Feb 2018 19.03 GMT. | An American woman of Irish, Jewish-German parentage goes undercover in Nazi Germany. Deborah Kerr, DJ. ALD, Not Tarantino’s WWII picture, but the 1978 B-movie that partially inspired it. To nab the spy ring, the Government has the West Coast's top radio... See full summary », Director: This 2002 movie centers on Sophie Scholl, a 21 year-old student in Munich who was guillotined in 1943 for distributing anti-Hitler propaganda. Carla Lehmann, Passed | in a Nazi spy ring. It still feels like a brave move – and it lends a film that could’ve been fusty and traditionalist a genuine cutting edge. (available to buy or rent from iTunes, Amazon Video, Vudu and Google Play.). | ), No one really thought we needed a movie version of John LeCarré's classic spy novel after the seven-part 1979 BBC TV series starring Alec Guinness at the height of his Obi-Wan Kenobi fame. Director: | Stars: Karel Lamac Sydney Greenstreet, Klimov’s film argues convincingly that there are no heroes in war, only victims and perpetrators, and that no amount of guns and ammo will be able to reconcile the memory of the Holocaust. | TH, QT takes the reins again for the tale of Heydrich’s assassination, Quentin Tarantino says... ‘When I was writing “Inglourious Basterds”, I ended up looking at a different type of war film than I’d ever watched before. Leslie Banks, Approved In fact, five years before Stauffenberg’s 1944 attempt, a German worker named George Elser planned and executed an elaborate (but unsuccessful) attempt to kill Hitler. camp barracks black marketeer, J.J. Sefton, is suspected of being an informer. Director: © 2020 Deutsche Welle | Robert Aldrich threw a rock in a tree and Jim Brown fell out, Charles Bronson fell out, John Cassavetes fell out, and Telly Savalas… and that’s without even mentioning Lee Marvin. Director: TH, Roman Polanski kicked off the twenty-first century with a sophisticated, Oscar-winning WWII survival drama which not only offered an authentic depiction of the Warsaw ghetto, but proved that – controversy aside – the director could still deliver when it mattered. | Emeric Pressburger Forget ‘Enemy at the Gates’ and the 2015 Fyodor Bondarchuk CG-fest, this rare Germans’ eye view of the conflict is a much more authentic glimpse of the hell that was Stalingrad – the turning point in World War II and one of the most brutal battles in human history. | Drama, Romance, Thriller. This is a movie so painstakingly crafted, so precise in its details, that it could’ve become cold and removed, unable to fully feel the horrors it depicts. Barbara Rütting, Lillian Gish, An American ballistics expert in Turkey finds himself targeted by Nazi agents. Director: | Biography, Drama, War. Adventure, Film-Noir, Romance. Paul Scofield, Stars: | DJ, At the beginning of WWII, all UK cinemas were closed. Under her unerringly tender care, fleeting memories of life prior to injury return to the ailing patient, including, most significantly, the juicy affair he had with a friend’s wife (Kristin Scott Thomas, looking enigmatic in linen). Spies live lonely lives and are destined to suffer a bad end. Richard Marquand | | Fritz Lang (Currently streaming on Netflix and available to buy or rent from iTunes, Amazon Video, Vudu and Google Play. Stars: But when you’re watching it, it seems unfathomable that anything could be worth that.’, William Holden’s authority-defying, nurse-goosing square-jawed US Navy Commander Shears may be the supposed hero, but in this grandiose epic set in a Japanese labour camp it’s Alec Guinness’s hopelessly compromised Colonel Nicholson that we really relate to. John Huston, Richard Burton, | One of the lynchpins of New German Cinema and, alas, the only female-directed film on this list (which says something about war movies). DJ, Withdrawal methodSam Peckinpah’s only war film follows a German platoon through the 1943 retreat on the Russian front. | | Spielberg isn't the first filmmaker to portray secret agents in Germany. | Stars: Starting in outer space and incorporating a fatal plane crash, French ghosts, naked pan-pipe playing children, brain surgery, feverish hallucinations, Abraham Lincoln, gushing romance and the halls of heaven itself, this is one of British film’s grandest fantasies. But the German government didn't allow them to shoot in the building - a council decided it should not be used in commercial films. Director: | Crime, Drama, Film-Noir. And this goes against all the ponderous, violin-music diatribes we’ve seen in war movies since the ’80s.’, Burt on the beachIf all you remember is Burt Lancaster and Deborah Kerr rolling in the Hawaiian surf, it’s time to take another look at this hard-headed wartime drama set in the run-up to the attack on Pearl Harbour. Bond's love scenes were filmed in the studio, though. The Soviets make a surprise appearance in the film and the ending is truly shocking the first time you see it. | Palmer survives and wins the day but there's no beautiful woman or glamorous locales waiting at the end of his mission. | Look out for your first newsletter in your inbox soon! Maybe it’s revisionist history, or maybe it’s a warning for the future. It's the kind of literate movie that you'd think Hollywood could crank out by the dozen and you hardly ever see. Terence Young Stars: 66 min Hollywood makes a lot of World War II movies — but the vast majority of them are told from the American perspective, in English.

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