This was always said to be the reason that while the USSR was belligerant and threatening it was actually very keen not to get into such a large war ever again.
Top Rated War Movies
- Thread starter MA-Caver
- Start date
This was always said to be the reason that while the USSR was belligerant and threatening it was actually very keen not to get into such a large war ever again.
OP
- Thread Starter
- #42
This could be very possible. That their own monstrous build up during the cold war was nothing more than a self-assurance of the atrocities of WWII could never happen to them again. That they wanted to feel that if anyone attacked/invaded them (again) that they could put such a high price on it that it'd be a waste.
Yet it was greed, to be able to continue their build up, that ruined them. The collapse was more due to the weight of their own debts (a lesson we SHOULD learn here) than anything else.
Yet their stories should be told. They're just as human as the rest of us and their people fought valiantly against the Germans in often inferior (at the time) equipment and horrendous weather conditions. The running joke of German officers and soldiers not wanting to be sent to the "Russian Front" had a lot of truth underlying it. They knew just as well how bad it was.
Perhaps someday we'll hear/see more stories from that front.
As well as the battles and horrors in China.
Maybe it's because of my interest in military history (that I've pursued since my pre-teens) that I don't think the Russian campaigns are 'secret' or untold (or at least undertold)? It could be that I over-estimate what the majority of people know, especially these days when it seems teenagers have never even heard of Dunkirk or Belsen (to site two major events at either end of the war)
!The Japanese actions in Asia, however, are destined to be kept quiet for a very long time I fear - unless the Chinese do a couple of blockbusters to break the ice perhaps? The Japanese will certainly be in no hurry for those tales to become common knowledge.
Has anyone mentioned The Young Lions? That has to be one of the greatest war movies of all time. It came out in 1958, starring Marlon Brando, Dean Martin (absolutely deadly serious in his role, showing his great range as an actor) and Montgomery Clift. There's a nice summary here.
Right as usual, S. What happened at Nanking alone deserves a movie, and an angry one at that. The Japanese have never owned up to the atrocities they committed there. For sheer racist contempt for the rest of humanity, the Japanese military rivaled the Nazis point for point.
Right as usual, S. What happened at Nanking alone deserves a movie, and an angry one at that. The Japanese have never owned up to the atrocities they committed there. For sheer racist contempt for the rest of humanity, the Japanese military rivaled the Nazis point for point.
OP
- Thread Starter
- #45
It is surprising with the ability of Chinese film-makers to make stunning cinema that they haven't thus far. It could still be too painful but somehow I don't think so. China has grown strong and mighty since those dark days of Japanese occupation. They've become a world super-power and have much to be proud of (in their own right)... in-spite of their own brutalization of Nepal and Tibet which could be compared to the U.S. brutalization of the Native Americans during the 1800's.
Either way this seems to be such a deep dark subject. Having read one of the better books of the Nanking atrocities (The Rape of Nanking by Iris Chang http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Rape_of_Nanking_(book) ) there are things that maybe even cinema still cannot portray (on a factual basis). :idunno:
Young Lions is another great film.
Don't you think it's funny how we're saying how great some of these war films are when war itself is so terrible, yet we applaud at how well it's portrayed on film. Go figure.
I'm not sure what message you meant to type, but by the time it got here it was so garbled that it read:
I liked him in the Matt Helm stuff, but...!
I liked him in the Matt Helm stuff, but...!
What's that Wittegenstein quote? Whereof we cannot speak, we must pass over in silence—but at the same time we're told by Santayana that those who do not learn from the past are condemned to repeat it, and how can you learn from something that no one will talk about? The problem is how to talk about Nanking, or Auschwitz, or similar unspeakable horrors, in a form of art. There's a general sense that no depiction of such events can give the true scale of their magnitude, and therefore to try to depict them risks reducing and trivializing them, doing a further indignity to their victims. But the work of Primo Levi, or Tadeusz Borowski in This Way to the Gas, Ladies and Gentleman, or Werfel's unbelievably horrific, heart rending The Forty Days of Musa Dagh, about the Armenian genocide, shows it can be done—in a literary format. The problem I think is that because of its potential both for literal interpretation and huge-screen epic portrayal of epic events (think the Russian version of War and Peace), cinematography has yet to learn how to do what those writers did—approach unimaginable horror at the smallest scale, which often is the only way to give a sense of what the large scale hell that the book is about really involved.
But in the case of The Young Lions, or the simple, sad Russian film Ballad of a Soldier, what the greatest of the war movies drive home is the tragic futility and waste that war involves, even in the best of causes. The best war poetry, such as Wilfrid Owen's, does the same thing. There're plenty of fantasy/action war movies, but the ones that we remember are the ones that convey not the glory but the shame and sadness that we are capable of doing these things to each other, and to ourselves.
No, honestly Arni, he was good! This may be his very best film role ever. Too bad he didn't do more work of that calibre... but I think not many people took him seriously enough to cast him at that same level.
Last edited:
OP
- Thread Starter
- #48
Indeed, he was largely a comedic actor he did several dramatic roles, another notable one was "The Sons Of Katie Elder" with John Wayne.
He may have simply chosen to remain as a comedy actor for the love of it and took on what few serious roles he did portray in as a change of pace. Or some actors just love making people laugh.
I stand corrected! (Now, give me another martini.)
