War

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WWII Burma…Six paratroopers undertake an extremely dangerous mission against the Japanese. It will ultimately cost them their lives, except for one “lucky” survivor.Read More »

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Beirut, My City finds Saab and her collaborator, the playwright and director Roger Assaf, returning to the shell of her former home following Israel’s 1982 invasion, finding small glimmers of hope in the chaos of refugee camps and the rubble of decimated neighborhoods.
“I consider this to be my most important film, the one that is the closest to my heart. In 1982, my house was burning. That’s not nothing. It was a very old house. 150 years of history went up in flames and disappeared. All of that is suddenly destroyed. The family home, wiped off the map, gone from the city, having become a pile of ruins.”Read More »

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An adaptation of an HE Bates story, set in an isolated Wiltshire farm in 1942. With her husband a prisoner-of-war, lonely wife (Jackson) strikes up an intimate relationship with a young soldier (Deacon), a farmer’s boy who hates the army. When he impulsively deserts, she hides him, disguised in drag as her sister. The inevitable tensions of their life are increased when two soldiers from the nearby camp discover ‘the girls’, and the lecherous sergeant (Reed) takes a fancy to the one in drag. The relationship between the wife and the deserter is built carefully and convincingly, but in going for laughs as the bullish sergeant, Oliver Reed lets some of the potential tension slip away. As with many of Bates’ stories, the plot is in any case resolved suddenly and melodramatically.Read More »

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Mikko Niskanen’s 1962 adaptation of Paavo Rintala’s novel Pojat (The Boys, 1958) deals with the experiences of young boys during wartime and, more specifically, with the difficult subject of Finnish cooperation with the Nazis during the Continuation War leading up to the Lapland War.

The Raksila Boys are a gang of school boys who are growing up in Oulu. Finland has agreed to ally itself with Hitler’s Germany in order to stand any chance of resisting total defeat against the Soviet Union. Read More »

IMDB Reviewer:
“The Night Fighters” is listed on IMDB under “A Terrible Beauty”, a deceiving title for a movie that has nothing to do with beauty. Considering it had been directed by the great Tay Garnett, and with a cast that included Robert Mitchum, Richard Harris, Ann Heywood, Cyril Cusak, and Dan O’Herlihy, among others, the early promise seemed to evaporate as we watched it.Read More »

Droll French comedian Noel-Noel essays the title role in Le Pere Tranquille (The Quiet Daddy). Contrary to expectations, the star isn’t a secret father, but in fact the unknown head of a WW2 resistance movement. By playing the fool whenever the Nazis are around and about, Noel-Noel is able to conceal his double life and successfully carry out his various sabotage missions. This deft combination of comedy and melodrama builds to a particularly suspenseful climax. Le Pere Tranquille was directed by Rene Clement, who also helmed the classic “underground” film Battle of the Rails. (All Movie Guide)Read More »

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Made immediately following the end of the war, Blasetti’s Un giorno nella vita follows
the trend of many other Italian films from this moment in history, and investigates the
situation of Italian people locked in mortal conflicts on native soil. In this case, the setting is
a secluded Convent of Nuns, the inhabitants of which appear to have lived through the war
years relatively oblivious and unaffected by the events of the outside world. However, the
peace of the Convent is upset, when a group of Italian partisans led by Amedeo Nazzari
takes shelter on the grounds of the convent. The Germans are in close pursuit, and one of
the partisans is in dire need of medical attention. Elisa Cegani and Mariella Lotti are
featured in the cast of nuns, who decide to aid the wounded partisan, and slowly also come
to sympathize with the battle weary men.Read More »

Plot synopsis
Westfront 1918 (aka Comrades of 1918) was the first talkie effort from German filmmaker G. W. Pabst, which he made for Nero Films, a production company headed up by Seymour Nebenzahl. Like the contemporary Hollywood production All Quiet on the Western Front, Pabst’s film is a bitter, melancholy antiwar statement. The story concentrates on four German soldiers, sent to the front in the waning days of World War 1. The futility of killing an enemy who is already dead spiritually, and of being killed for a cause that has for all intents and purposes been resolved, is brought home to the viewer with both barrels. The astonishingly fluid camerawork of Fritz Arno puts the spectator in the thick of the battle, and the effect is both terrifying and heartbreaking To watch only a few moments of Westfront 1918, one might think that Pabst had been making sound pictures all his life, rather than a mere couple of months. – by Hal Erickson.Read More »

Love and injury in time of war. Attilio de Giovanni teaches poetry in Italy. He has a romantic soul, and women love him. But he is in love with Vittoria, and the love is unrequited. Every night he dreams of marrying her, in his boxer shorts and t-shirt, as Tom Waits sings. Vittoria travels to Iraq with her friend, Fuad, a poet; they are there with the second Gulf War breaks out. Vittoria is injured. Attilio must get to her side, and then, as war rages around him, he must find her the medical care she needs. In war, does love conquer all?Read More »