Favorite Military Movies

The Washington Times ^ | Oct. 10, 2003 | John McCaslin, Inside the Beltway

[wardaddy]

you and me too....besides the only folks who I give a real shite about what they think about my posts are right here on these types of threads

..or on "third world stuff"

..or Southern threads..

I have seen that if folks really want to implode around here, then they should hang out on evo-creo threads, libertarian threads, WOD threads or Bush-bashing threads and make a name for themselves as an antagonist and they will be gone in short order.

Race...along with immigration are big deal killers around here....gotta be careful.

[wardaddy]

done..

[BOOTSTICK]

"Patton", Sands of Iwo Jima", In Harms Way", "Gettysburg", "The Patriot", "Stalag 17", "Gunga Din"

[lawdude]

"Castle Keep"?

I have tried to watch this ..... movie ..... a dozen times and have yet to make sense of it.

[lawdude]

Or...

Howze about "Exodus"?

[jaugust]

Patton
Run Silent, Run Deep
Midway (mainly because of "SENSURROUND")
Tobruk
Twelve o' Clock High
Big Red One
The Great Escape
They Were Expendable
Mr. Roberts
Braveheart (It qualifies)
Das Boot
The Longest Day

Thumbs Down:
Platoon (Don't want to glorify Oliver Stone)
Flight of the Intruder (Great book, HORRIBLE movie. Danny Glover (in spite of his liberal leanings) is the ONLY good thing about this movie.)

[jaugust]

ABSOLUTELY. I forgot! Have that one on tape...GREAT movie!

[wolficatZ]

Two Russian masterpieces:

 

Ballad of a Soldier (1959) Alyosha has it rough, being a Russian teenager on the front lines of World War II. But when he singlehandedly takes out two German tanks, he earns a day pass to go home and visit his mother. And wouldn't you know it... the voyage home is far more treacherous than those enormous tanks.

 

 

 

IVAN'S CHILDHOOD (1962)

		Andrei Tarkovsky's prize-winning debut feature is an extraordinarily moving view of war and revenge. 12-year old Ivan is determined to avenge his family's death at the hands of the Nazis, and he joins a Russian partisan regiment as a scout. His ability to slip through enemy lines more easily than an adult makes him useful to the army, but, as his missions become increasingly dangerous, it is decided that he must be removed from the front line.
	Ivan resists and convinces his commanding officers to allow him to carry out one last expedition. The wonderful monochrome photography depicts Ivan's war in a series of memorable sequences: from the opening shots of him creeping through a dead and submerged forest; the flashback to happier days by the seashore; his devastated home village, to the final sequences in the paper-strewn ruins of Berlin in 1945.

[Squantos]

I was jerkin Laz's chain............:o)

Like Travis Says.....I stear/steer clear of those threads for the most part unless a troll is just bustin folks chops. Then I pile on.

Stay Safe WD !

[Cloud William]

I'd rather watch old Victory at Sea sequences and similar things taken from military film and newsreels during the 40s and 50s than most war movies. The scale of many of the major operations in WW-II were large enough to make filming more than a little of them nearly impossible. In other words, how are you going to film a group of B25s flying in a wedge formation which is several miles across?

The History Channel's "WWII In Color" series strikes a pretty good balance; there's one episode that follows the exploits of a P-47 squadron as the Allies push through France.

Going back to the previous "Great War", The Blue Max is a wonderfully detailed film.

[friendly]

Third photo is from Starship Troopers!!

[tm22721]

'Danger UXB' is a BBC movie series about the Brits struggle to defuse unexploded bombs in London during the Blitz.

Every new fuse design is an episode in high suspense until the UXB team learns how to deactivate it.

BUMP

[archy]

Third photo is from Starship Troopers!!

You have to specify Starship Troopers I now. ST2 is on the way and in production.

Haaaaa! Kill bugs!

Would you like to know more?

-archy-/-

[archy]

I saw No Man's Land...and Vukovar and Sarajevo....a bunch of Balkans movies.

Give The Paraclete by Velko Milosovich a try some time.

<=== click it!

Uhoh mines!

[archy]

Stalingrad was not too shabby either along the same lines....subtitled I think though.

Try the Finnish film Talvisota, sometimes found with English subtitles listed as *The Winter War*, about the 1939 invasion of Finland by a million Soviet troops.

[archy]

Plus Ryan as a General with his babyface was a bit much. Should of made him a Louie or something.

He was exactly the same age Matt Ridgeway was when he commanded the 82nd Airborne. I believe Ridgeway was the youngest general officer in the US military at the time.

-archy-/-

[archy]

One of my favorite, all-time military movies. I teach military leadership classes for the Navy, and up until this movie, the only other one I have ever used was "Twelve O'Clock High." Twelve O'Clock High is an outstanding tool to explain differing leadership styles.

But I have now incorporated The Last Castle into my courses. Robert Redford's character is an excellent illustration of how to lead by example, whereas the "bad guy" character, Colonel Winter, the warden, is a perfect example of a pencil-pushing military leader devoid of integrity. If you haven't seen it, do

I hope you've seen Nick Nolte's Farewell to the King.

*...What is life, without a little salt?*

-archy-/-

[archy]

"War Hunt"

Redford's very first film in '62 about the Korean War. His uncle served in Belgium in WWII. *****

Cool, have to check it out.

Not to be confused with War Kill about the Phillipine guerillas versus the Japs, WWII, and including a few of the older-now original participants. Also worth checking out. Nice doggies!

-archy-/-

[yarddog]

There was some kind of bad blood between the combat engineers and the 82nd airborne. My Father was in the former and for some reason absolutely hates them. It got so bad that they had a football game after the war at the Berlin polo grounds.

The Engineers won and Daddy and his entire outfit got passes to attend the Posdam conference, of course not as participants. The funny thing is he never once told me why except once he said they (the paratroopers) were trained to fight their own men.

Marshall Zhukov was at the game and when asked which side he was pulling for, he said "the engineers" when asked why he said "because they are wearing red".

Daddy is so old that he can no longer remember a lot. I always wondered what caused the dissention.

[archy]

Anarchy.......at it's best. People say things like that can never happen........

Stay Safe !

Speaking of staying safe, sometime take a look at the movie version of the Harold Robbins book The Adventurers, with Ernest Borgnine, filmed in Colombia around 1970. You'll note some scenes where the troops have their rifles aimed a little high while shooting at each other. They're not using blanks.

There's one particular scene of a guy taking a round in the film. It ought to look a little more like the real thing than most- it was. After the guy died, the editor didn't have the heart to cut the guy's final performance out of the film. And it looked so realistic....

In the film, they needed an open area for a crowd scene to come charging against the evil bad guy dictator's light tanks and armored cars, so instead of the usual thundering herd down the main avenue toward the presidential palace, they came up from behind, from the beach.

A couple of years later when Army commander general General Alvaro Valencia Tovar was dismissed by the government, the tanks and wheelies took up positions around the presidential palace. And they came in by way of the beach, rather than the main drag where the Presidential Guard with the recoilless rifle-mounted jeeps were waiting.

-archy-/- -archy-/-