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The Battle Of The Somme - the original 1916 feature documentary - is, or will be very soon - released by the Imperial War Museum. I could recommend loads more, but availability is a problem.
Can any Forum members help me,i an very interested in any Films relating to the Great War,can Forum members supply me with a list of Films that are still available,or obtainable.Many thanks.
The Battle Of The Somme - the original 1916 feature documentary - is, or will be very soon - released by the Imperial War Museum. I could recommend loads more, but availability is a problem.
Is that the classic restaging where as they go "over the top" one of them slides back into the trench and then as most of them go off into the smoke, one of them is a bit slow stepping over the first lot of barbed wire? It's been used in loads of documentaries about WWI but they don't often point out that it's a restagingname='penfold']The Battle Of The Somme - the original 1916 feature documentary - is, or will be very soon - released by the Imperial War Museum. I could recommend loads more, but availability is a problem.
Steve
name='Steve Crook']Is that the classic restaging where as they go "over the top" one of them slides back into the trench and then as most of them go off into the smoke, one of them is a bit slow stepping over the first lot of barbed wire? It's been used in loads of documentaries about WWI but they don't often point out that it's a restaging
Steve
That bit, often pointed out, was indeed shot at Salisbury Plain manoeuvres....but most of the rest was emphatically not, and remains very moving even now. As a film that was shown to mainstream cinema audiences as the War raged on, it's a remarkably brave film in terms of content. There's certainly nothing so graphic on battlefeld casualties from WW2, and not much from Iraq today...
The 1960s series THE GREAT WAR (voiced by Sir Ralph Richardson )is still, for me, the definitive piece of television on this subject . I saw it at the same time as reading A.J.P Taylor's acerbic book on the origins- just out in paperback - a real eye-opener for a schoolboy.
For anybody interested, I notice the DVD sets for both THE GREAT WAR and THE WORLD AT WAR have recently been discounted down to £60 each. A bargain if there was one!
(Initially, I thought of many of my films that were WWI tales but after recounting them, I doubt any would be useful from a documentarian point of view.)
PATHS OF GLORY (1957 - Kirk Douglas; a courtroom drama that deals with a WWI incident; an ugly and angering story)
SGT YORK (1941 - Gary Cooper; it spends maybe 10 minutes on one incident in WWI; whether it's factually portrayed is another matter)
WINGS (1927 - Clara Bow, Hedda Hopper, young young Gary Cooper; pilots and the joys of aerial combat, but mostly a love story that has to end tragically - that's why hankies were invented)
THE LOST SQUADRON (1932 - Eric von Stroham; Robert King-Kong Armstrong, Mary Maltese-Falcon Astor - a film about making a WWI film - with almost nothing to do with WWI itself).
HELL'S ANGELS (1930 - Jean Harlow; the Howard Hughes extravaganza that was his first Talkie. I was glad to see this on TV where I could wander about - Hughes and Crew obviously did - why shouldn't the audience?)
ALL QUIET ON THE WESTERN FRONT (several)
BODY AND SOUL (1931; I have not seen this but it sits on our shelf)
WAR NURSES (1930 - a pre-Code film with Robert Montgomery, Zazu Pitts and Hedda Hopper; one more that sits on my shelf that's never been seen)
LAWRENCE OF ARABIA (1962 - same time, very different space).
MATA HARI (1931 - Greta Garbo as a German spy in Paris, 1917; hardly anything about WWI except the setting and time-frame; but it's Garbo!)
There's Redford's 1975 GREAT WALDO PEPPER that's another film about making WWI aerial combat films, but other than the appearance of biplanes, it has nothing to do with WWI.
As I go thru my list, I see all these films that have little more to do with WWI except as a time-period backdrop. Were film-makers THAT protective of the sensitivies of movie-goers? No real action outside of a few staged airplane battles? Or were the consulting veterans so horrified that they refused to re-create WWI battles on-film?
I have a much longer list of WWII films and while few will be documentarian, all of them portray some version. I'm surprised that WWI received relatively little coverage from film-makers. Perhaps film-making was too young, and by the time the machinery improved, WWII was "available" for their story telling.
Malcolm Macdowell did an odd little movie about WW1 Flyersname='PBI']Can any Forum members help me,i an very interested in any Films relating to the Great War,can Forum members supply me with a list of Films that are still available,or obtainable.Many thanks.
Dickie Attenborough's movie on Brighton Pier might seem a little irrelevant at the start but if you don't weep by the end you're a better man than me, Gunga Din.
Oh, What a Lovely War
I beieve that "All Quet On Tha Western Front" Is worth a mention.
John Llewellyn
The Dawn Patrol (1938) is excellent. Though it stars Errol Flynn, David Niven and Basil Rathbone it's a much more serious film than you might expect. It's due out on DVD Region 1 soon in Volume 2 of the Errol Flynn Collection.
Ted
There are a number of British films from the 1930s which no one has mentioned.These include Journey's End and Brown On Resoloution.I have these and if you are interested in obtaining a copy send me a pm.
How about The Blue Max and Zeppelin ? I'm not sure if they are British since they aren't on the A-Z listings. Not exactly classics either.
Journey's End is superb....though there is a German language version from a couple of years later that is better still; Conrad Veidt takes the Colin Clive role; stunning. One film of the trenches I would love to see again is from around the same time; Suspense, with Hay Petrie stealing the show as a prototype Private Baldrick.
I Was a Spy with Madeleine Carroll and Conrad Veidt. Regeneration with Jonathan Pryce and Jonny Lee Miller. King and Country with Dirk Bogade and Tom Courtney. The Spy in Black with Conrad Veidt and Valerie Hobson. The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp with Anton Walbrook and Roger Livesey.
Not British - A Very Long Engagement with Audrey Tautou.
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