Articles tagged with war

The scene is set in the early twentieth century suburban Britain with smartly tailored suits, flowing dresses, stiff necks, high noses and filtered cigarettes. The Post-World War I and Pre-World War II political turmoil is shown having its effect on life in general. So one can only imagine what pleasant drift from reality the first few minutes of the film hold. Typewriter keys tap as everyday happenings of those times are portrayed in the foreground. The acoustic effects along with that of...

There is certainly no doubt that David Lean is not fond of war. The director of both Lawrence of Arabia and The Bridge on the River Kwai could hardly be clearer with his message. However war serves a sort of purpose in both films, pushing men to be extraordinary, which is the infuriating flipside to its madness and destruction.

Unlike Lawrence (give or take some mistakes and some polishing), Bridge is a work of fiction, based on the novel by the man who...

Out of a perhaps endless variety of World War II films, The Guns of Navarone presents a number of interesting moral conundrums on top of a crucial and daunting – or more to the point, physically impossible – mission. Based on an Alistair MacLean novel, the plot follows the exploits of six men and two women, as they work their way across Nazi-occupied Greece to the titular guns, which they are under orders to “spike.” (The term comes from the eighteenth century, when...

When I was growing up on the east coast, when we went to the city to see a movie (our city of choice was Baltimore) we went most often to three theaters, the Charles, the Rotunda, and the Senator (the logic of this name being, I suppose, the closeness of the nation’s capitol, only an hour by car to the south). The first two do not stand out in my memory but for the films I saw at them, but the last is a palatial theater, 900 seats and a gigantic single screen, built in 1939, which...