The War Film

Robert Eberwein, editor. The War Film. Rutgers University Press, 2004. 236 pages; $22.95. Fundamental Elements Why we fight, or, more precisely, how we are and have been projected as a warring nation on film, is the subject of this edited book on American war films. Only a few classic foreign-made works are mentioned in passing. What should also be noted is that this book is largely concerned with the fictional combat or pseudo combat film as opposed to war dramas and/or various generic hybrids, such as training and POW films. In an otherwise thoughtful and informative introduction, this crucial distinction is never clearly engaged. Instead, the extended analytical introduction focuses on the most fundamental elements of the war film genre: documenting, re-enacting, and/or creating narratives concerning the experience of war-most particularly World War II and the Vietnam War-and then outlines the four predictable thematic sections of the book: Genre, Race, Gender, History. The War Film is thereafter comprised of a series of previously published articles and excerpts from books originally appearing in print between the mid 1980s and 2003. But, unfortunately, none have been revised in any way so that simple, but basic, factual errors remain. For instance: the wrong release date for John Ford's The Lost Patrol ( 1934) in the contribution from Jeanine Basinger 's seminal 1986 book, The World War II Combat Film. Though initially intended primarily for an academic audience, the selections are mostly jargon free and engage films that are easily accessible on DVD-a plus for using this book as a classroom text. A minus concerns its limiting dependence upon the list of usual suspects. An outstanding exception is Tania Modeleski's discussion of Dogfight (1991). After pointing out the misogyny in many Vietnam War-oriented films, she focuses on this comparatively obscure female-directed film starring River Phoenix and Lili Taylor. Presented as a 1966 flashback on personal events that took place in San Francisco in November 1963, Dogfight creates an interesting take on the collective psychology of America on the eve of its entrance into that prolonged conflict - through the eyes of an awkward young woman who has a less than traditional romantic encounter with a young soldier. Though definitely from a feminist perspective, neither the film nor Modeleski's close reading of it are didactic. The short contribution on All Quiet on the Western Front (1930) seems to be included for no other reason than that the film is part of the hoary canon of antiwar films. It is a weakly developed attempt to highlight the basic components of the antiwar subgenre that has not improved with age since its original publication in 1998. Moreover, it displays a superficial historical knowledge about that horrific 20th century global conflict and utterly fails to contextually establish why such antiwar statements were made, their impact, if any, and upon whom. There is an extended extract from Basinger's book The World War II Combat Film. Through a close reading of the classic Bataan (1943), she succeeds in more or less codifying the basic combat film formula, that, with few exceptions, centers upon the multiethnic, class, universal unit. All who have subsequently written on the subject, including myself, cannot help but have been influenced by her work. Basinger reinforces and expands upon her thesis by a comparison of the combat unit to a family within the tight confines of a submarine on patrol as portrayed in another WWII American film, starring Cary Grant as the captain, Destination Tokyo (1943). Interestingly, this is the only section of Eberwein's The War Film to engage the subject of non-ground combat. Dana Polan's contribution centers upon director Terence Malick's idiosyncratic cinematic interpretation of The Thin Red Line (1998). Polan not only focuses on the auteurism of the director but also upon the complex intersection between reality and the viewer's perceptions of reality-is the surreal perspective of a film's character more "real" in regards to the experience of warfare than such graphic representations of combat violence as the much-touted opening twenty minutes of Spielberg's Saving Private Ryan (1998)? …