Hanseat

Amazon is offering a set of five novels on which wellknown war movies are based for the price of a fiver (Cassell Military Paperbacks series). The titles are:

Ice Cold in Alex - Christopher Landon
The Great Escape - Paul Brickhill
Run Silent, Run Deep - Edward L. Beach
M*A*S*H* - Richard Hooker
633 Squadron - Frederick E. Smith

Read a Great War Movie

JohnB_Toronto

I've only read two of these ... Great Escape and Run Silent - both very good books. I see they've also reissued Ewen Montagu's book "The Man Who Never Was" - available in paperback on Amazon.

Nick Dando

I'd recommend Enemy Coast Ahead by Guy Gibson, and Das Boot by the late Lothar Gunther Buccheim.
Some books that didn't get made into films but should have been are two by Colin Forbes - Tramp in Armour and The Heights of Zervos.

Nick

Hanseat

All Quiet on the Western Front is still unsurpassed, as far as I am concerned. Also recommended are The Naked and the Damned (now almost forgotten, it seems) and Captain Corelli's Mandoline (and please forget that absolutely awful disgrace of a film).

JohnB_Toronto

Fabulous movie!!! Erich Maria Remarque's other great war novel was "A Time To Love and A Time To Die". I watched it again a couple of weeks ago and it's OK but a little disappointing. I always felt it could have been better: A WWII equivalent of "All Quiet" it also sees the war through the eyes of a German soldier. The book was highly rated but I haven't read it. I suspect it's better than the movie.

Hanseat

I've always seen it as proof of the amazing power of Remarque's writing that even the TV version of "All Quiet On The Western Front" is actually a good film. I am a little doubtful about yet another version which is rumored to be in pre-pre-production at this moment. I fear we'll see another U-571 surfacing ...

A Time to Love And a Time to Die I've watched only once and that a long time ago, but it didn't leave much of an impression. Would love to see it again, though, especially as Remarque actually played a part in it, something I didn't appreciate back then. The novel is very good, not as good as All Quiet on the Western Front but still way above average. I can also recommend The Road Back (soldiers returning from WWI) and, to a lesser degree, Three Comrades (WWI veterans trying to build a life in Berlin between the wars) - the two unofficial sequels to AQOTWF.

Covering similar territory but an infinitely better movie than A Time to Live ... is Hunde, wollt ihr ewig leben? (English title, Stalingrad: Dogs, Do You Want to Live Forever?) which was realised roughly a year later. One of the best war movies ever made.

Nick Dando

Another great book is The Tin Drum (Die Blechtrommel) by Gunther Grass. The Volker Schlöndorff film is good but doesn't do justice to the book itself and finishes part way through the story. It would require a mini-series in the style of Berlin Alexanderplatz or Heimat to do it full justice. Still, there are some very memorable scenes in the film as it stands - the Nazi Party jamboree that Oskar turns into a waltz, and the fishing for eels.

Nick

Hanseat

I can understand why Schlöndorff made those changes and I think, going by the originally quite negative attitude toward the project and the amazingly positive reception the film eventually received, his choices have been vindicated. Among other things, he made the story so accessible that people actually went and bought the book - only to find that it is, in fact, just as forbidding as they always had assumed. And yes, you are absolutely right about the memorable scenes (personally, I've never since been able to look at lemon sherbet without flinching); in fact, Schlöndorff has somehow managed to condense Grass' writing into images which are far more poignant than the original text (then again, that might just be me, as Günter Grass in general, and Die Blechtrommel in particular, is one of my pet hates ).

I find it interesting, though, that you see Die Blechtrommel as a war novel. Personally, I have always seen it as part of Grass' life-long attempt to define Germany and the German identity - and, of course, to find a literary voice as author and as German after Adorno had declared all such voices should be silent forever; in this sense the war would be at the same time a determining factor and almost incidental. Schlöndorff's film is, of course, far more clearly centered around the war; but, again, I would not necessarily class it as a war movie. And it does seem to leave people slightly confused as to its genre; it is most often simply reviewed as the adaption of a novel, the coward's way out, so to speak.

Still, it made me think about what exactly constitutes a war novel/war movie. And the more I thought about it, the less sure I've become. Does any story set during wartime qualify, for example? Would love to hear other views on this ...

D Cairns

I think genres are inherently imprecise, so lots of films fall into gray areas where it's hard to say for sure what genre they belong to. And many films were not consciously intended to be part of a genre: the concept of film noir was not familiar to the directors who made most of the noir classics.

So ultimately I guess I don't find the question of "is it or isn't it a war film?" that urgent or compelling. I'd prefer to ask if a given film says or shows anything meaningful about war, which I think The Tin Drum does.