the times | Saturday April 9 2022 saturday review 5
The Battle
of Algiers
Fight club: the experts’ guide to the best films about conflict
Zulu
utterly, wonderfully enjoyable from the
first moments to the last.
I must have seen this movie more than
any other film. I think that, in essence, it’s
reasonably accurate. I did enjoy Saving Pri-
vate Ryan, but while I’d give it eight out of
ten as a movie I’d give it six for accuracy.
And accuracy does matter — I’m so tuned
into historical errors they scream at me
from the screen and it affects my enjoy-
ment. The best for accuracy are The Thin
Red Line, The Cruel Sea (faultless as a his-
torical piece) and Downfall. The worst?
The Imitation Game — utter garbage and
historically complete nonsense.
MGM (subscribe with Amazon)Max Hastings
The Guns of Navarone (1961)
The Guns of Navarone, which I first saw
aged 15, is not the most realistic war movie
ever made — its heroics are preposter-
ous. Yet as a teenager I found it as inspi-
rational as I do today: the storm, the
cliffs, the Greek islands, the superbly
hammy stars, the theme music.
It took me 30 years to discover
that it was the Germans who were
the real stars and victors of the 1943
Dodecanese campaign, while the
British messed up everything. The
chronic problem for almost all makers
of big war movies is that to win audien-
ces they need romance, success and
Americans, while if they tell the truth —
that war is utterly horrible, and the bad
guys often win — they never raise the
money for a sequel.
Some of the 1950s British war films, The
Cruel Sea among them, possessed a truth
that few modern counterparts can match
because all the actors came from the war-
time generation — Richard Todd and co
knew what it was like at the sharp end.
I tell my children that if they want to
know what battle really looks like, they
should watch selected snatches of biopics,
not the whole thing: the first 20 minutes of
Saving Private Ryan — the scene on the
D-Day beaches is superb, whereas the
rest of the movie is Hollywood claptrap.
The D-Day stuff in the miniseries Band
of Brothers is terrific, and Damian Lewis
does a great turn as a young US Airborne
lieutenant.
Netflix, Amazon, Apple TV, Sky StoreLyse Doucet Julia (1977)
This film, set before the Second World
War, came to mind as I returned from re-
porting on the run-up to Russia’s invasion
of Ukraine and the destructive weeks that
followed. It centres on the bond between
the prominent American writer Lillian
Hellman and her lifelong friend Julia, who
fought against the Nazis and was mur-
dered for her activism. It reminds us that
wars are never just about troops and tren-
ches, but about a multitude of individual
acts of bravery, resistance and love.
War permeates all the sinews of our
lives, including relationships with our
family and friends. In this film, now widely
believed to be fictionalised, Lillian finds
within herself a courage that had always
eluded her. It was brave since Lillian, who
is Jewish, had to travel to Berlin to smuggle
money to Julia to help to rescue individu-
als from the Nazis’ tightening net. These
are the kinds of true-to-life stories — how-
ever different the details — I’ve seen time
and again in war zones. They stay with me,
with others. Wars are the ugliest of days;
they also provoke acts of courage and
compassion. But, most of all, they are days
of devastating loss, which excavate our
deepest bonds with people and places.
Available to watch on: Amazon
Anthony Loyd
The Longest Day (1969)
Epic and unrivalled, The Longest Day, the
producer Darryl Zanuck’s D-Day portray-
al, captures the sweep and scale of the
Normandy invasion while still giving
prominence to the experience of the indi-
vidual soldiers and airmen in the battle.
Made just 18 years after the event, it has
an all-star cast, including Richard Burton,
Kenneth More, Richard Todd, Robert
Mitchum, Henry Fonda and John Wayne,
that featured veterans of the campaign,
lending the film an élan that somehow
outmatched the other D-Day epic: Spiel-
berg’s 1998 film Saving Private Ryan.
Told from both Allied and German sides
of the battle, Zanuck’s film is based on Cor-
nelius Ryan’s impeccably researched 1959
book on D-Day of the same name, and its
title was drawn from a remark made by
German Field Marshal Erwin Rommel.
“The first 24 hours of the invasion will be
decisive,” Rommel said to his aide. “The
fate of Germany depends on the out-
come... for the Allies, as well as Germany,
it will be the longest day.”
Yet it is Burton, playing a badly injured
British fighter pilot, whose lines resonate
most strongly across the passage of
decades, with as much relevance to war
today as to that fought in Normandy.
Severely wounded while baling out, then
shooting dead a German soldier who
chanced on him in a barn, the dazed pilot,
lying near the German’s corpse, is discov-
ered by a lost American paratrooper.
“It’s funny, isn’t it?” Burton says. “He’s
dead. I’m crippled. You’re lost. I suppose it’s
always like that. I mean war.”
Amazon, Apple TV, Sky Store
James Holland
Battle of Britain (1969)
I’m torn between Terrence Malick’s The
Thin Red Line, set during the Battle for
Guadalcanal, and the 1969 movie Battle of
Britain. But I’m going to choose Battle of
Britain: fabulous aerial action, turns by
Christopher Plummer and Robert Shaw,
memorable one-liners, and it’s simply
nam; the Vietnamese are largely there as
props. But Francis Ford Coppola gets the
craziness of war, its intensity, its horror
and, yes, even its beauty.
Who can forget those first moments
with the black screen, as a tock-tock-tock
is heard and a peaceful jungle appears.
Wisps of smoke float up and helicopters fly
back and forth until the whole jungle ex-
plodes in flames. As Jim Morrison of the
Doors sings The End with that haunting
line, “All the children are insane,” the up-
side-down face of a young soldier floats in.
It is that tension between the power of war,
with all its paraphernalia, and what it does
to those who fight it, that makes the movie
so memorable and so moving.
Amazon, Apple TV, Sky Store, BFI PlayerAntony Beevor
The Battle of Algiers (1966)
Gillo Pontecorvo’s masterpiece was in-
deed “based on a true story”. In this case,
the attempt by the French general Jacques
Massu’s paratroopers to re-exert control
over the city’s casbah, during the Algerian
war of independence against the FLN
(Front de libération nationale). In contrast
to manipulative war movies, which use
that hackneyed formula in an attempt to
claim authenticity, Pontecorvo’s intellec-
tual honesty highlighted the inevitable
cruelty on both sides in urban asymmetric
warfare, with bomb attacks against civilian
targets by the guerrillas and the torture of
captives by the French army desperate for
intelligence about their leaders.
Using black-and-white film in newsreel
style, with a cast of thousands of Algerian
extras, Pontecorvo’s achievement is so
compelling that you need to keep remind-
ing yourself that it is a re-enactment. He
did not even stoop to portray Colonel Ma-
thieu, the commander of the paratroopers,
as General Massu, as most directors would
have done. Mathieu was a composite of
various French officers and depicted as a
cultured man rather than a sadistic bully. It
is a film that avoids the clichés of the stan-
dard war movie. It really does make you
think rather than attempting to milk your
tear ducts with both hands.
Apple TV, BFI Player, Curzon Home Cinema.
Antony Beevor’s Russia: Revolution and
Civil War 1917-1921 will be published by
Weidenfeld & Nicolson on May 26Saul David Zulu (1964)
All historical films take a few liberties with
the truth, and Cy Endfield’s stirring 1964
feature Zulu, depicting the heroic defence
of the mission station at Rorke’s Drift on
January 22-23, 1879, is no different.
It gives the impression that the defend-
ers were mostly Welshmen, when in fact
most came from the industrial slums of
England and Ireland. It paints the two offi-
cers Chard and Bromhead (Stanley Baker
and Michael Caine) as the heroes of the
hour, ignoring the far greater contribution
made by former NCO James Dalton.
And it falsely portrays Private Henry
Hook, one of the 11 Victoria Cross winners,
as an old sweat who liked a drink and was
always in trouble. He was, in fact, a 28-
year-old teetotaller with a spotless service
record who had been in the battalion for
less than two years. So enraged were
Hook’s descendants by this character
assassination that they refused to
attend the premiere.
Yet for all that, it’s a brilliant film
with a believable script, gorgeous
cinematography and a stand-out
performance by Caine, unknown at
the time, who, so the story goes,
played Bromhead only because he
didn’t get the part of Hook. And, for
all its infelicities, Zulu depicts the main
events of that battle — including the
rescue of the patients from the burning
hospital — with remarkable accuracy.
Amazon, Apple TV, Sky StoreMargaret MacMillan
Apocalypse Now (1979)
I am a coward when it comes to death and
destruction, so my favourite war movies
are usually the least realistic ones.
The war movie that I remember best is
Apocalypse Now, which is shot through
with violence and cruelty and the dreadful
wastefulness of war. (Its making also dam-
aged a great many of those involved, as
well as destroying acres of forest in the
Philippines.) It is not a flawless master-
piece. How can it be when the journey up-
river into the heart of darkness finds there
only an enormous, lisping Marlon Brando
who recites his lines as though they were a
boring shopping list? And it is very much
about the American experience in Viet-war images Francis
Ford Coppola’s
Apocalypse Now. Top
right: Michael Caine in
Zulu. Above right: Gillo
Pontecorvo’s The Battle
of Algiers. Below: Steve
Forrest and John Wayne
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