BOT's Top 50 Historical Fiction Films - The Countdown

[Eric the Minion]

8 minutes ago, The Panda said:

 

Oh shoot, went to grab a drink during the middle of a write up and somehow this was posted!

 

Will edit it out and post the actual full write up in a bit!  Sorry about that premature reveal guys!

You're a comedian Panda

[grim22]

8 minutes ago, The Panda said:

 

Oh shoot, went to grab a drink during the middle of a write up and somehow this was posted!

 

Will edit it out and post the actual full write up in a bit!  Sorry about that premature reveal guys!

This is some weak ass trolling. The correct way to troll is to post the entire thing and then correct it later.

[Fancyarcher]

10 minutes ago, The Panda said:

 

Oh shoot, went to grab a drink during the middle of a write up and somehow this was posted!

 

Will edit it out and post the actual full write up in a bit!  Sorry about that premature reveal guys!

 

[The Panda]

 

 

"She never woke up again."

 

Historical Setting: World War 2, Civilian Japan

 

Source from the Period

 

"Suddenly, a bright light flashed. Instantly, I squatted down and covered my face with my hands. We had been instructed to do so to protect ourselves when we were bombed. Otherwise, we were told that our eardrums would burst and eyeballs would pop out.  A tremendous heat engulfed us. It was as if we were thrown into a gigantic smelting furnace. Then I was blown down by a blast and beaten into the ground.  I jumped into the water because my body was burning hot. Soon, people started coming into the water one after another. I looked up the sky. It was pitch black and the dust filled the air. The sun was glittering, but it was cold and dark as if it were a winter day.   There was an eerie silence. After a while, I crawled out of the water. Low and weak groans were echoing all over.  I had no idea where my classmates were. Then, I saw one of them coming to me. He asked me how he looked. I told him; ‘Your cap and clothes are burnt and the skin on your face is hanging like rags.’ He told me that I looked exactly the same.  Near the bridge rail, a badly burned horse was struggling to stand up.  I followed the crowd and walked toward an empty lot. There was a sea of flames all over. I walked up a path to the hilltop of Hijiyama, from which I could see the city. Flames were seen here and there as if heaps of sawdust were burning. Fire sirens were blaring.  I did not feel anything because I could not figure out what was actually going on.

 

After a while, I walked down the hill and saw a group of soldiers in uniform walking toward me. The skin on their faces and hands was coming off and dangling. They were walking with their hands hanging out in front of them, like ghosts do.  I began to realize that something extraordinary had happened. Something out-of-this-world had happened. The elderly were chanting ‘nam-mai-da’ (a Buddhist invocation) in low moaning voices.  I started to walk toward the north, in the direction of Hakushima, where our home was. It was only then I started feeling pains. The burning pains were unbearable, so I dipped a towel into a fire cistern on the roadside and cooled the wounds. Walking was not easy with the ground covered with rubble.  When I reached Tokiwa Bridge near our home, I found my neighborhood was engulfed in flames. I could not go further because the force of the fire was too fierce.  Not knowing what to do, I turned around and walked to the Hiroshima station. The sights at the riverside near the station were scenes from hell.  Lying there were bodies; some were reduced to bones, while others were charcoaled or swollen with blisters. Many bodies were floating in the river.  Suddenly, I heard a military officer giving a command while brandishing a sword. He was out of his mind.  Across the street, a woman came out of a destroyed house, carrying her husband on her back. Soon, she fell down and cried by her dead husband.

 

In the station, employees were hurriedly carrying a stretcher with a woman bleeding from the head.  A train was lying on its side, and black smoke filled the station. I was stunned, kept watching those sights as if I were watching movie scenes.  Then I heard a voice from somewhere telling us to find shelter because there might be another bombing. So I walked to a pagoda near the station. I stayed in the pagoda until the fire died down. In the evening, I started to walk toward our home again.  I came home only to find that my mother was crushed to death under the house. My father later told me that it was likely that she died instantly because the house was so completely flattened and it was at least good that she did not suffer.  My father, who was a school teacher, was spared from the blast because he was in Kusatsu with his students on the day. My two sisters were also spared. The older one was in a shoe factory in Misasa and the younger one had already evacuated to the countryside for safety with her classmates.  It was already in the evening. What should I do? I thought for a while and decided to visit a friend of my father’s in Kawauchi. We had sent some of our valuables, including our family photo albums, to his place to protect them from air raids.  I walked a long distance. When I neared his house, my strength ran out. I fell down in a vegetable patch and lost consciousness. Neighbors found me and carried me into his house.  I was told later that for the next three days, I remained unconscious and was delirious from fever. When I regained consciousness, my father was by my side. Because discharge of pus was profuse, a mosquito net was used to protect me from flies and bugs. Changing the bandages that were soaked with discharge and blood was unbearably painful.

 

My aunt, a younger sister of my mother, visited me while I was at my father’s friend’s house. She did not get burned. But shortly after visiting me, she spewed out black foam from her mouth and died. We learned much later that she died from radiation poisoning, and that the bomb was a nuclear bomb.  On the other hand, a newspaper issued a few days later reported about the bombing. It said the damage was minor and under investigation.  While we did not know about radiation then, rumors were circulating that people were dying one after another, even those who had no external injuries. The riverside nearby became an impromptu crematory. It was fearful to lie in bed thinking that I might be one of those people.  After staying there for one month, I moved to my grandmother’s uncle’s place in Chiyoda-cho, where I stayed for six months.  I suffered from flashbacks for a long time. The atrocious scenes, the flash and blaring sirens repeatedly came back. Even a reflection in a glass would trigger the memory."

- First-person account: I survived Hiroshima

Hiromu Morishita

 

Historical Context

 

"In the early hours of March 10, 1945, 279 U.S. B-29s dropped 1,665 tons of bombs, mostly 500-pound E-46 napalm-carrying M-69 incendiary bombs, killing approximately 100,000 civilians in a single night. Almost 270,000 buildings were destroyed, and more than 1 million residents were rendered homeless.  It was the single most destructive bombing raid in history — even more than the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Most of the victims were civilians, and most of them were women, children, and elderly, in light of the fact that the able-bodied menfolk were off to war and the full scale evacuation of these vulnerable groups from urban areas had not begun in earnest yet.  The March 10 attacks on Tokyo were not the first on the city. The April 1942 Doolittle Raid, in which 16 B-25 Mitchells were launched from the USS Hornet, is well known but the damage from the retaliatory raid was limited although the propaganda effects were large.  It was the introduction of the U.S. B-29 Superfortress strategic bombers that raised the parameters on the level of destruction. But it would take constant training and finetuning of tactics before they were fully of use in their deadly missions.

 

As the war in Europe neared its end, the U.S. military could turn its full attention to the war against Japan, transferring personnel and equipment, including the Superfortresses, but the execution of the war was not going as desired.  While in Chengdu, China, as the recently arrived commanding general of the XX Bomber Command, Maj. Gen. Curtis LeMay thought it necessary to include civilian targets in its attacks to bring Japan to its knees, and experimented with this approach in a raid against a dock area at Hankow on December 18. Moving again to Guam in the new year to head the XXI Bomber Command, LeMay continued to advocate for “strategic bombing,” a view that gained greater ascendency as the ineffective campaign and high losses against Japan continued.  Specifically, LeMay wanted to use low-level (1,500 to 2,400 meters) incendiary attacks on Japanese cities, knowing the houses tended to be made of wood, were along narrow, crowded streets, and were often involved in making components for military industries.  An attack on Dresden in Germany in mid-February had killed an estimated 60,000 people in one night when incendiary bombs created a firestorm that subsumed the residential area of the city. It was believed the effect would be greater in Japanese cities.  Of course, this went against civilized warfare, but the arguments were used that its success would shorten the war. Ironically, in most cases it had the opposite effect, causing many Japanese to recommit themselves to the war effort against all hope. Indeed, the more LeMay’s forces fine-tuned its bombing campaigns, the more the Japanese side adapted.

 

The Battle of Iwo Jima in February-March 1945 was another key factor in bringing LeMay’s doctrine to fruition because the capture of the island denied Japan a place from which to launch fighters to disrupt these bomber flights and report on them via radar and provided an airfield for the U.S. to recover damaged aircraft.  It was a mere 20 days after the battle had started when the launch on March 9 of Operation Meetinghouse, in which 334 B-29s took off, eventually destroying much of downtown (Shitamachi) Tokyo.  Unfortunately, this was not the only attack during the war. In total, Tokyo would be struck 106 times, and dozens of other cities all around Japan were attacked repeatedly, basically indiscriminately, as well. These attacks beg the question as to their legality, and many on both sides of the Pacific believe that the attacks went against international law. They certainly were immoral, which many acts during war are."

- The March 1945 firebombing of Tokyo and the immorality of war, The Japan Times

 

Historical Accuracy

 

"The anime takes place during the US bombing of Japan, waged in the closing phase of World War Two and which included the firebombing of Kobe city.  With any war, tragedy is inevitable and the strength in the storytelling lies in Takahata's first-hand experiences, having himself survived a devastating air raid on his coastal hometown of Okayama.    Rich with detail and impressionistic effects, the Studio Ghibli co-founder's masterpiece brings to life the human impact of war.  Roland Kelts, author of Japanamerica, remembers a particularly tragic but "mesmerisingly beautiful" scene.  "We see a group of fisherman gazing out over the bay as the city of Kobe goes up in flames on the horizon. The flames lick at the sky and the fishermen are seen from the back," he told BBC News.  "The stillness of disaster. Nothing is moving but we feel their shock. It's a scene of pure shell shock, as gorgeous as it is terrifying."

 

Today, the film remains not only relevant but more important than ever, according to Lim Beng Choo, an associate professor in Japanese studies.  "Grave of the Fireflies is an important film because it emphasises (among other things) the value of life. While it depicts the irreversible tragedies and sufferings that Japanese people had to endure during the war, viewers should also actively be asking why and how World War Two was allowed to happen," Ms Lim said.  "Knowing Japan's historical military past will also give the audience a better understanding of events and will cultivate a generic humanistic sentiment towards all war, which would prove to be a more effective way of preventing future wars."

 

"Know that this movie is a metaphor for World War Two and is so much more than the death of these two characters. Grave of the Fireflies is about the consequences of blind unchecked nationalism and the bitter end of those that follow it. This film is not a masterpiece because it's sad, it's a masterpiece because of the lessons it teaches.""

- Heather Chen, The BBC

 

 

The Film Itself

 

The Story

 

"The story of Seita and Satsuko, two young Japanese siblings, living in the declining days of World War II. When an American firebombing separates the two children from their parents, the two siblings must rely completely on one another while they struggle to fight for their survival."

 

Critic Review

 

"Set largely in a small rural village, Grave of the Fireflies offers a deft abstraction of memory. The film’s source material is Akiyuki Noraka’s novel of the same name, which is centered on the author’s remembrances of his sister’s death due to malnutrition after the Kobe firebombing in 1945. The animation itself works as a sort of filter, an agent of augmentation between Noraka’s personal experiences and the harrowing story Takahata unveils; the fact that it’s animated also implies, rightly but perhaps unfairly, that it’s a story meant for children. And if Takahata’s framing device of Seita and Setsuko roaming the afterlife together is some kind of bet-hedging, the script renders the scenes more warm and solemn than sentimental and religious.

 

As food and resources diminish, so does the small community become less giving and forgiving to the siblings, who eventually find a home in a small cave by the local pond. Takahata pays careful attention to the decay of capitalism here, as the lack of fresh food almost entirely eliminates the use of the siblings’ money or any trade they might have made. A strident corrective to any war film where glory is won without any sense of overwhelming, genuine loss, Grave of the Fireflies depicts the physical and mental disintegration of Setsuko with convincing realism and a firm grasp on the importance of routine. The daily tasks the siblings set up for themselves give the characters a sense of purpose and discovery, and the film benefits greatly from the balance struck between this understanding of normal, quotidian existence and how the gruesome aftermath of war disrupts that normality.

 

The film’s title comes from a scene late in the film that speaks directly to the human indifference that Takahata is obviously raging against. After the siblings’ first night in the cave, they find that the fireflies they caught have died and Setsuko buries them in a tiny hole. At that moment, Takahata cuts back to the mass grave that Setsuko and Seita’s mother was tossed in after the firebombing. The long tragedy of war, its endless horror and degradation, isn’t reserved solely for those who march bravely across enemy lines."

- Chris Cabin, Slant

 

User Review

 

"The only film that has ever made me sob. I could not stop crying for ten minutes after watching it. A masterpiece, and definitely one of, if not the best war film ever made. A stunningly beautiful work, and one of the most emotionally wrenching. You're going to want to watch this. It'll make you cry, but you'll be a slightly better person for it." - @Noctis

 

Factoids

 

Grave of the Fireflies was directed by Isao Takahata.  It received 71 points and 11 votes.

 

 

Countries Represented: Algeria (1), Austria (2), Belarus (1), Brazil (1), Burma (1), England (1), France (2), Germany (2), Israel (2), Korea (1), The Ocean (3), Outer Space (1), Poland (1), Japan (5), Russia (1), Scotland (1), Rome (1), Spain (1), United States (18), Vietnam (1)

 

Time Periods Represented: 16th Century (2), 17th Century (2), 18th Century (2), 19th Century (5), 1920s (2), 1930s (3), 1950s (2), 1960s (8), 1950s - 1980s (1), 1990s (1), 21st Century (2), Classical Period (3), Middle Ages (2), World War 1/1910s (3), World War 2/1940s (9)

 

Cross Section of Times and Countries: 18th Century - Austria (1), 18th Century - United States (1), 19th Century - The Ocean (1), 19th Century - United States (4), 21st Century - United States (2), 1910s - The Ocean (1), 1910s-1920s - Russia (1), 1920s - United States (1), 1930s - Germany (1), 1930s - Korea (1), 1930s - United States (1), 1950s - Algeria (1), 1950s - United States (1), 1950s - 1980s - United States (1), 1960s - Brazil (1), 1960s - Outer Space (1), 1960s - United States (5), 1960s - Vietnam (1), 1990s - United States (1), Classical Period - Israel (2), Classical Period - Rome (1), Middle Ages - England (1), Middle Ages - Scotland (1), Sengoku Period - Japan (2), Tokugawa Shogunate - Japan (2), World War 1 - France (2), World War 2/1940s - Belarus (1), World War 2 - Burma (1), World War 2/1940s - Germany (1), World War 2 - Japan (1), World War 2 - The Ocean (1), World War 2/1940s - Poland (1), World War 2/1940s - Spain (1), World War 2 - Austria (1), World War 2 - United States (1)

 

Directors Represented: James Cameron (1), Park Chan-Wook (1), Francis Ford Coppola (1), Kevin Costner (1), Andrew Dominik (1), Stanley Donen (1), David Fincher (2), John Ford (1), Milos Forman (1), Bob Fosse (1), Mel Gibson (1), Anthoney Harvey (1), Ron Howard (1), Terry Jones (1), Philip Kaufman (1), Gene Kelley (1), Elem Klimov (1), Masaki Kobayashi (1), Stanley Kramer (1), Akira Kurosawa (2), David Lean (2), Michael Mann (1), Penny Marshall (1), Fernando Meirelles (1), Adam McKay (1), Steve McQueen (1), Theodore Melfi (1), Sam Mendes (1), Lewis Milestone (1), Wolfgang Peterson (1), Gillo Pontecorvo (1), Martin Scorsese (3), Ridley Scott (1), Steven Spielberg (2), Oliver Stone (2), John Sturges (1), Isao Takahata (1), Guillermo Del Torro (1), Peter Weir (1), Robert Wise (1), William Wyler (1)

 

Decades Represented: 30s (1), 40s (1), 50s (4), 60s (7), 70s (3), 80s (7), 90s (8), 00s (7), 10s (9)

 

 

 

Edited May 15, 2020 by The Panda

[The Panda]

Here are the last of the honorable mentions

 

 

51.    Paths of Glory 
52.    The Godfather 
53.    Bridge of Spies 
54.    Malcolm X 
55.    Dunkirk 

56.    Throne of Blood
57.    Black Hawk Down
58.    Glory 
59.    A Beautiful Mind
60.    The Pianist 

61.    All the President’s Men
62.    Spartacus
63.    The Age of Innocence
64.    Gandhi
65.    Gone With the Wind 

66.    Chinatown
67.    Kundun
68.    Kingdom of Heaven
69.    There Will Be Blood 
70.    Argo 
71.    Inherit the Wind 
72.    Fiddler on the Roof
73.    The Thin Red Line
74.    Little Women (2019)
75.    BlacKkKlansman 
76.    The Wind Rises 
77.    The Shawshank Redemption
78.    Letters from Iwo Jima
79.    Casino
80.    MASH 
81.    Roma 
82.    The King’s Speech 
83.    Unforgiven 
84.    The Last Samurai 
85.    Alexander Nevsky 
86.    Aguirre, The Wrath of God 
87.    Spotlight
88.    (Tied for 88) Platoon 
88.    (Tie for 88) L.A. Confidential 
90.    1776  
91.    The Godfather Part II
92.    Persepolis 
93.    A Man for All Seasons 
94.    Blood Diamond 
95.    Becket 
96.    Barry Lyndon 
97.    First Man 
98.    Ugetsu 
99.    The Searchers 
100.    Cinema Paradiso

[charlie Jatinder]

10 minutes ago, The Panda said:

55.    Dunkirk 

[The Panda]

 

 

"James, earn this... earn it."

 

Historical Setting: World War 2, The Invasion of Normandy

 

Source from the Period

 

"SUPREME HEADQUARTERS
ALLIED EXPEDITIONARY FORCE

 

Soldiers, Sailors, and Airmen of the Allied Expeditionary Force!

 

You are about to embark upon the Great Crusade, toward which we have striven these many months. The eyes of the world are upon you. The hope and prayers of liberty-loving people everywhere march with you. In company with our brave Allies and brothers-in-arms on other Fronts, you will bring about the destruction of the German war machine, the elimination of Nazi tyranny over the oppressed peoples of Europe, and security for ourselves in a free world.

 

Your task will not be an easy one. Your enemy is will trained, well equipped and battle-hardened. He will fight savagely.

 

But this is the year 1944! Much has happened since the Nazi triumphs of 1940-41. The United Nations have inflicted upon the Germans great defeats, in open battle, man-to-man. Our air offensive has seriously reduced their strength in the air and their capacity to wage war on the ground. Our Home Fronts have given us an overwhelming superiority in weapons and munitions of war, and placed at our disposal great reserves of trained fighting men. The tide has turned! The free men of the world are marching together to Victory!

I have full confidence in your courage, devotion to duty and skill in battle. We will accept nothing less than full Victory!

Good luck! And let us beseech the blessing of Almighty God upon this great and noble undertaking."

- General Eisenhower's Order of the Day, 6/1944

 

Historical Context

 

"In May 1944, the Western Allies were finally prepared to deliver their greatest blow of the war, the long-delayed, cross-channel invasion of northern France, code-named Overlord. General Dwight D. Eisenhower was supreme commander of the operation that ultimately involved the coordinated efforts of 12 nations.  After much deliberation, it was decided that the landings would take place on the long, sloping beaches of Normandy. There, the Allies would have the element of surprise. The German high command expected the attack to come in the Pas de Calais region, north of the river Seine where the English Channel is narrowest. It was here that Adolf Hitler had put the bulk of his panzer divisions after being tipped off by Allied undercover agents posing as German sympathizers that the invasion would take place in the Pas de Calais.

 

Surprise was an essential element of the Allied invasion plan. If the Germans had known where and when the Allies were coming they would have hurled them back into the sea with the 55 divisions they had in France. The invaders would have been on the offensive with a 10-to-1 manpower ratio against them.  The challenges of mounting a successful landing were daunting. The English Channel was notorious for its rough seas and unpredictable weather, and the enemy had spent months constructing the Atlantic Wall, a 2,400-mile line of obstacles. This defensive wall comprised 6.5 million mines, thousands of concrete bunkers and pillboxes containing heavy and fast-firing artillery, tens of thousands of tank ditches, and other formidable beach obstacles. And the German army would be dug in on the cliffs overlooking the American landing beaches.

 

At the Tehran Conference in August 1943, Allied leaders scheduled Overlord to take place on or about May 1, 1944. In the meantime, they prepared ceaselessly for the attack. Trucks, tanks, and tens of thousands of troops poured into England. “We were getting ready for one of the biggest adventures of our lives,” an American sergeant said. “We couldn’t wait.” Meanwhile, the American and British air forces in England conducted a tremendous bombing campaign that targeted railroad bridges and roadways in northern France to prevent the Germans from bringing in reserves to stop the invasion.  Allied leaders set June 5, 1944, as the invasion’s D-Day. But on the morning of June 4, foul weather over the English Channel forced Eisenhower to postpone the attack for 24 hours. The delay was unnerving for soldiers, sailors, and airmen, but when meteorologists forecast a brief window of clearer weather over the channel on June 6, Eisenhower made the decision to go. It was one of the gutsiest decisions of the war.  Just after midnight on June 6, Allied airborne troops began dropping behind enemy lines. Their job was to blow up bridges, sabotage railroad lines, and take other measures to prevent the enemy from rushing reinforcements to the invasion beaches. Hours later, the largest amphibious landing force ever assembled began moving through the storm-tossed waters toward the beaches. Most of the Americans were packed into flat-bottomed Higgins boats launched from troop transports 10 miles from the French coastline. Vomit filled the bottom of the boats, and as water kept rushing in over the gunwales, the green-faced men had to bail this vile stew with their helmets. Though it was cold, the men were sweating.

 

Planners had divided the landing zone into five separate beaches. The British and Canadians landed at Juno, Gold, and Sword beaches. The Americans landed at Omaha and Utah beaches.  The fiercest fighting was on Omaha Beach where the enemy was positioned on steep cliffs that commanded the long, flat shoreline. Troops leapt from their landing boats and were pinned down for hours by murderous machine-gun fire that turned the beach into a vast killing field. “If you (stayed) there you were going to die,” Lieutenant Colonel Bill Friedman said. “We just had to . . . try to get to the bottom of the cliffs on which the Germans had mounted their defenses.” By midday, the Americans had surmounted the cliffs and taken Omaha Beach at a heavy cost: over 4,700 killed, wounded, or missing out of the total of approximately 35,000 who came ashore that day, a loss rate of more than 13 percent.  By nightfall, about 175,000 Allied troops and 50,000 vehicles were ashore with nearly a million more men on the way that summer.  The Normandy invasion was one of great turning points of 20th-century history. An immense army was placed in Nazi-occupied Europe, never to be dislodged. Germany was threatened that same month by a tremendous Soviet invasion from the east that would reach the gates of Berlin by the following April. The way to appreciate D-Day’s importance is to contemplate what would have happened if it had failed. Another landing would not have been possible for at least a year. This would have given Hitler time to strengthen the Atlantic Wall, harass England with the newly developed V-1 flying bombs and V-2 rockets, continue to develop jet aircraft and other so-called “miracle weapons,” and finish off his killing campaign against ethnic and sexual undesirables."

- D-Day: The Allies Invade Europe

The National WWII Museum in New Orleans

 

Historical Accuracy

 

"The truth is not that simple, and Saving Private Ryan represents another case in the ongoing struggle for film historians, who must constantly deal with modern critics who judge artistic events by the standards of their own times. For the combat movie, this means if there's no blood and guts, there's no glory. Although there is no question that Spielberg made a fine film or that Tom Hanks and the rest of the cast have done an excellent job, there are issues of film history to be addressed in evaluation. No one is going to argue with the WWII veterans who have stated that Saving Private Ryan is the most realistic presentation of combat they've seen. There is also no question but that Spielberg has achieved integrity in his images. He closely consulted with historian Stephen E. Ambrose (author of Citizen Soldiers) and Dale Dye, a retired Marine Corps captain who acted as his chief military adviser. The issue to be discussed is not combat accuracy (or the quality of the movie) but rather accuracy about the history of the World War II combat genre and Saving Private Ryan's place in that history.  Taking an overview based on actual screenings, where does Saving Private Ryan fit? It has been defined by modern critics as groundbreaking and anti-generic, "the desire to bury the cornball, recruiting poster legend of John Wayne: to get it right this time."1 The primary differences that have been cited are (1) its realistic combat violence, (2) its unusual story format in which soldiers question leadership and the point of their mission, and (3) its new and different purpose.

 

The violence of Saving Private Ryan's opening sequence (the D-Day landing on Omaha Beach) is overwhelming. Spielberg's mastery of sound, editing, camera movement, visual storytelling, narrative flow, performance, and color combine to assault a viewer, to place each and every member of the audience directly into the combat experience. Spielberg anchors the audience in Tom Hanks (as Captain John Miller), and provides three recurring motifs for Hanks/Miller's response to war: the elimination of sound (cinematic), a shaking hand (performance), and a resistance to explaining his prewar background (narrative). All are simultaneously internal and external, and all are clearly understood by the audience to be what they are: the stress of the combat experience. The elimination of sound is particularly effective, since it is both logical in the narrative (the captain's hearing could have been damaged by the shock of battle noise) and psychological (it physicalizes the emotional trauma he is undergoing).  As the action unfolds, the audience sees blood, vomit, dead fish, dismembered arms and legs, wounds spurting fountains of blood, torsos disintegrating while being dragged to safety. Men drown, are wounded, and are shot and killed in a chaotic atmosphere of fear and bewilderment. Medics are forced to make ruthless decisions about the wounded ("Routine!" "Routine!" "Priority!") as they advance among what appears to be every soldier on the beach, all apparently dying. This opening sequence is a nightmare. Today's audiences are shocked into silence while watching. No one talks, and no one munches popcorn or rattles candy wrappers.

 

What has reactivated the combat genre? In asking the question, it's probably a good idea to remember that World War II did not exactly disappear from American lives. It has remained with us in movie revivals, television shows, books, magazines, documentaries, and the History Channel. Among the many reasons being suggested for the new movie versions are: male directors who watched combat films as boys and now want to make their own; a new conservatism that takes us backward to simpler times; the millennium that makes us want to reevaluate the century; and so forth. Until we see the combat films to come, however, we cannot really know what they will add up to. It's a new chapter for the evolutionary process, and what we know now is that Saving Private Ryan may be the seminal film. It certainly will be the first key movie in the new era.  In the meantime, we need to place Ryan's role in the genre's history accurately. It is not that audiences had never seen soldiers question leadership or objectives, or that they had never seen violence or heard doubts expressed.  We live in an era of desensitizing movie violence. The New York Times pointed out that Starship Troopers, a space fantasy, also showed us bodies blown apart, limbs flying through the air, and plenty of blood and gore.  What Saving Private Ryan does is take the carnage out of space and back down to the human level. Spielberg has asked us to think about it and ask ourselves where we are going in the future in this country. As the "old" Private Ryan asks his wife—and by extension, the audience—"Did I earn it?" he connects the movie directly to the "me" generation. Is one individual worth it? What Saving Private Ryan means is in its final admonition: "Earn it." Spielberg's true accomplishment is that he has used familiar genre elements for a new purpose, putting them together in a brilliantly visualized movie that causes Americans to take the war seriously again."

- TRANSLATING WAR: THE COMBAT FILM GENRE AND SAVING PRIVATE RYAN

Jeanine Basinger, Historians.org

 

 

The Film Itself

 

The Story

 

"After the invasion of fortress Europe on June 6th 1944, Cpt. Miller leads his squad from the 2nd Ranger Battalion of the 29th Infantry Division, on a mission to find and bring home Private James Francis Ryan after the death of his brothers. The mission takes them through Nazi occupied territory to establish contact with Ryan's unit, an element of the 101st Airborne Division. This exciting war thriller brings the reality of history's bloodiest war into the homes of ordinary people, but also brings to light the reality of broken and lost families in a time of total and encompassing war."

 

Critic Review

 

"There are movies and then there are movies.  And then there is Steven Spielberg's "Saving Private Ryan."  Searing, heartbreaking, so intense it turns your body into a single tube of clenched muscle, this is simply the greatest war movie ever made, and one of the great American movies. In one stroke, it makes everything that came before – with the exception of two or three obscure European variants on the same theme – seem dated and unwatchable. And it redefines the way we look at war.  Generically, it could be called the last example of that vanished category, the unit tribute film. But this unit is not the 2nd Ranger Battalion or the 101st Airborne. Rather, it is a generation: those men born in the late 1910s and early '20s, who, when asked, simply put aside their tools and settled the great issue of the century, determining who would administer the industrial revolution, dictatorship or democracy. They did this without complaint, bitterness, anger or remorse. Then they came home and picked up their tools again. To this day, few will talk about what they saw and did, and Spielberg shows us why.

 

Spielberg's ability to capture the palpable madness of all this borders on the incredible. The first 25 minutes of the film – a re-creation of Omaha Beach from the point of view of an all-too-human Ranger captain, who's been here and done this, but not at this level of violence – is surely one of the great tours de force of world cinema. From the spillage of viscera, the shearing of limbs, the gushing of blood and the psychotic whimsy of the bullets, to a final kind of fog of panic and soul-deep fear, he makes you glad it was your daddy's job, and not yours.  But Spielberg also understands war's deepest reality, which is that being there is not enough, and being willing to die for your country is also not enough; you have to be willing to kill for your country. So much of the battle carnage pictured in "Saving Private Ryan" is based on the craft of close-quarter, small-unit combat: It's watching men maneuver across terrain for geometrical superiority, hunting for a position to vector fire in on the enemy. He who shoots from the best position and brings the most fire to bear, he's the winner. The thermodynamics of infantry combat: Shoot well, shoot fast, shoot often.

 

Where does this unprecedented version of war come from? It may come out of a few other movies, ironically all of them German. I think of "Das Brucke" ("The Bridge"), "The Winter War" (actually Finnish, about the short, brutal Russo-Finn war of 1940), or "Stalingrad" or even "Das Boot" – all movies that portrayed unflinchingly the iron randomness of war. But more vividly, it has clearly been informed by a close study of as much archival footage of The Real Thing as can be had. In this sense, it's ersatz documentary, with desaturated '40s color, jittery, terrified camera movement (you feel the cameraman's fear of getting hit) and the sensation of overwhelming chaos."

- Stephen Hunter, Washington Post

 

BOT User Review

 

"A tremendous modern war film. It gets overly sentimental in the final minutes though at the same time I like that it doesn't come out and say that "saving private ryan" was definitely 100% worth the deaths of 6 squad-members who might have lived otherwise." - @4815162342

 

Factoids

 

Saving Private Ryan was directed by Steven Spielberg.  It received 83 points and 14 votes.

 

 

Countries Represented: Algeria (1), Austria (2), Belarus (1), Brazil (1), Burma (1), England (1), France (3), Germany (2), Israel (2), Korea (1), The Ocean (3), Outer Space (1), Poland (1), Japan (5), Russia (1), Scotland (1), Rome (1), Spain (1), United States (18), Vietnam (1)

 

Time Periods Represented: 16th Century (2), 17th Century (2), 18th Century (2), 19th Century (5), 1920s (2), 1930s (3), 1950s (2), 1960s (8), 1950s - 1980s (1), 1990s (1), 21st Century (2), Classical Period (3), Middle Ages (2), World War 1/1910s (3), World War 2/1940s (10)

 

Cross Section of Times and Countries: 18th Century - Austria (1), 18th Century - United States (1), 19th Century - The Ocean (1), 19th Century - United States (4), 21st Century - United States (2), 1910s - The Ocean (1), 1910s-1920s - Russia (1), 1920s - United States (1), 1930s - Germany (1), 1930s - Korea (1), 1930s - United States (1), 1950s - Algeria (1), 1950s - United States (1), 1950s - 1980s - United States (1), 1960s - Brazil (1), 1960s - Outer Space (1), 1960s - United States (5), 1960s - Vietnam (1), 1990s - United States (1), Classical Period - Israel (2), Classical Period - Rome (1), Middle Ages - England (1), Middle Ages - Scotland (1), Sengoku Period - Japan (2), Tokugawa Shogunate - Japan (2), World War 1 - France (2), World War 2/1940s - Belarus (1), World War 2 - Burma (1), World War 2 - France (1), World War 2/1940s - Germany (1), World War 2 - Japan (1), World War 2 - The Ocean (1), World War 2/1940s - Poland (1), World War 2/1940s - Spain (1), World War 2 - Austria (1), World War 2 - United States (1)

 

Directors Represented: James Cameron (1), Park Chan-Wook (1), Francis Ford Coppola (1), Kevin Costner (1), Andrew Dominik (1), Stanley Donen (1), David Fincher (2), John Ford (1), Milos Forman (1), Bob Fosse (1), Mel Gibson (1), Anthoney Harvey (1), Ron Howard (1), Terry Jones (1), Philip Kaufman (1), Gene Kelley (1), Elem Klimov (1), Masaki Kobayashi (1), Stanley Kramer (1), Akira Kurosawa (2), David Lean (2), Michael Mann (1), Penny Marshall (1), Fernando Meirelles (1), Adam McKay (1), Steve McQueen (1), Theodore Melfi (1), Sam Mendes (1), Lewis Milestone (1), Wolfgang Peterson (1), Gillo Pontecorvo (1), Martin Scorsese (3), Ridley Scott (1), Steven Spielberg (3), Oliver Stone (2), John Sturges (1), Isao Takahata (1), Guillermo Del Torro (1), Peter Weir (1), Robert Wise (1), William Wyler (1)

 

Decades Represented: 30s (1), 40s (1), 50s (4), 60s (7), 70s (3), 80s (7), 90s (9), 00s (7), 10s (9)

 

 

[Eric the Minion]

 

[Ethan Hunt]

Panda earning the award for laziest fake out in the history on the most effortful list in the history kinda feels right 

[Dementeleus]

SPR? Ugh. 

[Cap]

5 minutes ago, Plain Old Tele said:

SPR? Ugh. 

It's only #3, too.  Is the Berg slipping?  Not 1 & 2?  

[Dementeleus]

1 minute ago, Cap said:

It's only #3, too.  Is the Berg slipping?  Not 1 & 2?  

Well, he’s gonna have 1 or 2 as well, so....

[DAR]

9 minutes ago, Plain Old Tele said:

SPR? Ugh. 

Confirmed Tele hates those young whipper snappers known as the Greatest Generation

[Cap]

1 minute ago, Plain Old Tele said:

Well, he’s gonna have 1 or 2 as well, so....

How dare he! At least y'all put the right movie on top.  Well, no, you didn't, cause Indiana Jones wasn't eligible.  

 

[MrPink]

9 minutes ago, Plain Old Tele said:

Well, he’s gonna have 1 or 2 as well, so....

 

I guess he did executive produce BTTF, huh.

[Dementeleus]

3 minutes ago, MrPink said:

 

I guess he did executive produce BTTF, huh.

Good point. 

[The Panda]

49 minutes ago, Plain Old Tele said:

SPR? Ugh. 

It's okay Tele, it didn't beat this one.

 

 

 

"Truly, for some men nothing is written unless THEY write it."

 

Historical Setting: World War 1, The Ottoman Empire

 

Source from the Period

 

"The following notes have been expressed in commandment form for greater clarity and to save words. They are, however, only my personal conclusions, arrived at gradually while I worked in the Hejaz and now put on paper as stalking horses for beginners in the Arab armies. They are meant to apply only to Bedu; townspeople or Syrians require totally different treatment. They are of course not suitable to any other person's need, or applicable unchanged in any particular situation. Handling Hejaz Arabs is an art, not a science, with exceptions and no obvious rules. At the same time we have a great chance there; the Sherif trusts us, and has given us the position (towards his Government) which the Germans wanted to win in Turkey. If we are tactful, we can at once retain his goodwill and carry out our job, but to succeed we have got to put into it all the interest and skill we possess.

 

15. Do not try to do too much with your own hands. Better the Arabs do it tolerably than that you do it perfectly. It is their war, and you are to help them, not to win it for them. Actually, also, under the very odd conditions of Arabia, your practical work will not be as good as, perhaps, you think it is.

 

18. Disguise is not advisable. Except in special areas, let it be clearly known that you are a British officer and a Christian. At the same time, if you can wear Arab kit when with the tribes, you will acquire their trust and intimacy to a degree impossible in uniform. It is, however, dangerous and difficult. They make no special allowances for you when you dress like them. Breaches of etiquette not charged against a foreigner are not condoned to you in Arab clothes. You will be like an actor in a foreign theatre, playing a part day and night for months, without rest, and for an anxious stake. Complete success, which is when the Arabs forget your strangeness and speak naturally before you, counting you as one of themselves, is perhaps only attainable in character: while half-success (all that most of us will strive for; the other costs too much) is easier to win in British things, and you yourself will last longer, physically and mentally, in the comfort that they mean. Also then the Turks will not hang you, when you are caught.

 

22. Do not try to trade on what you know of fighting. The Hejaz confounds ordinary tactics. Learn the Bedu principles of war as thoroughly and as quickly as you can, for till you know them your advice will be no good to the Sherif. Unnumbered generations of tribal raids have taught them more about some parts of the business than we will ever know. In familiar conditions they fight well, but strange events cause panic. Keep your unit small. Their raiding parties are usually from one hundred to two hundred men, and if you take a crowd they only get confused. Also their sheikhs, while admirable company commanders, are too 'set' to learn to handle the equivalents of battalions or regiments. Don't attempt unusual things, unless they appeal to the sporting instinct Bedu have so strongly, unless success is obvious. If the objective is a good one (booty) they will attack like fiends, they are splendid scouts, their mobility gives you the advantage that will win this local war, they make proper use of their knowledge of the country (don't take tribesmen to places they do not know), and the gazelle-hunters, who form a proportion of the better men, are great shots at visible targets. A sheikh from one tribe cannot give orders to men from another; a Sherif is necessary to command a mixed tribal force. If there is plunder in prospect, and the odds are at all equal, you will win. Do not waste Bedu attacking trenches (they will not stand casualties) or in trying to defend a position, for they cannot sit still without slacking. The more unorthodox and Arab your proceedings, the more likely you are to have the Turks cold, for they lack initiative and expect you to. Don't play for safety.

 

23. The open reason that Bedu give you for action or inaction may be true, but always there will be better reasons left for you to divine. You must find these inner reasons (they will be denied, but are none the less in operation) before shaping your arguments for one course or other. Allusion is more effective than logical exposition: they dislike concise expression. Their minds work just as ours do, but on different premises. There is nothing unreasonable, incomprehensible, or inscrutable in the Arab. Experience of them, and knowledge of their prejudices will enable you to foresee their attitude and possible course of action in nearly every case.

 

24. Do not mix Bedu and Syrians, or trained men and tribesmen. You will get work out of neither, for they hate each other. I have never seen a successful combined operation, but many failures. In particular, ex-officers of the Turkish army, however Arab in feelings and blood and language, are hopeless with Bedu. They are narrow minded in tactics, unable to adjust themselves to irregular warfare, clumsy in Arab etiquette, swollen-headed to the extent of being incapable of politeness to a tribesman for more than a few minutes, impatient, and, usually, helpless without their troops on the road and in action. Your orders (if you were unwise enough to give any) would be more readily obeyed by Beduins than those of any Mohammedan Syrian officer. Arab townsmen and Arab tribesmen regard each other mutually as poor relations, and poor relations are much more objectionable than poor strangers.

 

25. In spite of ordinary Arab example, avoid too free talk about women. It is as difficult a subject as religion, and their standards are so unlike our own that a remark, harmless in English, may appear as unrestrained to them, as some of their statements would look to us, if translated literally.

 

26. Be as careful of your servants as of yourself. If you want a sophisticated one you will probably have to take an Egyptian, or a Sudani, and unless you are very lucky he will undo on trek much of the good you so laboriously effect. Arabs will cook rice and make coffee for you, and leave you if required to do unmanly work like cleaning boots or washing. They are only really possible if you are in Arab kit. A slave brought up in the Hejaz is the best servant, but there are rules against British subjects owning them, so they have to be lent to you. In any case, take with you an Ageyli or two when you go up country. They are the most efficient couriers in Arabia, and understand camels.

 

27. The beginning and ending of the secret of handling Arabs is unremitting study of them. Keep always on your guard; never say an unnecessary thing: watch yourself and your companions all the time: hear all that passes, search out what is going on beneath the surface, read their characters, discover their tastes and their weaknesses and keep everything you find out to yourself. Bury yourself in Arab circles, have no interests and no ideas except the work in hand, so that your brain is saturated with one thing only, and you realize your part deeply enough to avoid the little slips that would counteract the painful work of weeks. Your success will be proportioned to the amount of mental effort you devote to it."

- T. E. Lawrence, The 27 Articles of T.E. Lawrence

 

Historical Context

 

"The Ottomans rose to power in the 14th-15th centuries, capturing land, wealth and power from the dwindling Byzantine Empire (based in Constantinople, but called Istanbul in Turkish). From Istanbul, and the region of Turkey, the Ottomans dominated areas ranging from Central Europe to the Balkans to the Black Sea region, including the recently contested Crimean peninsula, the Middle East, the Arabian Peninsula and North Africa from Egypt westward to Algeria.  Within the vast domains of the Ottoman Empire was a veritable babble of language groups (Turkish was the official language; there were at least 35 minority languages), ethnicities and religious affiliations. The Ottoman Empire controlled one of the most diverse sets of people ever successfully governed. For all its flaws, the Ottoman Empire provided order, peace, stability, cultural continuity and imperial persistence over a bewildering diversity of peoples and persuasions.

 

Truly the Ottomans maintained one of the world’s great empires.  But it was not to be.  Despite the Ottoman imperial motto of “The eternal empire,” as the centuries progressed problems from within and without the empire led to decay. By the 1800s, Europeans derisively labeled the Ottoman Empire “The Sick Man of Europe.”  Seeking to preserve itself as a living, sustainable empire, the Ottomans sided with Germany in World War I. They hoped that Germany would provide them salvation from the encroachments of competing foreign powers. Of course, as history played out, the 1919 treaty of Versailles effectively labeled Germany and its allies, such as the Ottoman Empire, the losers responsible for the devastation and damage of World War I. The victors were primarily Britain and France. According to the rules of war, France and Britain divvied up the spoils of war. Those spoils included the Middle East.

 

The Ottoman Empire had ensured political stability and peace for centuries in the Middle East, minimizing the conflicts potentially inherent in differences of race, ethnicity, nationalism, language and religion. Now, with the death of the Ottoman Empire, the rules that had kept full-scale internal conflict from the Middle East were gone. And apparently without calculating the consequences, Britain and France, influenced in part by the European invention of nationalism, decided to impose nationalism on peoples, religions, languages and ethnicities.  Most Western countries have a sense of nationalism derived from hard-won, agentive self-determination, often attributed to a revolution (e.g., the American or the French revolutions). In contrast, with the dissolution of the Ottoman Empire, the peoples of the Middle East were not allowed self-determination or even much self-rule. They became protectorates of foreign powers. France and Britain drew new borders, effectively inventing new countries that had never existed previously: Iraq, Jordan, Syria, Lebanon, and by some measures Israel/Palestine, Saudi Arabia, and Yemen. How many Americans would have pride in their country if some war-winning foreign power invented our borders and chose our leaders?

 

This rhetorical mental exercise has obvious answers.  Thus, is it any wonder that people throughout the Middle East have felt such angst and consternation about controlling their own lives for the nearly 100 years since the end of World War I?  Why, then, does World War I matter today? Because the conflicts of the present are, in part, the unresolved conflicts of the past. If we seek to resolve the conflicts of the present, we must first understand and resolve the conflicts of the past."

- Taylor Halverson, PhD

 

Historical Accuracy

 

"Today, T.E. Lawrence remains one of the most iconic figures of the early 20th century. His life has been the subject of at least three movies—including one considered a masterpiece—over 70 biographies, several plays and innumerable articles, monographs and dissertations. His wartime memoir, Seven Pillars of Wisdom, translated into more than a dozen languages, remains in print nearly a full century after its first publication. As Gen. Edmund Allenby, chief British commander in the Middle East during World War I, noted, Lawrence was first among equals: “There is no other man I know,” he asserted, “who could have achieved what Lawrence did.”  Part of the enduring fascination has to do with the sheer improbability of Lawrence’s tale, of an unassuming young Briton who found himself the champion of a downtrodden people, thrust into events that changed the course of history. Added to this is the poignancy of his journey, so masterfully rendered in David Lean’s 1962 film, Lawrence of Arabia, of a man trapped by divided loyalties, torn between serving the empire whose uniform he wore and being true to those fighting and dying alongside him. It is this struggle that raises the Lawrence saga to the level of Shakespearean tragedy, as it ultimately ended badly for all concerned: for Lawrence, for the Arabs, for Britain, in the slow uncoiling of history, for the Western world at large. Loosely cloaked about the figure of T.E. Lawrence there lingers the wistful specter of what might have been if only he had been listened to.

 

As first articulated by T.E. Lawrence, the goal wasn’t to permanently sever the Turks’ southern lifeline, but rather to keep it barely functioning. The Turks would have to constantly devote resources to its repair, while their garrisons, receiving just enough supplies to survive, would be stranded. Indications of this strategy are everywhere evident along Highway 15; while many of the original small bridges and culverts that the Ottomans constructed to navigate the region’s seasonal waterways are still in place—instantly recognizable by their ornate stonework arches—many more are of modern, steel-beam construction, denoting where the originals were blown up during the war.  The GARP expeditions have produced an unintended consequence. Jordan’s archaeological sites have long been plundered by looters—and this has now extended to World War I sites. Fueled by the folkloric memory of how Turkish forces and Arab rebels often traveled with large amounts of gold coins—Lawrence himself doled out tens of thousands of English pounds’ worth of gold in payments to his followers—locals quickly descend on any newly discovered Arab Revolt site with spades in hand to start digging.  “So of course, we’re part of the problem,” Saunders says. “The locals see all these rich foreigners digging away,” Saunders adds wryly, “on our hands and knees all day in the hot sun, and they think to themselves, ‘No way. No way are they doing this for some old bits of metal; they’re here to find the gold.’”

 

While the Aqaba campaign is considered one of the greatest military feats of the early 20th century—it is still studied in military colleges today— Lawrence soon followed it with a masterstroke of even greater consequence. Racing to Cairo to inform the British high command of what he had achieved, he discovered that the previous British commander in chief, never a strong supporter of the Arab Revolt, had been dismissed following two failed frontal attacks against the Turks. His replacement, a mere two weeks into the job when an emaciated and barefoot Lawrence was summoned to his office, was a cavalry general named Edmund Allenby.  Rather lost in Lawrence’s electrifying news from Aqaba was any thought as to why the junior officer hadn’t informed his superiors of his scheme, let alone of its possible political consequences. Instead, with his newfound celebrity, Lawrence saw the opportunity to win over the green Allenby with a tantalizing prospect.  During their slog across the desert, Lawrence had, with only two escorts, conducted a remarkable reconnaissance mission across enemy-held Syria. There, he told Allenby, he had determined that huge numbers of Syrian Arabs were ready to join the rebels. Lawrence also vastly exaggerated both the strength and capability of those rebels already under arms to paint an enticing picture of a military juggernaut—the British advancing up the Palestine coast, as the Arabs took the fight to the Syrian interior. As Lawrence recounted in Seven Pillars: “Allenby could not make out how much [of me] was genuine performer and how much charlatan. The problem was working behind his eyes, and I left him unhelped to solve it.”  But Allenby bought it, promising to give the rebels all the aid he could and consider them equal partners. From now on, in Lawrence’s estimation, the British Army and Arab rebels would be joined at the hip, the French relegated to the margins. If the rebels reached Damascus first, they might be able to wrest Syria from the French altogether. Or so Lawrence hoped.

 

It was at Carchemish that Lawrence first came to despise the despotism of Ottoman Turkey, and to imagine an independent Arab nation with Syria at its heart; today, of course, Turkey is a democracy while Syria is in the grips of an unspeakably savage civil war. Karkamis, where the town’s sleepiness gives way to a tinge of menace, sits at the very dividing line between those two realities.  The hilltop sprawl of Hittite ruins is now a Turkish police post, off-limits to visitors, while at the base of that hill a 15-foot-high concrete wall topped with concertina wire has recently been erected. On the other side of that wall, in the Syrian town of Jarabulus, fly the black-and-white war flags of a rebel group known as the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant, or ISIS, an Islamic fundamentalist faction so murderous and extreme it has been disavowed by its former umbrella organization, al-Qaeda. In Karkamis’ grim little park, idle Syrian men who managed to escape tell of family and friends being butchered at the hands of ISIS, of how Jarabulus has become a ghost town.  A Syrian refugee in his mid-40s, unwilling even to disclose his name, tells me that he had planned to escape with his family six months earlier when, on the eve of their departure, ISIS had grabbed his teenage son. “I sent my wife and younger children on to Lebanon,” he says, “but I stayed behind to try and get my son back.”  He points to a teenager in blue jeans and a red T-shirt sitting on a brick wall a few feet away, gazing up at the canopy of trees with a placid, faraway smile. “That’s him,” he says. “After six days, I managed to get him back, but the terrorists had already destroyed him.” The father taps a forefinger against his own temple, the universal gesture to indicate a person gone mad. “That’s all he does now, smile that way.”  From the Turkish side could be heard the call to jihad wafting from the ISIS’s loudspeakers. Somewhere over that wall, a half-mile from the Carchemish ruins, sits Lawrence’s old research station, a former licorice storehouse that he lovingly repaired and converted into a comfortable home. Now, it is a place that no Westerner will likely see for a very long time to come."

- The True Story of Lawrence of Arabia

The Smithsonian Magazine

 

 

The Film Itself

 

The Story

 

"Due to his knowledge of the native Bedouin tribes, British Lieutenant T.E. Lawrence is sent to Arabia to find Prince Faisal and serve as a liaison between the Arabs and the British in their fight against the Turks. With the aid of native Sherif Ali, Lawrence rebels against the orders of his superior officer and strikes out on a daring camel journey across the harsh desert to attack a well-guarded Turkish port."

 

Critic Review

 

"David Lean’s magnificent and sensual 1962 epic is back at London’s BFI Southbank in a 70mm print. Robert Bolt and Michael Wilson’s terrifically bold adaptation of TE Lawrence’s Seven Pillars of Wisdom is a movie with all the sweep and antique confidence of a cavalry charge.  Lean demonstrated a mastery of storytelling structure, scale, perspective-shifting, the intense closeup moment, the colossal widescreen panorama – epitomised by the film’s most famous coup de cinéma: having accepted his commission to go out to the Middle East with the Arab bureau in the first world war, and allowed audiences to savour his marvellous profile, Peter O’Toole’s Lawrence blows out a match and the scene changes to the burning desert at sunrise. The screen is ablaze. The dunes undulate in the heat, and Maurice Jarre’s score ululates along with it.

 

It is Lawrence’s destiny to unite warring Arab tribes to fight the Turks and the Ottoman empire in the British interest. But Lawrence’s own loyalties become divided, and he falls in love with the Arab nations and all their fondly (or condescendingly) imagined ascetic martial heroism, perhaps the way Byron did with Greeks during the war of independence a century before. Lawrence’s Seven Pillars became a key text of orientalism, and the movie intuits its romantic grandeur, while amplifying its absurdity and conceit.

 

As for O’Toole, he made one of the most outrageously charismatic debuts in film history with his performance: a Valentino for the 1960s, one of the working-class young lions like Caine and Finney. He is physically beautiful, with mesmeric eyes of china blue. His long, handsome face was that of a seducer, a visionary, an anchorite, a sinner or a saint, and is entirely comfortable with the ambiguities of his sexual nature, about which the movie is reasonably frank.  It is an oddity that there are no women characters: Lawrence’s love affair is with the desert, with the pan-Arab nations and, well, with Arabs themselves. Omar Sharif is superb as his ally Sherif Ali – he made almost as much of a career-defining splash as O’Toole – although it is uncomfortable now to see Alec Guinness cast in blackface as the wily Prince Feisal. An exhilarating, immersive experience."

- Peter Bradshaw, The Guardian

 

BOT User Review

 

"One of my favorite movies. The epic that every other epic after it wanted to be." - @CoolioD1

 

"One of the true greats. A seamless blend of a huge epic and a character study that never even comes close to being messy or boring." - @Jake Gittes

 

"LOA's script is a masterpiece of subtlety and economy. There's not a wasted word." - @Plain Old Tele

 

Factoids

 

Lawrence of Arabia was directed by David Lean.  It received 119 points and received 15 votes.

 

 

Countries Represented: Algeria (1), Austria (2), Belarus (1), Brazil (1), Burma (1), England (1), France (3), Germany (2), Israel (2), Korea (1), The Ocean (3), Outer Space (1), Ottoman Empire (1), Poland (1), Japan (5), Russia (1), Scotland (1), Rome (1), Spain (1), United States (18), Vietnam (1)

 

Time Periods Represented: 16th Century (2), 17th Century (2), 18th Century (2), 19th Century (5), 1920s (2), 1930s (3), 1950s (2), 1960s (8), 1950s - 1980s (1), 1990s (1), 21st Century (2), Classical Period (3), Middle Ages (2), World War 1/1910s (4), World War 2/1940s (10)

 

Cross Section of Times and Countries: 18th Century - Austria (1), 18th Century - United States (1), 19th Century - The Ocean (1), 19th Century - United States (4), 21st Century - United States (2), 1910s - The Ocean (1), 1910s-1920s - Russia (1), 1920s - United States (1), 1930s - Germany (1), 1930s - Korea (1), 1930s - United States (1), 1950s - Algeria (1), 1950s - United States (1), 1950s - 1980s - United States (1), 1960s - Brazil (1), 1960s - Outer Space (1), 1960s - United States (5), 1960s - Vietnam (1), 1990s - United States (1), Classical Period - Israel (2), Classical Period - Rome (1), Middle Ages - England (1), Middle Ages - Scotland (1), Sengoku Period - Japan (2), Tokugawa Shogunate - Japan (2), World War 1 - France (2), World War 1 - Ottoman Empire (1), World War 2/1940s - Belarus (1), World War 2 - Burma (1), World War 2 - France (1), World War 2/1940s - Germany (1), World War 2 - Japan (1), World War 2 - The Ocean (1), World War 2/1940s - Poland (1), World War 2/1940s - Spain (1), World War 2 - Austria (1), World War 2 - United States (1)

 

Directors Represented: James Cameron (1), Park Chan-Wook (1), Francis Ford Coppola (1), Kevin Costner (1), Andrew Dominik (1), Stanley Donen (1), David Fincher (2), John Ford (1), Milos Forman (1), Bob Fosse (1), Mel Gibson (1), Anthoney Harvey (1), Ron Howard (1), Terry Jones (1), Philip Kaufman (1), Gene Kelley (1), Elem Klimov (1), Masaki Kobayashi (1), Stanley Kramer (1), Akira Kurosawa (2), David Lean (3), Michael Mann (1), Penny Marshall (1), Fernando Meirelles (1), Adam McKay (1), Steve McQueen (1), Theodore Melfi (1), Sam Mendes (1), Lewis Milestone (1), Wolfgang Peterson (1), Gillo Pontecorvo (1), Martin Scorsese (3), Ridley Scott (1), Steven Spielberg (3), Oliver Stone (2), John Sturges (1), Isao Takahata (1), Guillermo Del Torro (1), Peter Weir (1), Robert Wise (1), William Wyler (1)

 

Decades Represented: 30s (1), 40s (1), 50s (4), 60s (8), 70s (3), 80s (7), 90s (9), 00s (7), 10s (9)

 

 

Edited May 15, 2020 by The Panda

[Cap]

Terrible movie. 

[Dementeleus]

Dammit @The Panda, now I can’t be angry. 

[Fancyarcher]

1 minute ago, Plain Old Tele said:

Dammit @The Panda, now I can’t be angry. 

No, but you can cause a revolt because it ain't number one.