In times of war and trial, America has found relief and solace at the movies. They’ve rallied us, eased our fears, attacked our enemies, soothed our worries and, most of all, raised our spirits.
No doubt they will again, even in the aftermath of last week’s bloodiest domestic attack from foreign shores in our country’s history.
It may be interesting then to take a look back at the movies that have enlisted in the national service — or spread the national cheer — in years and wars past. Their modern equivalents are already being conceived, but, if you want your spirits raised in the mean time, here are some of the movies that touched and helped us.
World War I
In the WWI years, America was over a century old, and the movies were young. Yet they had already conquered the world; their biggest stars were demigods, known everywhere.
It’s not surprising, then, that three American movie idols came to symbolize the country during those times: comic tramp Charlie Chaplin, curly-haired sweetheart Mary Pickford and dashing adventurer Douglas Fairbanks, Sr. Friends in real life, the three rallied huge crowds at bond drives, cheered the troops and, most importantly, made the movies that helped audiences at home relax from the storms of the 20th Century’s first great conflagration.
1. Charlie Chaplin “Shoulder Arms”
(Chaplin; 1918) (star)(star)(star)1/2
Chaplin’s contribution to the World War I effort was a typical comic-fouling-up-in-the-military farce of a kind that movie comedians have been copying ever since.
2. Mary Pickford “The Poor Little Rich Girl”
(Maurice Tourneur; 1917) (star)(star)(star)1/2
One of Pickford’s biggest hits and one of the key films of her career, this is a pictorially stunning near-fairytale about a bright little rich girl who yearns to be with the street kids outside. Mary, at age 24, plays a believable 11. Frances Marion, her most frequent and congenial scenarist, co-wrote from Eleanor Gates’ pop novel and play. And French director Maurice Tourneur gives it a great nightmare sequence and a rich look.
“Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm”
(Marshall Neilan; 1917) (star)(star)(star)
A classic “Little Mary” film, expertly balancing slapstick comedy and pathos. Here, Pickford is the rural charmer from Kate Douglas Wiggin’s bestseller, cutting capers and breaking hearts.
“Stella Maris”
(Marshall Neilan; 1918) (star)(star)(star)(star)
Pickford’s most outstanding performance came in this film’s dual roles: Stella Maris, a beautiful invalid sheltered from the world’s ugliness, and homely, persecuted Cockney orphan Unity Blake. Both women are in love, tragically, with Conway Tearle’s John Risca. Both show a different side of Pickford, who came from humble origins, like Unity. This is an almost inspired pop romantic fairytale.
3. Douglas Fairbanks “A Modern Musketeer”
(Allan Dwan; 1917) (star)(star)(star)1/2
Fairbanks’ great swashbucklers came after the war, but this modern comedy — in which he’s a young Kansas guy whose mother loved “The Three Musketeers” and who tries to be D’Artagnan in real life — is a delightful precursor.
World War II
World War II changed America and its movies in so many profound ways that they’re difficult to catalog. The films now took us to the battlefields, but they also presented the same idealized view of home front America typified by the Hardy Family movies. We saw battles in Bataan, struggles in the Pacific, but we were also treated to luscious Technicolor musicals with Betty Grable or Judy Garland, Frank Sinatra and Gene Kelly. Hollywood perfected a kind of supremely casual comic entertainment, typified by the individual movies and “Road” collaborations of the two most popular stars of the ’40s, Bing Crosby and Bob Hope.
1. “The Great Dictator”
(1940) (star)(star)(star)(star)
A great, gutsy political comedy. Chaplin, who had the mustache first, takes on Hitler in a virtuoso double role as the little Jewish barber and Der Phooey himself: Adenoid Hynkel, dictator of Tomania. (“Heil myself!”). Jack Oakie plays Napoloni, Paulette Goddard is Hannah the barber’s love, and Billy Gilbert and Henry Daniell play Hynkel cohorts Herring and Garbitsch. This was the last great time Charlie raised our spirits, as he had in WWI and during the Depression with the classics “City Lights” and “Modern Times.” In 1952, his right-wing enemies kicked him out of the country.
2. “Lassie Come Home”
(Fred M. Wilcox; 1943) (star)(star)(star)(star)
One of the most appealing, beautifully made and well-loved of all the classic children’s animal movies, this MGM gem follows writer Eric Knight’s intrepid collie as she journeys back to Yorkshire and the impoverished family who were forced to give her up. The excellent human cast includes Roddy McDowall, Donald Crisp, Edmund Gwenn, Dame May Whitty and the 11-year old heartbreaker, Elizabeth Taylor. But they’re all upstaged by the remarkable canine Pal (a male collie renamed “Lassie” by trainer Rudd Weatherwax). And the movie itself — with its love of home and its salute to our British allies — seemed perfect for its time. (Author Knight enlisted and died in battle.)
3. “Meet Me in St. Louis”
(Vincente Minnelli; 1944) (star)(star)(star)(star)
Hollywood’s great holiday musical is this sparkling adaptation of writer Sally Benson’s memoir: a movie that takes us on a Currier and Ives 1903 holiday tour of St. Louis with the postcard-perfect Smith family. Star Judy Garland is Esther, Tom Drake the bland “boy next door” she adores, Mary Astor and Leon Ames her parents, Marjorie Main their cantankerous housekeeper. The movie’s most memorable moment (among many): the shattering Yuletide scene where 7-year-old Margaret O’Brien demolishes her snowman family and is calmed by older sister Garland’s heart-stabbing rendition of “Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas.”
4. “Air Force”
(Howard Hawks; 1943) (star)(star)(star)(star)
The single most nerve-racking of all WWII movie flights is probably the voyage of the crew of the Boeing B-17 bomber Mary Ann on Dec. 7, 1941, in Howard Hawks’ ace flagwaver “Air Force.” We’re rarely off the plane; we experience the start of the war as the fliers do, in a real-life nightmare that explodes into one of the most spectacular and scary of all high-sky Armageddons. John Garfield stars as the crew’s rebel; the writers were Dudley Nichols and (uncredited) William Faulkner.
5. “The Road to Morocco”
(David Butler; 1942) (star)(star)(star)
Crooning con man and his ski-nosed patsy of a sidekick (Crosby and Hope again) are, like Webster’s Dictionary, Morocco-bound: They wander amiably through Arabia, pursued by gorgeous harem girls and homicidal maniacs. Perhaps the most typical of all the “Road” pictures: melodic, low-pressure, very funny.
6. “Anchors Aweigh”
(George Sidney; 1945) (star)(star)(star)
As naive World War II sailor Clarence Doolittle, crooner Sinatra goes on a frantic Hollywood leave with lady-killing hoofer chum Gene Kelly. The highlight: Kelly’s live action-cartoon dance with Hanna-Barbera’s Jerry the Mouse.
Vietnam War
Vietnam was a departure from any previous U.S. war. Much of America was eventually opposed to the conflict, including almost all of Hollywood’s younger filmmakers and stars (and many older ones as well). So the war was mostly ignored while it was fought. Nor were conventional spirit-raisers at a premium. The movies of the Vietnam-era tend to be darker, more realistic, gloomier in outlook — in fact, among the best and most uncompromising ever made in America. But audiences did need cheering, and here were two that did that job.
1. “The Graduate”
(Mike Nichols; 1967) (star)(star)(star)(star)
The most popular romantic comedy of the 1960s is an unusual movie, an artistic blockbuster. It’s a comic fable of sexual anxiety and absurd social entrapment, set in sunny, sterile upper-middle-class Southern California suburbia meant to symbolize the entire Los Angelized U.S. In that privileged milieu, we follow recent eastern university graduate Ben (Dustin Hoffman), whose life steadily tumbles into chaos after he is seduced by one of his parents’ friends, Mrs. Robinson (Anne Bancroft), and later falls in love with her daughter, Elaine (Katharine Ross).
2. “M*A*S*H”
(Robert Altman; 1970) (star)(star)(star)(star)
Altman’s comic masterpiece about a hip Army surgical corps during the Korean War, tough pros in a hell of bloodshed and death, for whom gallows humor is lunatic inspiration. The great cast includes Donald Sutherland, Elliott Gould, Robert Duvall and Sally Kellerman (respectively the original Hawkeye, Trapper John, Frank Burns and Hot Lips).
All-time best American wartime spirit-raiser
In 1942, when it first appeared, “Casablanca” had a lucky publicity break: the real city of Casablanca was in the news as site of a major wartime conference. And, though it had been thrown together on the Warner Bros. assembly line, this movie magically jelled. It was an instant popular hit.
But as the years have passed, this movie has retained its power and proven to be the one popular classic that gives American audiences what they most want or need in times of trouble. It was a spirit-raiser in WWII, during Korea and even during Vietnam — when it was a favorite film of both supporters and attackers of the war. Somehow, it has become the single movie that best symbolizes America’s idealistic spirit in bad times — even though it’s set far from the U.S., in a soundstage Morocco, with a largely international cast. Perhaps that’s another part of its magic. It’s the ultimate Hollywood “melting pot” studio classic.
“Casablanca”
(Michael Curtiz; 1942) (star)(star)(star)(star)
Nobody plays “As Time Goes By” like piano man Sam (Dooley Wilson). Nobody lights a torch like Ingrid Bergman’s Ilsa or carries one like Humphrey Bogart’s Rick. And nobody ever gathered together a sharper, more emblematic international cast (Claude Rains, Sidney Greenstreet, Peter Lorre, Paul Henreid, Conrad Veidt, S.Z. Sakall, Marcel Dalio, Leonid Kinskey) in a more imperishable exotic movieland cabaret than Warner Bros. and director Michael Curtiz in this greatest of all Hollywood World War II adventure romances. (Julius and Philip Epstein wrote the script and Howard Koch rewrote it, often only hours ahead of shooting.)
Set in the Morocco nightclub digs of world-weary, acid-tongued Rick, and based on a mediocre play (originally intended as a Ronald Reagan-Ann Sheridan vehicle), “Casablanca” is a movie that — as critic Robin Wood once said of “Rio Bravo” — justifies the entire Hollywood studio system. In a city thick with intrigue, Rick bandies wisecracks with lecherous Capt. Renault (Rains), creepy Ugarte (Lorre) and corrupt Ferrari (Greenstreet) before re-encountering the love of his life, Ilsa, who dumped him in Paris for her stolid freedom-fighter husband, Victor Laszlo (Henreid). What follows is a tale that has stirred millions ever since 1942 — and never fails to get a burst of applause on Renault’s great last-scene line: “Major Strasser has been shot. Round up the usual suspects!”
