War

Synopsis:
Set just outside Stalingrad in the winter of 1942, this compelling wartime drama tells the tale of a contingent of German soldiers caught in a Russian vise. Headed by Gen. Paulus (Wilhelm Borchert), the other officers and foot soldiers are slowly surrounded by Russian troops on the offensive. The battles that ensue as a result of the entrapment are depicted via the experiences of individual officers and enlisted men — the full story emerges through the eyes of each of these soldiers. There is also a subsidiary tale about a friendship between a Russian woman (Sonia Zieman) and a German officer that ultimately saves the man’s life.Read More »

Lively comedy sending up British stiff-upper-lip prisoner-of-war dramas, starring James Robertson Justice as Sir Ernest Pease, a bombastic scientist who ends up in a German PoW camp during World War II. The inmates, led by Jimmy Cooper and Jock Everett, are forced to help him escape.Read More »

IMDB:
A US Army sergeant who participated in the First World War now leads a rifle squad in the same division in which he’d served, the First Infantry. The squad participates in combat action from storming Vichy French Africa into the long siege of Sicily and Italy, into D-Day at Omaha Beach, and onward through the push to Germany. Along the way the squad gets involved in several incidents with civilians, such as a French woman about to give birth and also in a firefight in an insane asylum. Throughout the war the Sergeant has engaged in a mini-battle of wills with Pvt. Griff, a semi-pacifist whose convictions are destroyed in a horrific scene amid the human genocide of a concentration camp in 1945.Read More »

Synopsis:
This is the story of an English middle class family through the first years of World War II. Clem Miniver is a successful architect and his beautiful wife Kay is the anchor that keeps the family together. With two young children at home, Kay keeps busy in the quaint English village they call home. She is well-liked by everyone and the local station master has even named his new rose after her. When their son Vincent, Vin to everyone, comes home from Oxford for the summer he is immediately attracted to Carol Beldon, granddaughter of Lady Beldon. Their idyllic life is shattered in September 1939 when England is forced to declare war on Germany. Soon Vin is in the RAF and everyone has to put up with the hardship of war including blackouts and air raids. Read More »

TCM writes:
Tense and claustrophobic World War II film deals with the efforts of the British armed forces to defeat the intimidating German battleship Tirpitz. After the RAF fails to sink the vessel, a Navy commander (John Mills) must convince his superiors to let him carry out a bold and experimental mission utilizing midget submarines to take the ship out of commission while it’s anchored in a Norwegian fjord. John Gregson and Donald Sinden co-star in the action-packed tale based on true events.Read More »

The story centers on two brothers: Honoré Butera, working for Radio Télévision Libre des Mille Collines, and Augustin Muganza, a captain in the Rwandan army (who was married to a Tutsi woman, Jeanne, and had three children with her: Anne-Marie, Yves-André, and Marcus), who bear witness to the killing of close to 800,000 people in 100 days while becoming divided by politics and losing some of their own family. The film depicts the attitudes and circumstances leading up to the outbreak of brutal violence, the intertwining stories of people struggling to survive the genocide, and the aftermath as the people try to find justice and reconciliation.Read More »

Battle Hymn was inspired by the true story of American minister Dean Hess, played here with rare sensitivity by Rock Hudson. A bomber pilot during World War II, Hess inadvertently releases a bomb which destroys a German orphanage. Tortured by guilt, Hess relocates in Korea after the war to offer his services as a missionary. Combining the best elements of Christianity and Eastern spiritualism, Hess establishes a large home for orphans. The preacher’s efforts are threatened when the Korean “police action” breaks out in 1950. Battle Hymn was one of several collaborations between Rock Hudson and director Douglas Sirk–though Sirk felt that Robert Stack would have been better suited to the role of Rev. Hess.Read More »

Synopsis:
In this drama, a crippled German veteran of WW I attempts to reconcile his recent experiences with his former ideologies in this drama. After the war he goes back to his hometown on the German-Polish border to his old teaching job. Time passes and he becomes increasingly cynical and bitter; he then finds himself increasingly drawn to dark, oppressive ideologies that cause his fiancee to abandon him. He then rapes a female student and finds himself thrown out of his village. It is not long before he joins the Nazi party where he quickly rises in the ranks. By the time he returns to his village, he has become a terrifying Nazi commandant.Read More »

Synopsis
White-tiled rooms, neon lighting; on the walls black and white photographs from an exhibition entitled ,Vernichtungskrieg’ (War of Extermination) documenting the atrocities committed by the Wehrmacht on the Eastern Front. Against this background, Ruth Beckermann and cameraman Peter Roehsler have filmed former soldiers talking about their experiences beyond the bounds of ,normal’ warfare. With a mixture of helplessness, impotence, shame, opportunism and undiminished fanaticism, witnesses from that time tell of atrocities such as the shootings of Russian prisoners-of-war, the murder of Jews and abuse of women. The differing accounts of these events demonstrate how selective perception was even in this most inhuman and brutal of environments.Read More »