War

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Vive La France by Serge Bozon, a heady experiment full of soul that more than delivers on the allegorical chutzpah of its title. On receiving a troubling letter from her husband, a soldier in the First World War, Camille (Sylvie Testud) sets off to find him incognito, chopping her coif and wrapping her boobs to pass as a lad of 17. Deep in a forest landscape rendered with limpid concentration by cinematographer Céline Bozon, she falls in with a clutch of soldiers mobilized to the front. Or so it seems: Strange things are afoot in La France—like the spontaneous performance of twee, jangling ballads, rendered on scrap-yard acoustic instruments and sung, from an unabashed female perspective, by the harmonizing grunts. Weirder than the arrival of these inexplicable neo-retro-folk jams is how seamlessly they fit into Bozon’s melancholic war fable. Which is to say La France invents a curious and confident hybrid mode to accommodate, even reconcile, disparate modes and strategies: war film and musical, elegiac and avant-garde, cerebral and poignant, rigorous and flexible.Read More »

On the border of North and South Vietnam, civilians live underground and cultivate their land in the dead of night, farmers take up arms, and bombs fall like clockwork. Joris Ivens and Marceline Loridan’s record of daily life in one of the most volatile regions of a war-torn, divided country is both a hazardous piece of first-hand journalism and a shattering work in its own right, simmering with barely repressed anger.

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During his acceptance speech for a lifetime achievement award, Nicolas Chauvin – a farmer-soldier, a veteran of the Revolutionary Army and the Napoleonic Wars, “father” of the chauvinism that bears his name – embarks on a monologue and recounts his life story. At the bend of a road, a spectral encounter shocks his (non-)existence.Read More »

The story of a soldier looking after a broken plane in a remote Soviet village. Meanwhile, the German-Soviet war breaks out, but he carries on guarding it, protecting it even against the NKVD and Red Army, brought there on the information of his conscientious fellow-citizens. Based on a book by Russian writer Vladimir Voynovich, published in 1975 in Paris; Voynovich himself emigrated in 1980 following persecution by the regime. The film uses almost exclusively non-professional actors, and its tone captures the atmosphere of the start of the war and also of coloured film.Read More »

Plot: In this war drama, set during the Korean War, an Air Force nurse gets involved in a love triangle on the front lines. ~ Sandra Brennan, All Movie Guide

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A routine film on the surface, Flight Nurse is quite original in showing war from the point of view of a nurse who is as comely as as she is generous. Far from hiding her charms under the uniform, she emphasizes the to assert the right to life and beauty. Dwan thus makes a kind of erotic ritual of her applying make-up, particularly lipstick: Joan Leslie, in sympathy with her wounded patients, knows that her sex appeal provides far more comfort to them thah her medical attentions. In desiring her, they commune with their wives or girlfriends. When it comes to healing, desire is granted the same power as prayer. Michael Henry Wilson, Allan Dwan’s Moral Tales At the Edge of Paradise, in Allan Dwan The Name beneath the Title (2001)Read More »

Produced and directed by Otto Preminger, Exodus is a 212-minute screen adaptation of the best-selling novel by Leon Uris. The film is concerned with the emergence of Israel as an independent nation in 1947. Its first half focuses on the efforts of 611 holocaust survivors to defy the blockade of the occupying British government and sail to Palestine on the sea vessel Exodus. Paul Newman, a leader of the Hagannah (the Jewish underground), is willing to sacrifice his own life and the lives of the refugees rather than be turned back to war-ravaged Europe, but the British finally relent and allow the Exodus safe passage. Once this victory is assured, 30,000 more Jews, previously interned by the British, flood into the Holy Land.Read More »

This unaired pilot for a series Fuller pitched to CBS about a U.S. infantry troop fighting its way through Nazi-held North Africa offers a fascinating new angle on Fuller’s relationship with the average foot soldier and moral complexity of war.Read More »

Synopsis
On September 27, 1810, the French troops commanded by Marshal Massena, were defeated in the Serra do Buçaco by the Anglo-Portuguese army of general Wellington.

Despite the victory, Portuguese and British are forced to retreat from the enemy, numerically superior, in order to attract them to Torres Vedras, where Wellington had built fortified lines hardly surmountable.

Simultaneously, the Anglo-Portuguese command organizes the evacuation of the entire territory between the battlefield and the lines of Torres Vedras, a gigantic burned land operation, which prevents the French from collecting supplies.

This is the setting for the adventures of a multitude of characters from all social backgrounds – soldiers and civilians, men, women and children, young and old – to the daily routine torn by war and dragged through hills and valleys, between ruined villages, charred forests and devastated crops.Read More »

First of all, You have to give points for pulling off using humouristic elements as brilliantly as this, to describe something as dreadful as war. There aren’t many movies that have achieved that without feeling constrained, or more or less morally repulsive. Kubrick and Coppola were masters of that section, and Veli-Matti Saikkonen doesn’t come far behind with his interpretation of Veijo Meri’s classic novel.
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