Guy Westwell,
War Cinema. Hollywood on the Front Line.
London: Wallflower Press, 2006.
ISBN: 978-1-904764-54-0
£12.99stg (pb)
144pp
(Review copy supplied by Wallflower Press)

Despite the number of war films produced by Hollywood each year, there are few (recent) texts that actually analyse the genre from either an historical or cultural-political perspective. There are, of course, books dealing with the war film in specific periods – the First World War, World War Two, Vietnam and so on – not to mention an increasingly vast array of essays dealing with specific films, but Westwell’s book in the Short Cuts series is one of the few that gives an overview of the genre from its beginnings in the silent era to the present day.

Westwell has conveniently divided the book into four chapters, following a chronological approach: early war cinema, 1898-1930; World War Two, 1930-61; Vietnam, 1961-89; and contemporary war cinema to 2006. Within each of those sections, Westwell focuses on particular films as an entry into the films being made during that period: Tearing Down the Spanish Flag (USA 1898), Hearts of the World (USA 1918), and All Quiet on the Western Front (USA 1930) for the first period; Bataan (USA 1943) and The Steel Helmet (USA 1951) for the second period; The Dirty Dozen (UK/USA 1967), Apocalypse Now (USA 1979), Rambo: First Blood Part II (USA 1985), and Platoon (UK/USA 1986) for the third; and Courage Under Fire (USA 1996), Saving Private Ryan(USA 1998), Pearl Harbour (USA 2001), and Black Hawk Down (USA 2001) for the contemporary period. The emphasis is clearly on World War Two and after, but each time Westwell discusses a core film, he never fails to place it in context by comparing and contrasting it with the many other war films made during the same period.

Representation of war are not limited to the movie screen and includes other medium – comic books, novels, war memorials and the like – all part of what Westwell calls the ‘cultural imagination of war’. One aspect of that cultural imagination is, of course, Hollywood’s war movie. This is explained in an introduction, perhaps a little clumsily, as Westwell attempts to conceptualize war film from the perspective of ‘ideology’. He need not have in my view. The important thing here is historical and cultural context, and once he gets into an analysis of particular films, he does this very well.

We thus get an explanation as to why films in the 1920s tended to be both pacifist and cynical, the first of the ‘War is Hell’ genre that was once the staple of Hollywood films. This at least is how these films have often been interpreted, although Westwell questions the extent to which they might be pacifist – given, for example, that there was a post-1914 air war cycle that romanticized war – and to what extent they may have continued to project “a positive conceptualisation of war”(20). In any event, a lot of these films paved the way for the best-known World War One movie, Lewis Milestone’s All Quiet on the Western Front (USA 1930). This was clearly an anti-war film and it came in for an enormous amount of censorship at the time, including in Australia and New Zealand. Interestingly, as Westwell points out, Hollywood was able to project such a bleak image of war partly because it did not feature American units in battle – which would have led to questions about American liberal democracy – but rather because it focuses on French and German troops, representatives of militarist societies. All Quiet was a milestone in other respects. It was the first time that the viewer saw the experience of battle – almost invariably a male experience – from the perspective of the infantryman.

These anti-war films naturally made selling the Second World War more difficult and is one of the reasons why a 1941 box-office hit, Sergeant York (USA), starring Gary Cooper, the story of a pacifist turned WWI sniper, was used to prepare Americans for the coming war. Other ‘readying’ films included Casablanca (USA 1942). Even once the war began, however, considering how badly it was going in the Pacific, it proved to be a hard sell. B-grade movies such as Wake Island (USA 1941) and Bataan (USA 1943) specifically focused on American defeats in the Pacific in the early part of the war, intending not only to gear up the American public for revenge, but to remind it that the war was going to be difficult and that it was going to require great sacrifices from everyone concerned.

We see during this period the emergence of the classic Hollywood war movie written about by people like Jeanine Bassinger, in which an ethnically diverse group of men work together to overcome their differences and unite in a common goal. America, these films emphasise, was a democratic melting-pot that valued social inclusiveness. Hollywood nevertheless possessed contradictory attitudes towards race that it had difficulty resolving (p. 41). If, on the one hand, it wanted to portray itself as racially and socially inclusive, it delighted in portraying the enemy Other, and in particular the Japanese, as racially inferior. It was not uncommon therefore in war movies set in the Pacific for the Japanese to be referred to as ‘nips’, ‘monkeys’, ‘slant-eyed devils’ or ‘chimps’. The racist stereotypes used in many anti-Japanese films largely mirrored an overtly racist attitude common among many Americans of European origin that could be found not only in the attitude of the common soldier fighting on the ground, but also in the rhetoric of some of the top-ranking military in the US navy and army.

Westwell does not tell us whether these racist undertones were ever carried over into representations of Vietnam in the 1960s and 70. Certainly, Hollywood was not particularly subtle in its portrayal of the enemy Other, as can be seen in one of the worst war films ever made, John Wayne’s The Green Berets (USA 1968). On the whole, Hollywood generally steered clear of the topic altogether and instead preferred to make Westerns as well as World War One and Two films with a ‘Vietnam subtext’ that generally pointed to the failure of military organisation. It was not until a few years after the withdrawal of American troops from Vietnam in 1975 that films started to appear dealing with what Westwell calls America’s obsession. These films included Coppola’s Apocalypse Now (USA 1979), Cimino’s The Deer Hunter (USA 1978), and the Rambo cycle that appeared in the 1980s. These films are the best known examples of what might be dubbed the ‘veteran movie’ in which the protagonist, going through a crisis of identity/masculinity, seeks to find some sort of psychological (often post-war) resolution. The veteran is portrayed here as both perpetrator and victim. They were illustrative of the tensions that existed in America in the 1960s and 70s, not only within society but between the entertainment industry and the state, which led to “new ways of describing war” (p. 68). Unlike the Second World War when films were often about group cohesion and solidarity, the 1970s and 80s threw up films in which there was no forging of an effective fighting force. On the contrary, they were usually about group disintegration.

The two most obvious examples of this were Oliver Stone’s Platoon (1986) and Kubrick’s Full Metal Jacket(UK/USA 1987). These films, part of the second wave of Vietnam movies, were touted for their ‘realism’ – what Westwell calls ‘Vietnam verité’. In Platoon, the men fall into two distinct groups, one composed of rednecks who listen to Country and Western music, the other made of pot-smoking, Motown listening ‘hippies’ that not only symbolically mark the divide between pro and anti-war adherents in American society but which also, through the biblicalesque characters personified by Elias and Barnes (played by Tom Berenger and Wilhem Dafoe), reduces Vietnam to a battle between good and evil. The protagonist of Platoon, Chris Taylor (Charlie Sheen), has a voice-over shot in the final scene in which he leaves the audience with the enigmatic quip, ‘we didn’t fight the enemy, we fought ourselves, and the enemy was within us’. It suggests what the Vietnam war had come to represent to American culture although, as with most Hollywood productions and despite the supposed re-enactment of the My Lai massacre in a scene in which a village is burnt, Americans do not tend to dwell terribly much on the consequences of their actions on those they have invaded. It is also a pity that Westwell does not explore Full Metal Jacket as an alternative to Platoon. There may have been parallels worth drawing on, or it might have provided a possible alternative vision of what Vietnam has come to represent in American society.

It took time for Hollywood and indeed American society to accept Vietnam as a war of which they could be ‘proud’. This shift in the ‘cultural imagination of war’ is evident in a number of films made in the 1990s and beyond in which either Vietnam was treated differently, as though indeed America had been victorious (Randall Wallace’s We Were Soldiers (USA/Germany 2002)), or with a return to triumphalist narratives of the Second World War (Saving Private Ryan (USA 1998) and Pearl Harbour (USA 2001)). Much of this was made permissible by America’s involvement in the First Gulf War which seems to have resuscitated the country’s lagging self-confidence. Westwell’s analysis of Saving Private Ryan is particularly good in this respect. He not only places it in a cultural-historical context but critiques the consequences of such a triumphalist vision of history – ambiguous certainly but also conservative – that has given birth to a host of ‘patriotic’ war films (Black Hawk Down (USA 2001)) that would have been unthinkable in the late 1980s. One of the tropes common to war movies since Vietnam, argues Westwell, is that history becomes ‘psychologised’, by which he means that the history in film is often about individual traumatic experience. In this way, Hollywood avoids having to contend with the complexities of the historical event. In doing so, we can see a shift away from the damaged characters in Apocalypse Now and the somewhat deranged superhero in Rambo (USA 1982), to the everyman portrayed by Tom Hanks in Saving Private Ryan. It is almost as though Hollywood has come full circle, back to the good old days when America knew what it was fighting for, when war was ‘good’ because fought for altruistic reasons (pp. 97, 99-100). It has allowed a retelling of Vietnam in films like We Were Soldiers(USA/Germany 2002), and even when this cannot work well – as in Black Hawk Down – Americans are more often than not portrayed as victims.

This is an insightful introduction to war and film and one that I would highly recommend as a classroom text. It is admittedly competing with a couple of other texts on the market – Robert Eberwein (ed.), The War Film (New Brunswick, N.J., 2005) and the more recent James Chapman, War and Film (London, 2007) – but it is perhaps one of the best critiques of war films that I have come across. The only problem with a book of this nature is that new chapters will constantly have to be added. The spate of recent films that have been generated by America’s involvement in Afghanistan and Iraq is a case in point.

Philip Dwyer,
University of Newcastle, Australia.

Created on: Thursday, 31 July 2008