The Great Crusade: 10 World War II Films

World War II was the first conflict waged in the global film age. Newsreels kept those on the home front abreast of the battles going on all over the world. War propaganda, like Frank Capra’s Why We Fight series, was a way to deliver information to a film-going populace numbering in the millions. Even as it was happening, films were telling us how we should feel about the war and how the war felt. World War II has always been a fertile ground for stories that creating a list like this one is overwhelming. How can one possibly narrow the genre down to ten films? The answer is one can’t. These films are just a sampling of films that I think should be seen, covering the war from different national perspectives. What would your World War II list include?

Casablanca (1942) dir. Michael Curtiz

It seems easy to forget that, at its heart, beyond its beloved stasis as one of cinema most enduring star-crossed love stories, 1942’s Casablanca is a melancholy war film about lost souls drifting in and out of Rick’s Café Américain, hoping to make it out of Vichy-controlled Morocco (almost literal purgatory) for a second chance at life. Based on an unpublished play, with a total of four different screen writers, helmed by a director who was known more for swash-buckling, adventure epics and starring an untested romantic leading man, most wrote the film off and, indeed, the film was only a moderate success upon its release, but somehow these disparate elements worked a kind of alchemy to create understated movie magic that only seems to get better with age. The film follows Rick, a hard, broken man, who has little regard for the sad stories that enter his club nightly, until the night the woman who broke his heart waltzes into his gin joint. Ultimately, a tale of sacrificing a shot at happiness for the greater good, the winds of war forcing the most ambivalent to pick a side, it is also about acts of resistance, both large and small, that are at the heart of triumphing over oppression. And one need look no further than the scene when Victor Lazio leads the entire bar in American cinema’s most stirring rendition of “La Marseillaise”.

To Be or Not To Be (1942) dir. Ernst Lubitsch

There are many words I could use to describe Ernst Lubitsch’s To Be or Not To Be, one of cinema’s most sharpest satires, but the ones I always come back to are bold and impudent, but brilliantly so. Yet, how else can one describe a comedy about Nazi occupied Poland and the wacky hijinks that ensue when a group of theatrical actors join forces with the Polish resistance in an effort to slip the clutches of Nazi officers including Hitler himself. Released in March 1942, a mere few months after the United States declared war on Germany, Lubitsch’s film met immediate criticism for making light of a regime responsible for such destruction, yet that makes the film even more biting, a trait that hasn’t diminished in the seventy years since its release. Satirizing the Nazi’s ridiculous ideology and transposing that with the always ridiculous art of acting is at the heart of this film’s humor. Leading the cast of actors turned resistance fighters is Jack Benny as the wonderfully vain, desperately insecure Joseph Tura and the equally brilliant Carole Lombard as his diva wife Maria Tura. Lombard would not survive to see the film released. She died in a plane crash while promoting War Bonds in the Midwest two weeks before the film was released.