The best war movie director? You’ll never guess!
The director Francis Ford Coppola once said that Apocalypse Now was ‘not a movie about Vietnam. It IS Vietnam.’ It’s a fatuous comment – no film shoot, no matter how messy its making – is a war zone.
On the other hand, there’s no denying that the incoherent swirl of Coppola’s finished picture gives you some insight into life on a battlefield – where nobody knows what’s going to happen next.
David Thomson’s The Fatal Alliance offers a similar experience. The book is both a history of war films and an analysis of the way the very form of cinema can encourage viewers to be blithe, even blasé about bloodshed. It’s also a bit of a mess.
We’re more than 100 pages in before he starts discussing specific films. Before that you have to wade through muddy metaphysics about how cinema and world war came about at roughly the same time.
Thomson points out the similarities between the camera and the gun. Just as you load a gun with bullets, so you load a camera with film. Just as you point a gun and shoot, so too a camera.
He spends as much time on the ‘shallow exhilaration’ of movies like The Cruel Sea and The Colditz Story as he does on Powell and Pressburger.
While he is right to say ‘movies are rarely adequate as history’, he underestimates Roberto Rossellini’s Rome, Open City – a terrifying vision of Rome under Nazi rule. For all its shapelessness, The Fatal Alliance has some great scenes. Thomson’s reverie about a movie version of Edmund Wilson’s To the Finland
Station, with Leonardo DiCaprio playing Lenin, alone justifies the book’s price.
Then there’s his startling calculation about the battle of the Somme. Were a director to allot just 10 seconds of viewing time to everyone who died, the resultant film would last 132 days.
But films, says Thomson, are no good at abstract argument. Jean Renoir’s La
Grande Illusion is nothing if not a plea for world peace. Yet love it though Thomson does, it also makes him ‘doubt there is any such thing as an anti-war film’.
Indeed, he thinks the director who got closest to grasping the truth about war was Alfred Hitchcock. For most people
The Lady Vanishes, released in 1938, is a spy thriller. But look beneath its surface charm, says Thomson, and you realise Hitchcock knew ‘ugliness was building’ – if only because ‘he himself had always suspected the worst in people’.