Stars and stripes forever
Tom Hanks is Hollywood’s go-to WWII hero
For Tom Hanks, “Greyhound,” now streaming on Apple TV+, is a return to hallowed, if familiar, ground.
A World War II thriller that Hanks himself adapted from historical writer C.S. Forester’s 1955 novel, “Greyhound” is set in early 1942, just months after America entered the war.
Hanks stars as U.S. Navy Commander Earl Krause, whose first assignment is a perilous trip through the Nazi-held North Atlantic leading a fleet of 37 boats to Britain.
Just as John Wayne returned again and again to Westerns, Hanks has found in “The Last Great War” meaning and purpose. For the multi-Oscar winner, WWII offers a clue to national identity, illuminates our moral values and its stories are a way to honor those who gave the ultimate sacrifice, their lives, to save democracy.
It was Steven Spielberg’s “Saving Private Ryan” with its acclaimed recreation of the carnage on Normandy’s Omaha Beach on D-Day, June 6, 1944, that launched an enduring association between Hanks’s Army captain character onscreen and the innate decency of the actor himself.
The success of “Private Ryan” prompted Hanks and Spielberg in 2001 to create the miniseries “Band of Brothers,” which in 10 episodes follows the U.S. Marines of Easy Company thru European war zones.
The duo reunited in 2010 for a sequel (or companion piece), “The Pacific,” which follows three Marines in different regiments fighting the Japanese.
In 2007, Hanks came aboard Ken Burns’ PBS documentary series “The War,” which was meant to be a history of WWII from the perspectives of four small “quintessentially American towns.”
For Burns, Hanks did not appear on camera but read excerpts from World War II-era columns by Al McIntosh.
You could argue that Hanks’ collaboration with Steven Spielberg for the fact-based Berlin Cold War drama “Bridge of Spies” (2015) is really a “Son of WWII” movie. Hanks again plays a reluctant warrior — here not a soldier but lawyer James B. Donovan — who must negotiate behind the scenes with Russia which holds downed U.S. spy pilot Francis Gary Powers and is willing to maneuver a prisoner exchange.
In real life, Donovan was WWII general counsel for America’s OSS, the precursor to the CIA. So, in effect, Hanks once again is playing a heroic wartime American.
And he’s hardly done with the subject. There is to be a third WWII miniseries with Hanks and Spielberg after ‘Brothers” and
“Pacific”: “Masters of the Air: America’s Bomber Boys Who Fought the Air War Against Nazi German,” based on Donald L. Miller’s book.
With a reported $250 million budget for its nine episodes, it’s slated to eventually premiere on AppleTV+.