Like the second world war itself, the second world war movie is an ocean of stories: global, universal, all-encompassing. As a genre unto itself, it is the same age as the post-Stagecoach western and the post-Angels With Dirty Faces gangster movie, and as varied and multifaceted as either.
And like all oceans, it comes at us in waves, occasionally depositing flotsam like Allied on our shores. The first was the wave of movies made in the US and in Britain as the war was actually happening. Then came the celebratory postwar wave of nostalgic revisitings that, in Britain, offered consolation and compensation – for decades – to a nation drastically reduced in wealth and stature by the war’s end; and, in the forward-looking US, seemed designed to motivate citizen-patriots in the emergent cold war. The 60s offered a lot of 20th anniversaries to celebrate with bloated European co-productions like The Battle Of The Bulge. But at the end of the decade, each celebratory war movie, say Battle Of Britain or Army Of Shadows, would be offset by a starkly reproving history such as Marcel Ophüls’s The Sorrow And The Pity. Then, a slow decline from the late 1970s to century’s end, by when not just the second world war but even Vietnam had faded from folk memory.
Saving Private Ryan changed all that, and for all its shortcomings, Spielberg’s Tom Hanks vehicle showed what could be achieved with modern CGI and horror-movie gore. Along with 2001’s masterly miniseries Band Of Brothers, exec-produced by the pair, it rebooted the genre, just in time for the wars of Bush and Cheney. The second world war movie now lives in their shadows, or perhaps just those of Hanks and Spielberg.
Now we are back to repeating ourselves. Sean Ellis’s Anthropoid was an unsatisfactory stab at the story told in Lewis Gilbert’s Operation Daybreak (1975), while Christopher Nolan’s upcoming Dunkirk will doubtless add all the horror that went awol in Leslie Norman’s version in 1958, just as The Eagle Has Landed was a replay of Went The Day Well? and Downfall was take two of Hitler: The Last Ten Days. Allied, from Fury producer Brad Pitt, seems doomed to be a different kind of remake, a bookend to Mr And Mrs Smith, both plot-wise – concerning two assassins, Pitt and Marion Cotillard, who fall in love – and in the tabloid lives of its stars.
The one thing we can’t call these movies, though, is forgetful. Here in the United States of Amnesia, as the shadows darken perceptibly, it may be that one day soon we may have to fight such a war – and the whole 20th century with it – all over again. Everything in waves.
Allied is in cinemas from Friday 25 November
