Humor in War Movies Essay

There is more than one way to get a point across in the movies. Movies based on actual events, movies made using actual facts but not always about true events, documentary films and those films that use humor or satire to get their point across. I think the three films that I chose fall into the last category. The first film (released in 1953) is Stalag 17, a film about American prisoners of war being held in a German prison camp. This film seems to follow the typical war movie theme, group unity for a common cause and no single hero. The movie stars William Holden who as Sergeant Sefton, a wheeler-dealer who doesn’t hesitate to trade with the guards and who has acquired goods and privileges that no other prisoner seems to have is accused of being a German spy by his fellow prisoners. The Germans always seem to be forewarned about escapes and in the most recent attempt the two men, Manfredi and Johnson, walked straight into a trap and were killed. For some in Barracks 4, especially the loud-mouthed Duke, the leaker is obvious. An officer is passing though on the way to another camp, tells of how he sabotaged an ammunition train by luck using matches. The Germans find out and now he has to hide so he can escape to avoid being shot. The director Billy Wilder created a popular film loaded with subversive subtexts, his signature cynicism and humor (although it’s sometimes a feeble attempt at humor it is humor just the same). WW II wasn’t even a decade old yet and maybe it wasn’t the right time to make a movie depicting the conditions of the German prisoner camps in such a realistic manner, but there seem to be a goldmine of possibilities within that setting for the directing genius of Wilder. By today’s standards it may be difficult to appreciate Stalag 17 as a classic film due to the TV show Hogan’s Heroes that it inspired. Wilder’s directing style, wit and perception are lost in the interpretation, but the films humor still remains. Another reason for lack of appreciation the basics of the Stalag 17’s plot have become the staple in terms of wartime incarceration and general prison-break films. Still, it is interesting to see the matter-of-fact style in an escape film. Most focus on the details of the laborate plan, but Stalag 17 follows the most practical route make a run for the fence while the guards are diverted which, when you think about it, is a more likely scenario besides how easy do you think it is to lay your hands on a pair of wire cutters in a prison camp. Broadly played, the humor, serves as a good method for getting away with the more subtle subversive aspects of the film. As Wilder once was quoted â€Å"that if one was going to tell the truth, be funny or they’ll kill you. † There is a long musical scene as one of the POWs sings while the rest celebrate Christmas by dancing with each other. The men are nice and toasted after having raided Sefton’s booze and Animal is desperately pining over Betty Grable. When Shapiro stuffs yellow straw under a bonnet as a gag, Animal thinks his dream girl has come to life and starts to dance and come on to Shapiro as he thinks Shapiro is Betty Grable. You can’t say that Sgt. Sefton is the hero of the movie, even Holden sited the unlikeability of the character, but his vicious, sharp and charismatic demeanor was enough for you to forgive him and root for him anyway. Holden’s character doesn’t change his wheeling and dealing ways at the end of the movie and one of his fellow prisoners remarks as Sefton is escaping â€Å"Maybe he just wanted to steal our wire cutters. You ever think of that? † Wilder had little use for such sentimentality and it is reflected in Stalag 17 because it’s an examination of the human condition not a moral tale. Such a cynical perspective in the depiction of actual combat would have to wait another twenty years and the dismal aftermath of two unpleasant wars to have the American audience fully ready for it. While a number of novels about World War II were able to capture such themes, Wilder was ahead of his time. Film critic Richard Corliss once suggested that, Wilder may have been â€Å"less a cynic than a premature realist. † Stalag 17’s dramatic scenes seem to hold up much better than the comedic scenes, considering many of people in the original audience had fought in the WWII and that American POWs were then being held in the current military conflict going on in Korea. It seems that the extensive comic segments might have been a used to defuse scenes that would have hit home more then than it would now. Back then I don’t think that many Americans audiences would have been willing to sit through an insistently grim POW drama. The bit about the soldier, his wife, and the baby on the doorstep must have made a few people in the audience very uneasy. It’s important to remember that this film was made and released in the early 1950’s. It is no mistake that the real traitor to American values was the head of â€Å"security† Price. At the time of the films release the congressional members of the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) was busy protecting American security by depriving citizens of their right to be different in very much the same ways as those depicted in the film. Like Sefton, however, Wilder is no hero. It can be argue that this is very much the film’s real message, Wilder cleverly hides it under enough comedy and plot that he runs no risk of offending Sen. McCarthy’s communist hunters. The next film Mister Roberts released in 1955 is about life on a Navy supply ship the â€Å"Reluctant† dubbed the â€Å"Bucket† by its crew. The Reluctant is commanded by an oppressive Captain Morton, who takes sadistic pleasure in undermining the crews’ morale. Lt. Doug Roberts (aka Mister Roberts) intervenes on the crew’s behalf as much as possible and watching him butt heads with the captain seems to lift the crew’s spirits while providing most their entertainment. This film doesn’t seem to follow the war movie theme. The main character Mister Roberts seems to be out for himself, with the war drawing to an end he wants to see some action. His weekly requests to be transferred are always turned down by Capt. Morton, who according to Roberts is using Roberts to promote himself. The fact that the crew is not happy with their situation is secondary to Roberts’ problem. One of the more sympathetic and insightful films from the 1950s to deal with World War II was Mister Roberts. It was an indication of the distance the public as well as filmmakers had come from the war. This distance would allow for a more sophisticated and dramatic treatment of the conflict and the people involved. Of all the films during this time that also reflect the new maturity, Mister Roberts was the most successful of them all, though getting it made properly took real work. Director John Ford was perfect for the project; he retired from the reserves as a rear admiral. Ford may have been too close to and slightly too old to do justice to the script to this subject, also he was up against the competing personality of star Henry Fonda. Fonda had scored a huge hit with the Broadway version of Mister Roberts and he had given up any hope of ever doing the movie version since he hadn’t been on-screen in eight years. Ford insisted on Fonda to star as a condition to directing the film, but the two were at odds from the beginning over the production, mostly over the director’s tendency to inject rough-house comedy into his movies. Ford used such an approach to breathe life into some of his other movies like Fort Apache. However, Mister Roberts was a character-driven film with very little real action and Fonda thought the Fords’ emphasis on laughs would destroy the integrity of the material. Ford’s demanding dictatorial directing style combined with his excessive drinking created tension between the two. Ford left the production, he was replaced by director Mervyn LeRoy who basically asked the cast to use their best judgment and make the kind of movie Ford would’ve made. The result is a finely textured character study that captured the best dramatic moments of the play. Some of the comical scenes in the movie were when the sailors discover that they can have a clear view of the nurses’ shower room in a hospital on the nearby coast by looking through binoculars. This provides them with their first release from drudgery in over a year. The ship’s morale officer, young Ensign Pulver, is also aware of the nurses and finagles a trip to the hospital to pick up aspirin for Doc. While there, he convinces head nurse, Lt. Ann Girard, to come to the ship later by promising to share a bottle of scotch with her. Back on board, Pulver is distressed to learn that Roberts, the owner of the scotch, has used it to bribe an official to send the Reluctant to a liberty port. Roberts and Doc mix up simulated scotch, called â€Å"jungle juice,† from alcohol, Coca-Cola, iodine and hair tonic for Pulver to use in place of the scotch. When the nurses appear, Pulver, With Roberts’ permission, pretends to be the ship’s cargo officer and shows them around. The nurses, who are undeceived by his pretensions, discover the sailors’ view of their quarters and leave immediately to hang curtains. Another humorous point happens during a night onshore, the men unleash all their pent-up energy, they crash an Army dance, fight with soldiers, terrorize women, steal an admiral’s goat and mistake the French Colonial governor’s mansion for a bordello. Roberts hopes the night will give them strength for the â€Å"miserable, endless days ahead of them. The next day, the ship is banished from the port. Mister Roberts also made two appearances as a TV series, once in 1965 and again in 1984. As far as public was concerned enough time had passed that most Americans were able to laugh at some of the kookier aspects about military life and Hollywood provided just the right amount of seriousness and irreverence with this 1955 hit. The third film I chose is M*A*S*H released in 1970. The movie is about a mobile army surgical hospital set in the Korean War conflict (1950-1953). This movie breaks from the traditional war theme movies. It not about any one person at any given time but it’s not about the unit as a whole either. The plot in M*A*S*H is not defined; instead the unusual characters are involved in a sequence of darkly comic episodes. M*A*S*H is a black comedy about life in a Mobile Army Surgical Hospital unit located only three miles from the front lines. The mission of any MASH unit is to provide immediate medical treatment to those wounded in combat, and the young surgeons are always up to their elbows in blood and guts for long periods of time. When they’re off duty, the MASH unit personnel keep their sanity by pursuing a wacky, irreverent lifestyle that leads to some hilarious adventures. Some of the hilarious scenes in the movie are; they sneak a microphone under the bed of Major â€Å"Hot Lips† Houlihan, and broadcast her lovemaking to the entire camp, a tent that is pulled away from the showering Major Houlihan an attempt to settle a bet about her being a natural blonde, they drug a general and photograph him in a brothel, a Last Supper parody where a man whose impotency has made him despondent is duped into a faux suicide and a rather lengthy football game sequence. The way they present humor in â€Å"M*A*S*H,† is almost metaphysically cruel, there is something about war that inspires practical jokes and the heroes (if you can call them heroes (Donald Sutherland (Hawkeye), Elliot Gould (Trapper John) and fellow camp members) are inspired and utterly heartless. We laugh because it is so true to the sadist in all of us. There is perhaps nothing so wonderful as achieving sweet mental revenge against someone we hate with particular enthusiasm. And it is the flat-out, poker-faced hatred in â€Å"M*A*S*H† that makes it work. Most comedies want us to laugh at things that aren’t really funny; in this one we laugh because they’re not funny. We laugh, so that we do not cry. This movie depends upon timing and tone to be funny. Hawkeye, Trapper John and the members of their merry band of pranksters are offended because the Army regulars Major Burns and Houlihan who don’t feel deeply enough. They are only concern is with Army protocol and not with war. Hawkeye and Trapper John dancing on the brink of crack-ups, dedicate themselves to making them feel something. Their facade offends them; no one could be that unaffected by the work of this hospital. And so if they can crack their defenses and reduce them to their own level of dedicated cynicism, the number of suffering human beings in the camp will go up by two. Even if they fail, they have a hell of a lot of fun trying and of course, it’s a distraction to the war. Although the movie is set in Korean War, no one seeing â€Å"M*A*S*H† in 1970 confused the film for anything but a sarcastic comment on the Vietnam War. This is one of the counterculture movies that exploded into the mainstream at the end of the ’60s. Altman wanted his 1970 audience to think in terms of Vietnam, where another unpopular war was still in progress. Altman’s style of cruel humor, overlapping dialogue, and densely textured visuals brought the material to life in an all-new kind of war movie (or, more precisely, antiwar movie). Audiences had never seen anything like it: vaudeville routines played against spurting blood, fueled with open ridicule of authority. The film’s huge success spawned the long-running TV series, a considerably softer take on the material. The concept of war comes in three parts, the training, the actual combat and the repair of the casualties of the combat. Each part has it’s critics and it’s supporters, both championing for their side. Not seen in the earlier combat films was the concept of why we fought. Those wars before the Korean War were world wars with many countries involved being fought in many different countries. The Korean War and all those that followed up to the present were mostly two sided with the Americans at the spearhead of each. Yes, the United Nation forces were involved in many of these wars, but it was the Americans leading the way. After such a history, Americans could very well sustain their unity against the Axis Powers during WW II, but they could not readily accept a limited war such as the Korean War, in which negotiations with the enemy to bargain for objectives far short of his destruction accompanied the very fighting of the war. Dissents against the Korean War also were encouraged by an uneasy political atmosphere troubling the United States in 1950. WW II had produced not a satisfactory peace but an ongoing Cold War with communism led by the Soviet Union, to which the United States held out the prospect of no more triumphant but an outcome of containment. Such a change in the ways of war was perceived by Americans were truly visible in a lot of modern day war films. Reference http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0046359 http://www.amazon.com/Mister-Roberts-Henry-Fonda/dp/6305225761 http://www.fandango.com/misterroberts_v64788/summary http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0066026 http://rogerebert.suntimes.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/19700101/REVIEWS/40812002/1023