“Freedom!” – Braveheart
“The most difficult thing about being humble is not being able to brag about it.” – George S. Patton
Housekeeping: We should be a go on podcast tomorrow night, though I’m on the fence on a Friday post, as I just might take the day off.
I’ll change things up a bit due to Fourth of July (or as it’s known in the metric world “Friday”), and have a slightly different take on films this month – patriotic films. In this, I don’t necessarily confine the patriots in question to entirely American patriots – I do allow some room for a couple of films that show patriotism from other cultures. These are in something of an order, but don’t put too much on that. Let’s just say the easiest to include on the list are first, and the ones that just barely made it are at the bottom.
I will say, I liked the way the A.I. posters turned out this time.
So, here are my top 10 patriotic movies:
No man could salute like Patton. At least, no human man.
Patton
George S. Patton knew he was going to be a general in the United States Army from when he was a child. He lived that life to become the enigma that George C. Scott portrayed perfectly on screen. Patton wanted glory, but also was personally filled with bravery and admired the men who displayed it. Patton was for an America ruled by Americans, and was willing to lead hundreds of thousands of men to capture 82,000 square miles (6.3 megaliters) of Europe and capturing nearly a million enemy soldiers.
No matter how he tried to retire, they kept dragging him back in.
The Patriot
How could I skip this movie? Well, I couldn’t. The United States wasn’t given to Americans, it was willed into existence by men such as the one played by St. Mel of Gibson in this film. Interestingly (to me at least), the main character is pulled into military service not because of his zeal to kick the British out of the colonies. Nope. His motivation is personal – his son being killed by a British officer untouchable by justice.
If he had been born in 1970, he’d have been William Wallace, Guardian of Scotland and Walmart® greeter.
Braveheart
I warned you that not all films would show strictly American patriotism, and this one chronicles the life of William Wallace, the Scottish rebel who fought against England to attempt to free Scotland. He failed to free Scotland, but it wasn’t long afterwards that Robert the Bruce did lead my ancestors against my other ancestors to win freedom. Braveheart clocks in at somewhere close to three hours, but doesn’t seem that long. A good film, and St. Mel again chews up the scenery.
Is that a French submarine surrendering?
Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World
One of my favorite movies. A captain, very well played by Russell Crowe takes his ship on a journey to fight the French, who only surrendered once in this film. This line, about Lord Nelson tells the tale: “The second time… The second time he told me a story… about how someone offered him a boat cloak on a cold night. And he said no, he didn’t need it. That he was quite warm. His zeal for his king and country kept him warm. I know it sounds absurb, and were it from another man, you’d cry out “Oh, what pitiful stuff” and dismiss it as mere enthusiasm. But with Nelson… you felt your heart glow.”
The Soviets weren’t expecting what they got when they parachuted into Henson, Colorado.
Red Dawn
1984 was Reagan’s year. He had made it clear that the United States would stand toe-to-toe with the Soviet Union, and would win. At that point, the country was together much more so than now, and you can see it in the vote total Ronnie got for re-election. A movie like Red Dawn was a slam dunk – plucky American teenagers being insurgent guerillas against an invading multicultural force of commies. Huh – that was back when we could sense danger, I guess.
Well, I guess we know what they serve there now.
300
Submit? To you? Here? In Sparta? No. Because . . . This. Is. Sparta. Leonidas fought against all odds to contain the Persian horde from entering Greece because that’s patriotism. Did he die? Yes. Gloriously. So gloriously that he’ll be remembered in 10,000 years. I think that’s how long the A.I.’s memory cache will last.
I can hear Kenny Loggins now, singing about Maverick after he lost his pilot’s license, “I waited in the loading zone . . . “
Top Gun: Maverick
I found this a much better film than the original. I always thought the original was boy meets girl, but with fighter jets. Here? It’s all about the mission. And Tom Cruise flying that F-14 Tomcat one last time before Social Security kicks in.
“Houston, we seem to have two more problems.”
Apollo 13
Not all patriotic films have to do with war, and Apollo 13 is a good example. The movie is about Americans fighting to win the Space Race and get to the Moon. Oh, we did that already? NASA has made it boring? Well, let’s see how they do if their ship explodes while they’re the farthest away from Earth that anyone besides a few other Americans have been. Excellently plotted, filmed, and told by an ensemble cast of great actors led by Tom Hanks, it’s a movie I can just start watching from any point and enjoy.
Wonder how this would have gone if all the characters were played by Tom Cruise, like some old Peter Sellers movie?
Saving Private Ryan Cruise
This one was the last on my list. I’m not sure why. It does feature the everyman (Hanks) who sacrificed everything because that’s what the orders said to do. It features the shared burden of that sacrifice on those who survive. It’s stunningly filmed, and, though the story drags a bit in the middle, is tense. I think that the reason that it’s here is that it’s the film I’d simply be least likely to re-watch of all of these. YMMV.
If this was a top 10 list – it is one shy. I left room for one I missed or didn’t think about.
What did I miss? Other notable films that nearly made the list include: Midway, We Were Soldiers, The Green Berets, Gettysburg, and Gods and Generals. Gettysburg honestly had the best chance, but I would have had to watch it again, and the movie lasts about 74 hours, or two hours longer than the battle itself. I kid. It’s 271 minutes, or 27.1 metric hours.
You forgot Independence Day! That film WINS on the 4th of July!
And, arguably, Casablanca. Everyone is just going along with the Germans, until the American steps up.
The Sands of Iwo Jima.
Glory! The Black guys are heading into nearly certain death, but they do it. Denzel has the most amazing, but believable transformation from hard-ass malcontent to hero.
Old school, but very good – Disney’s Johnny Tremain (I swear, I will tear down Disney singlehandedly if this is ever made into a remake).
The Right Stuff, and couple it with Apollo 13.
We are Marshall – it epitomizes American Grit.
And, last, the one that ALWAYS starts my 4th of July celebration – Live Free or Die Hard.
Because that’s what makes YOU the Guy!
“Casablanca. Everyone is just going along with the Germans, until the American steps up.”
Not just “the American”. Michael Walsh (for totally unclear reasons) wrote a prequel/sequel novel (it jumps between events pre and post the movie) in which it’s revealed that “Rick Blaine” was born Yitzhak Baline, a Yiddish mobster, who went on the lam and changed his name to Richard Blaine. So it’s not just some random Yank who stands up to the Nazis, it’s a brave and plucky Jew who, despite being a mobster, turns out to be morally superior to everyone, except maybe Victor Lazlo.
Of course, that was out of Walsh’s head. Unclear to me whether his novel was canon. Anyway, Casablanca (the movie, not Walsh’s unfathomable fever dream) truly is a Great movie. It’s also a fantastic piece of propaganda.
Casablanca for the win.
And Independence Day, when D.C. goes kablooey. Chef’s kiss.
I almost put in ID4. Great fun. Live Free or Die Hard . . . I’ll have to go back and watch that one again.
“Saving Ryan’s Privates” has the most accurate portrayal of what the initial assaults on Omaha Beach were like.
It is based very loosely on a true story, but it was an Army parachute Chaplain who helped a soldier look for his brother who was killed on DDay. It was the Chaplain who found out about a brother being lost in the Pacific theater (later found fro be alive) and seek return of the Young paratrooper.
Army and Marines will see in the movie the Hollyweird story lines which often directly conflicts with tactics and logic. Example: turning loose a captured German. If you cannot take him with you why not truss him up like a pig about to be roasted and put him in a farmhouse where he would be found later…..?
Others abound. This response is not to pick apart the movie, but to highlight the fact that truth is almost never found in anything HollyWeird does.
Buyer Beware !!
I thought “Saving Ryan’s Privates” was a porno? 😉
Private Ryan can be viewed as a movie about military morality. Whenever given a choice, the protagonists usually make the wrong one. The plot really follows the intelligence analyst, who is a complete and utter screw-up.
He’s a translator typist, not an intelligence analyst. IOW, a REMF.
Who are generally complete and utter screw-ups when placed in combat arms.
Fury wasn’t much of a historical stretch in that regard either.
“There’s a name for movies that get every single historical detail exactly correct: we call them documentaries. I don’t make documentaries; I make movies.” – Steven Spielberg
Again, I watched it, and the D-Day scene was overwhelming, but something was a bit off.
Das Boot: the only movie about submarines that comes close to reality.
Run Silent, Run Deep, Ice Station Zebra, and The Hunt For Red October would like to have a word with you.
So would The Enemy Below.
What about Up Periscope? I need a man with a tattoo on his . . .
Top Gun: Maverick was, in my opinion, a pretty mediocre film that is widely acclaimed but it was so unusual at the time for showing men doing masculine things with only a handful of girl pilots and it wasn’t dripping with America hatred. It is a testament to how bad movies have become that it seems so good in comparison but the original is far more entertaining in every respect.
It is a time when celebration of the manly and the patriotic are avoided at all costs. Thus, Maverick.
The Ones You Missed
1) You should have included Gettysburg. You’d get to see Ted Turner in a Confederate uniform shot in the chest. That’s worth waiting 271 parsecs for. The fact that it played both sides heroically and even-handedly is even better.
2) You should also have included The Green Berets. And The Alamo(1960). Not coincidentally, both directed by his holiness, St. John of Wayne. Forget any historical quibbles: they were right.
{And FTR, anyone who so much as mentions the irredeemably awful 2004 version of The Alamo bleeds pussy-hat pink, should be declared an honorary Mexican, and deported thence.}
3) Four more: All with the Duke, and 3 of 4 with John Agar: Rio Grande, She Wore A Yellow Ribbon, Fort Apache, and Sands Of Iwo Jima. For the latter of which John Wayne should have won his first Best Actor Oscar, instead of waiting another 20 years to hand him one.
4) The Lost Battalion. Rick Schroeder’s best career work ever. Epic.
5) Sergeant York. Back when Bible reading and prayer weren’t inimical to Hollyweird values.
6) Sahara (1943). {If anyone thinks to mention the Jim Belushi mediocre remake in 1995, see the comments to #2, above. Remakes are almost universally awful, and I can name the exceptions among 50,000 films on my fingers.}
They Were Expendable
Thirty Seconds Over Tokyo
Command Decision
Twelve O’Clock High
Greyhound
pretty much every American submarine, aviation, or paratroop movie ever made
Let’s face it: Patriotic WW2 movies are an embarrassment of riches.
And if you were considering Midway, it better have been the 1976 version with Charlton Heston, not the Roland Emmerich retarded abortion from 2019.
7) 1776. Even with the Continental Congress reduced to being a chorus line, this flick completely kicks @$$.
8) Pork Chop Hill The Alamo, with Chinese. Oh, and we win this one.
9) Uncommon Valor
Flight Of The Intruder
Being a patriotic American means sometimes you break the rules to do what’s right.
10) The Wind And The Lion John Milius’ predecessor to Red Dawn and Flight Of The Intruder, featuring America being American, and the Marines killing anyone who interferes with that. Not the 1804 version of killing Mideastern terrorists, nor the 2004 version, but the middle (1904) version. Best palace assault scene in cinematic history, exactly like Bullitt has the premier epic car chase.
11) Taking Chance. About the only flick about the GWOT that’s worth a damn.
12) Casablanca
The premier patriotic masterpiece of all time.
Richard Blaine sticks his neck out for nobody, but he has no compunction about shooting Nazis when the time is ripe. And even sportingly warning them ahead of time about not invading certain parts of NYFC.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tjkRd288caQ
13) Hacksaw Ridge
Patriotic pacifism at its finest.
Adding those to your list would make a pretty good Independence Day viewing marathon.
So would adding any of several Clint Eastwood efforts:
Firefox
Heartbreak Ridge
Space Cowboys
Flags Of Our Fathers
Gran Torino
American Sniper
Sully
15:17 To Paris
Richard Jewell
It’s also no coincidence that patriotism and heroism are almost completely overlapping circles on a Venn diagram, to almost 100% correspondence.
Another non-coincidence is that the films of John Ford, Frank Capra, John Wayne, Clint Eastwood, Mel Gibson, and Tom Hanks usually show up in any decent list over and over.
Great list.
A great list! I could quibble with a few, and The Duke probably deserved more than an “almost”.
As a straight white Christian man, I grew up under elitists who despised me, although I didn’t fully understand that until the past few years. So it’s tough for me to identify with modern expressions of patriotism.
America that was, fren.
Codex’s codicil to Iowahawk’s Laws of SJWs:
4. After the skinsuit is stinking and visibly crawling with maggots, convince everyone it was always rotten.
Always the ideal, as every man has feet of clay.
All of the American patriotic films mentioned here, and others like 300 and Braveheart and Master & Commander, are all obvious and deserved examples of the patriotic genre. I gotta confess I love them all but have a special place in my heart for Casablanca. Let’s face it, men do heroic and dangerous things for thrill and glory in times of war, but most of all men do them for Britannia, or Columbia, or Ingrid Bergman. “Here’s looking at you, kid.”
And referring to a meme you posted earlier this week, no, women should not breastfeed in combat.
Now, I am gonna get pilloried for this comment, but I’m gonna make it anyway. John, you yourself said you would “allow some room for a couple of films that show patriotism from other cultures”, and in this vein I submit that the most patriotic film ever made was Leni Riefenstahl’s 1935 Nazi propaganda masterpiece Triumph of the Will. I am absolutely no Nazi sympathizer but I have watched this movie and if we’re talking purely as cinema critics ya gotta give credit where credit is due. TOTW is an undeniable masterpiece and the prime example of the patriotic genre, most amazingly presented as a documentary and not a work of fiction. This film played a key role in the deaths of millions of people in the 1930s and 1940s, many of them Americans, all in the name of patriotism.
Which shows that patriotism, and exciting films about it, is an incredibly powerful force.
But just as American dogfaces showed Nazi stormtroopers that American patriotism back then was just as strong as the German version, so did Frank Capra show Leni that American cinema was equally as strong as her work with his own masterpiece, Why We Fight.
https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLugwVCjzrJsXwAiWBipTE9mTlFQC7H2rU
The American patriotic films we talk about here in today’s column are all wonderful. But they are ultimately meant to be stirring calls to action in dire times. If draft cards were issued today, what remake of Why We Fight could possibly be shown to those who bothered to show up for boot camp?
“I will say, I liked the way the A.I. posters turned out this time.”
I was a little taken aback by the first one. A cat with three ears, and two right arms (fore limbs?) in the arms of a pretty well done Mel Gibson is a bit weird, but the Saving Private Ryan with a cat’s head just sitting there on a rock alongside three Tom Cruises isn’t much better.
But the movie summaries make up for the weird images. The problem with AI is people just seem to trust it.
They do. We’re not far away from the first major AI caused calamity.
One of Eastwood’s movies that I love to watch this time of year is “Where Eagles Dare.” I know, I know…. It doesn’t really fit the 4th of July theme being it was in the snowy mountains, but then again, there are a lot of people watching Hallmark’s “Christmas in July” so that makes it okay 🙂
It isn’t really a patriotic movie in the sense that Eastwood’s character is the only American on a British raid. But it did a good job of capturing the bigger picture of how Americans got thrust into the middle of other countries’ problems and were doing their best to try and clean up the mess.
JBird
Actually, it’s simply another fantastic film adaptation of another great Alistair Maclean* novel.
*{The guy who wrote The Guns Of Navarone and Ice Station Zebra, both cinematic all-time classics, and only two of the dozen-plus or so adapted into films. Anyone who doesn’t track down and read every one of the 26 novels written by him in his lifetime, starting with HMS Ulysses, is missing out on the premier action novels of the 20th century, and the ones – along with the work of Jack Higgins – that made Tom Clancy’s later literary career possible.}
I loved those movies. When I was little, I got a Guns of Navarone play set for Christmas. Fond memories.
Okay, that was cool as hell. Never knew it existed!
I hated The Guns Of Navarone movie. I can’t tell what it’s like for the people who only can judge it on its own merits, but I read the book first and it is a spectacularly awful adaptation. Every change they made in adapting the book to the big screen was for the worse. It was baffling, I’ve never seen anything like it before or since. You’d think that they’d at least get something right, but no: literally every single change made the story worse. I’d recommend reading the book, but skip the movie.
Well, that certainly makes one of you.
The book’s author only wrote another dozen movies and sold the screenplay rights after it came out, so even the author disagrees with you, and it’s the only novel he ever wrote a sequel to (which was also made into a movie, albeit with considerably less box office success), never mind movie audiences in the millions, both then and currently. It made nearly $30M in an era when a movie ticket averaged under a buck.
Rotten Tomatoes rates it at 92% fresh, and their popcorn meter comes in at 86%, while it only managed to come in as the highest grossing motion picture in 1961, only beating out all other of 175 films released in the US that year, leaving 10-Oscar winner West Side Story to hold down second place by a country mile in box office, while only netting itself an Oscar and two Golden Globes, and the lead actors only have four acting Oscars between them.
So we can believe the opinion of the entire American movie-watching audience the year it came out.
Or, you.
Quite the poser there.
Maybe movie reviews isn’t your game, Ike.
Just saying.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_American_films_of_1961
Appeal to authority. “The author signed off on the movie being made!”
Appeal to popularity. “People at the time liked the movie and it was a big success!”
Ad hominem. “Quite the poser there. Maybe movie reviews isn’t your game, Ike.”
It doesn’t matter that Alistair MacLean signed off on The Guns of Navarone screenplay.
It doesn’t matter that The Guns of Navarone was a popular movie.
It doesn’t matter that you insult me.
Your post was nothing but logical fallacies and didn’t even try to address my argument that The Guns of Navarone movie adaptation is not a faithful one. The changes made to characters, backstories, relationships, events, and overall story were entirely unnecessary and makes the movie subpar when compared with the book.
You might as well have argued that I’m wrong because the sky is blue or because Alexander was initially repulsed at Battle of the Persian Gate.
F-, please do not try again.
Aesop, you seem to be confused. All your arguments in this latest reply are made as if I claimed that no adaptation could make any changes at all when transferred into another form of media, but that simply isn’t true.
All I’ve said is that The Guns of Navarone movie adaptation made stupid and unnecessary changes and that a more faithful adaptation would have made for a much better movie.
Where Eagles Dare avoided the mistakes of The Guns of Navarone, such as not introducing a romance subplot and keeping the characters truer to their book originals, and it is both a better adaptation and a better movie precisely because of it.
Appeal To Talking Out Of Your Nethers.
Match Forfeit.
When the audience, the critics, the box office gross, and every cinematic body in existence is against your opinion, take off your shoe and pound on the table. Well-played.
“The grapes were probably sour anyways.” – my namesake.
Actually, all of those things you’d like to paint as fallacious are actually exactly what matters.
The fact that a movie didn’t slavishly follow the book that inspired it is because books tell, and movies show. Most people who aren’t you get this without being clubbed over the head with that obvious factoid.
And in fact, when characters start monologuing like The Exposition Fairy mid-film as your criteria would require, it’s seen as rank amateurism and lazy cinema. They got away with a couple of moments like that in Jurassic Park, and it works in a novel format. But if Jeff Goldblum had given 1/10th of Malcolm’s pages-long tirades from the novel in the film version, the other actors, perfectly in character, would have tied him hand and foot, and fed him to the velociraptors mid-sentence, while they made their cinematic escape, and the audience would have been on their feet cheering and clapping.
That’s before you get into the difference between you reading words in your own head, and an actor having to regurgitate what the story’s author thought was snappy repartee.
“George, you can type this sh*t, but you can’t say this sh*t!” – Harrison Ford, Carrie Fisher, Mark Hamill, and Alec Guiness on all of the original Star Wars movie sets, time after time after time.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rihbi2U7tNg
https://www.youtube.com/shorts/qK2TxpFY6Rs
https://www.youtube.com/shorts/l3F8Iqqck_w
So no, the movie of Guns Of Navarone wasn’t a faithful replication of the novel.
Exactly like 99.99998% of all screenplays ever written weren’t either, nor would anyone (but you, apparently) ever want them to be. No one of import or basic intelligence gives a flying f**k about that criteria in which you have foolishly place all your cinematic judgement and rhetorical eggs.
How unfortunate.
Pay attention, lackwit: A page of screenplay is generally about a minute of screen time.
(Sometimes, a fraction of a page is many minutes. E.G Heat: “The team exits the bank, and a shootout with the police ensues.“)
A page of a pocket novel is equal to about three pages of screenplay, which has unbelievable spacing and gaps compared to a written page of a novel. This, like many other things, is evidently news to you, but so be it.
So “following the book”, even accounting for some on-screen pictures equaling a thousand words, is asinine, and frankly, impossible and cinematically suicidal.
War And Peace would have been 15 hours long. Even Shakespeare with his original plays wasn’t that sadistic to an audience, or he’d have been drowned in the Thames the same day.
Hunt For Red October eliminated what would have been another 900 minutes of movie as well. The Hobbit and Lord Of The Rings eliminated what would have been days of screen time. And we all know how much those movies sucked, right?
We won’t even discuss such cinematic masterpieces as Jaws, The Godfather, The Wizard Of Oz,, or pretty much every Best Picture based on a book or story since they started giving out Oscars in 1929.
The pocket novel for The Guns Of Navarone was 416 pages in length. That’s a movie roughly 1200 minutes long.
So please, tell the class, in detail, how a movie 20 hours long would have been soooo much better than the one that came out in 1961, which only amounted to a paltry 2 hours and 37 minutes, back when credits rolled by in three or four panels rather than the length of a game show, and explain to us poor boobs, based on your wealth of cinematic experience and authorial majesty, how your version would have outdone one made by the greatest cinematic creators both in front of and behind the camera in that – or most any – day.
AFAIK, there has been exactly one screenplay in cinematic history that was the book, or nearly so: The Andromeda Strain, artfully written by a virtually pubescent yet still brilliant Michael Crichton.
Exactly none of his other works are faithful to their respective novels, and he produced and co-wrote the screenplays for nearly all of them.
And they’ve only made a few billion dollars, and been both critical and box-office smashes.
In fact, at one point, Crichton had the Number One book, movie, and TV series in America, all at the same time. And his movies didn’t regurgitate his own books onscreen, word-for-word, either.
Share with us how you’re smarter than him, and all of Hollywood, since Edison invented the motion picture camera, rather than admit you’re fixating on the one thing that’s not only nearly totally unimportant, but actually detrimental to making a good movie.
All this and more is why “following the book” exactly and slavishly is quite simply retarded.
This is why your criteria was studiously ignored, because kicking retards who don’t even know what they don’t even know, and beating them about the head and shoulders with a stout cudgel at length is generally regarded poorly, even when they have it coming in spades. Be careful what you ask for.
You liked the book better than the movie?
Good for you.
So do billy goats.
Your ball, genius.
When you’re in a deep hole, maybe stop digging?
Be different from 99.99998% of the Anonymous internet commentariat:
Take your lumps standing up, and learn from your mistakes.
That’s weird, why did the comments show up out of order?
Don’t worry about a software glitch. You couldn’t sound any better if it had plopped down where you wanted it. Move the goalposts all you like, ignore that books aren’t movies and never will be, and yet you’re still an army of one, issuing judgement from nowhere to stand. All I’ve done is catalogue the dozens of reasons why you’re not only incorrect, but entirely unqualified to make your assertions, beyond your unsupported personal taste. No one can argue you or anyone else out of licking turds, either. So you win on that point alone.
What you claim as “stupid and unnecessary” changes turned a little-noted second novel by a relatively unknown British author (it was only Maclean’s second work at the time, and briefly peaked at no better than #12 on the weekly bestseller lists of 1957, and disappeared from those lists completely after a 3 week hiccup onto them) into a Hollywood blockbuster, becoming the Number One movie of the entire year at the box office. Every movie studio and author since ever would sell their mothers to get those exact kind of results from such “stupid and unnecessary” changes. Including Maclean himself.
So, exactly as originally noted, your opinion makes an exceedingly lonely one such.
Thirty-seven million or so people then, who all bought tickets when there was no other choice to see a movie, and millions more since, not to mention television and cable networks and their executives whose raison d’etre is to get eyeballs on screens, think your judgement on screenplays is non-existent. It’s so good, contrary to your testimony, that even YouTube gets people to pay to watch it, 64 years after its original theatrical release, and despite channels like TCM showing it all the time.
So the only basis you have for thinking that your imaginary screenplay would trump everyone else’s is based on nothing but your uninformed opinion, and despite the knowledge obvious even to Stevie Wonder from space, that of 416 pages in that novel, about 340 such would need to be entirely eliminated from any adaptation to make a workable screenplay. Like happens with every other novel adaptation to movies since ever.
So please, do go on about what 80% of the total novel you would have cut out to make a better movie, plus what you’d have kept and why, and then expound on how and why that one would have triumphed more resoundingly than the 1961 actual movie, which despite your judgement is only a cinematic classic, and one of only 119 movies out of 50,000+ ever made that have been the biggest movie at the box office in any year since 1906, when the first full-length feature was released.
Please, show all work, and explain what you would have ripped out and left on the editing floor instead of what Foreman did, which wouldn’t have changed the movie far more than you’re willing to abide, and contrary to the changes made by the man who had already written the immensely successful screenplays for High Noon, The Bridge On The River Kwai*, and The Mouse That Roared, before tackling The Guns Of Navarone.
Then follow up on that by explaining to everyone why vanilla ice cream is terrible, while pickle-flavored ice cream is superior. That’s the quest to which you’ve set yourself here, with a firm reliance on mere gainsaying your personal preference as the basis. No one ever denied you the right to be weird. I’ve merely pointed out how out of touch you are with the objective reality of the rest of the cinematic world.
*(for which screenplay Foreman was posthumously but correctly issued screen credit denied him during and because of the Blacklist, granting him the resulting screenplay adaptation Oscar owed him since 1958, three years before adapting and producing Guns Of Navarone. So you’re the one telling that guy, who only had a lifetime seven Oscar nominations and one win, who wrote for such minor directors as Frank Capra, Michael Curtiz, Fred Zinneman, David Lean, and Richard Attenborough, that he didn’t know what he was doing. Bravo. Well-played, sir.
Call us when you get into the WGA. 25,000 members at last look, only 400 (or less) major movies made per year, and you’re willing to go all in without even being in the 98.4% of annual failed screenplay authors whose opinion might have some bare objective merit. Ballsy, beyond question. ROWYBS)
Have you read the original novel?
I shall interpret your enduring silence as confirmation that you have not read the original novel.
My position, having both read the book and seen the movie, is that The Guns of Navarone movie adaptation made intrusive and unnecessary changes and that had it been more faithfully adapted, like Where Eagles Dare was, then it would have been a better movie. Some of those changes were the inclusion of a romantic subplot and rendering the villain pathetic rather than sinister.
Your position, having presumably only seen the movie, is that I am wrong because my position isn’t popular enough. This is your one and only argument, which you have repeated in one form or another for more than 1800 words.
I hope that some day you will come to value truth as more than a popularity contest, but you’ve made it clear that there is no point to argue with you. Have a pleasant day, Mr Raconteur.
It’s one of my favorite movies, and a great Iron Maiden song.
I just saw the current version of non-patriotism in the film blockbuster of the summer, F1. A pointedly international team takes on a new American lone wolf member to fight other international teams on the battlefields of Grand Prix racetracks spanning the globe. The black hotshot upcomer is British (and apparently based on multiracial driver Lewis Hamilton). The literal NASA (well, Lockheed) engineer who designed the car is a hot babe. The other supporting team members are all Diverse. This obligatory dash of wokeness is left behind in the whirlwind cyclone of non-stop action and paint-by-numbers plot / character development. This is Top Gun : Maverick with four tires instead of afterburners. Buy a big bucket of popcorn and go enjoy this movie. It’s fun.
PS – This movie made me look up some stuff on Formula One racing. Top speed is around 220 MPH. The cars really are instrumented like a space mission and have a literal mission control back room and tech support team during the race. The top teams in recent years – Ferrari, Red Bull – spent close to a half billion dollars on their 24 races per season. Accordingly, the governing body has put in a limit of around $150 million per year per team to give everybody an “equal” shot. This apparently doesn’t include driver’s salaries – Max Verstappen (Red Bull) makes $65 million per year, Lewis Hamilton (Ferrari) gets $60 million.
Drinker really liked that one. I’ll catch it at home . . .