Just a short one. I've been reading through "Projections of War"by Thomas Doherty, and I think that the following quote sums up WWII cinema quite well:
From the vantage of half a century, the film record of 1941-1945 is condescended to as quaint or condemned as duplicitous. The technique seems hopelessly antiquated, the sensibility laughably naive...Writing in the film magazine Premiere, critic David Denby vented a common current-day sentiment: "World War II pictures (especially ones made during the conflict) look childish and banal - morally hapless in the dehumaniation of the enemy, naive in their glib underestimation of the spiritual devastations of combat, their unshadowed faith in the democratic and egalitarian American future." Against the ruthless honesty of today's R-rated, FX-laden spectacles and the searing vision of the cutting-edge auteur, classic Hollywood cinema sanitizes the horror and flinches before the ghastly realities.
I feel like this is a more or less accurate assessment of a lot of the government-sponsored pro-war movies from the era. Compared to today's war movies or war-related movies, they're especially one-sided and propagandistic. I wonder when and why, specifically, this started to change.
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