Dipping my toe in the Vietnam Era

I've been examining box office numbers (because that's all I do now, apparently) for the Vietnam years - the best figures I've been able to find are here: http://www.filmsite.org/boxoffice2.html - and from the years of 1955-1975, there aren't many discernible patterns. I did notice that in the early years of the war, many of the highest-grossing movies were either Biblical adaptations - "The Ten Commandments," "Ben-Hur," and (wait for it) "The Bible" - or decidedly anti-war/liberal-minded movies about WWII (war movies from war eras that are about one war but, y'know, really about another one are pretty popular), like The Bridge on the River Kwai and the musical South Pacific. Honestly these trends send me kind of mixed messages, but the general idea that I'm getting is that in this tumultuous time period, audiences are shifting away from pro-War material, but still consider themselves moral, religious people who enjoy a good Biblical epic every now and then. Also a lot of James Bond movies. This is a pretty big change from the 40s, where many of the most successful movies were blatantly pro-war and pro-American. This shift in box office results can be linked, I think, to the shift in social attitudes towards war that the Vietnam War (which a lot of Americans considered to be an unnecessarily and immoral war) caused. Which leads me into my...*drumroll*...tentative thesis!


Which is this:

"Western civilization's changing attitudes towards war are reflected in the mainstream American cinematic landscape from WWII to the present."

On a similar note, the Projections of War book made an interesting point about how a lot of movies from WWII that were technically about WWI served to recontextualize WWI as something more romantic and noble in order to garner support for WWII. I think a similar recontextualization is evident in the Vietnam Era, with movies that deglorify WWII and show the darker side of things. Because it's easy to have one war as a placeholder for another in the service of commentary, a lot of movies made during wartimes seem to aim to paint previous wars in the light that they want current wars to be seen. "War is hell" wasn't exactly the sentiment in 1940s cinema, but I think you'd be hard pressed to find a popular war movie made after 1970 or so, about any war, that doesn't at least touch on it. The winds have changed.