Cinema came of age in the 20th century and documented that epoch in all its trials and tribulations. Movies are for the most part escapist confections but they can also reflect our world back to us. To learn about the major events of the last century, it is sometimes as useful to turn to a film as to pick up a book. The following are ten movies that tell key chapters of the 20th century.
The Great War, 1917 (Sam Mendes, 2019)
World War I is the harder of the two world wars to make a movie about. It was not a good war, easily rendered into a Hollywood morality play about monstrous Germans, cruel Japanese, plucky Brits and heroic Americans. It was an ethically messy conflict of intersecting national and strategic interests rooted in dominion and the divine power of a fading world.
The notion of dying for king and country is alien to modern sensibilities and the outcome of the Great War — a temporary expansion of the British Empire — is not something many filmmakers want to romanticise. The obvious route, then, is to polemicise against misplaced patriotism and senseless slaughter and tut solemnly at how unenlightened the world was back then.
Sam Mendes avoids falling into either trap in his masterful 1917, an epic of bravery and love. Two soldiers (played by George MacKay and Dean-Charles Chapman) are despatched with a message to cancel a planned offensive that will lead British forces into an ambush. To reach the isolated troops requires a perilous trek across minefields and through German aerial bombardments and ends with a desperate sprint onto the battlefield to stop the carnage.
A particular highlight is MacKay stumbling across a company of Tommies in a forest as one (actor and singer Jos Slovick) offers an ethereal rendition of ‘Wayfaring Stranger’. It’ll give you chills.
World War II, Army of Shadows (Jean-Pierre Melville, 1969)
For many years, Jean-Pierre Melville’s Second World War thriller was forgotten, having fallen foul of ideological critics upon its release and not rediscovered until decades later. Even today, it is not a particularly well-known WWII movie but it is two and a half hours of unrelenting suspense.
The story of a cell of Resistance fighters in Vichy France, Army of Shadows is a claustrophobic depiction of courage and betrayal in which jarring close-ups and an oppressive score conspire to tighten the noose around the audience as much as the hunted men and women on screen. Melville’s grip is so taut, you start to feel like the Gestapo are after you too.
Army of Shadows does not belong to the familiar rotation of Sunday afternoon war movies still common on British TV. Its sensibilities are darker, although not wholly fatalistic. There is a sentiment of noble sacrifice for the good of the republic, which is very French and less universal than the straightforward good-versus-evil parables that British and American takes on WWII often favour. Nonetheless, it is a film that articulates the anxieties of being an insurrectionist in your own country in a way that lingers in the mind.
The Holocaust, Shoah (Claude Lanzmann, 1985)
Cinema’s most celebrated retelling of the Final Solution is Schindler’s List (Steven Spielberg, 1993) but no film records the enormity of the crime like Claude Lanzmann’s Shoah. At nine hours in length, the 1985 documentary is the most meticulous accounting of the systematic murder of six million Jews ever to make it to the big screen.
Lanzmann spent more than a decade interviewing both survivors and their persecutors and the testimony given is sometimes raw and sometimes contemplative but always devastating.
Shoah is not an enjoyable movie in the conventional sense but its moral spirit compels you through its daunting running time. This is history told first hand by those who lived it. Some of the most difficult interviews are with former SS officers, including the admissions of Franz Suchomel, a Treblinka guard whom Lanzmann secretly recorded.
In an under-appreciated device, the director also decided to forgo newsreel footage from the war, journeying instead to the same sites to film them as they were three decades on from the events narrated. Intercutting and overlaying survivors’ accounts with shots of empty fields and disused railroad tracks underscored how quickly Europe had moved on and how only memory had the power to keep the truth alive for the next generation.
India’s struggle for independence, Gandhi (Richard Attenborough, 1982)
It is the role that made Ben Kingsley’s career and bagged him a Best Actor Oscar. As the eponymous icon of peaceful resistance to imperial rule, he is charming, insouciant, unshakeable and inspiring. His portrayal of the Mahatma is rich with defiance of all the jibes and sneers that Gandhi faced early on from the British. When he tells the colonial administration ‘it is time you left’, the scene crackles with the audacity and self-evidence of the statement.
War films are sometimes reproached for pandering to patriotism but Richard Attenborough’s magnum opus is that rare beast: a civic nationalist war movie. As Gandhi explains: ‘There is no people on Earth that would not prefer their own, bad government to the good government of an alien power.’ The movie boasts detractors on the right and some of their objections are valid. (Attenborough’s film is a work of hagiography, not biography.)
But leaving some of Gandhi’s less palatable views in shadow takes nothing away from the motive force of the movie: Kingsley’s performance. Few actors playing real people are able to embody their characters so totally and still be acting rather than impersonating. Kingsley is the definitive Gandhi as much because of the actor Kingsley is as because of the man Gandhi was.
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The State of Israel, Exodus (Otto Preminger, 1960)
It is the most improbable of stories, a 20th century David versus Goliath fable. Expelled from their national homeland for 2,000 years, the Jewish people return and, in the shadow of their attempted annihilation, found the modern State of Israel. Exodus, Otto Preminger’s liberal Zionist classic, is based on Leon Uris’ bestseller of the same name, but softens its political points into a romantic portrait of the competing approaches taken by different factions battling to restore Jewish sovereignty in the Land of Israel.
Paul Newman is our hero, a Haganah freedom fighter who faces down the British to transport a ship full of Jews to pre-state Israel. Sal Mineo takes a divergent path by joining the Irgun, a rightist liberation force that opposed the Haganah’s policy of havlaga(‘self-restraint’) and was convinced the occupiers would be driven out only by guerrilla warfare. The two archetypes, crudely drawn but not without truth, dramatise the dilemmas that confronted Jews striving to rebuild their homeland.
Critics accuse the film of failing to reflect the local Arab perspective on 1948 but the movie is memorable for Newman’s impassioned speech for peace as he buries a murdered Arab friend and a slain Jewish refugee in the same grave. The film’s famous ending, in which the mourners leap into trucks and head for the frontline, is just as stirring 60 years on.
The Cold War, Invasion of the Body Snatchers (Don Siegel, 1956)
Don Siegel’s pod people B-movie is not the most critically acclaimed Cold War film. That honour goes to Stanley Kubrick’s Dr Strangelove. Nor does it depict how profoundly communism frightened the commanding heights of US politics. John Frankenheimer’s paranoia-drenched Manchurian Candidate is your best bet for that perspective. Yet this low-budget tale of alien invasion captures the Cold War mindset more urgently than any critic-friendly Oscar-bait.
The residents of Santa Mira, a fictional town in California, are being steadily replaced by emotionless lookalikes hatched via pods sent to Earth by extra-terrestrials. Of course the plot is nonsense. What did you expect of a film called Invasion of the Body Snatchers? The ludicrousness fits perfectly with the allegory, which is anti-communist or anti-anti-communist depending on who you ask. Siegel translated Cold War America’s fears — of communism and conformity — into a pulpy sci-fi picture that has outlasted all its contemporaries because its director understood that schlock and satire can coexist.
Like the suspicion-cloaked America of McCarthyism and Soviet spying, Siegel’s Santa Mira is a place where truth is no defence to accusations and sometimes lying is a matter of self-preservation. Just to prove it, in one scene Siegel has his leads, played by Kevin McCarthy and Dana Winter, try to pass as pod people to escape the deadly doppelgängers — only to be betrayed by their own humanity when they see a dog hurt.
The original ending was meant to be a downer but the studio baulked, yet the more ambiguous finale, which leaves the fate of mankind up in the air, is much more unsettling.
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The US civil rights movement, The Bus (Haskell Wexler, 1965)
Haskell Wexler is better remembered as an Oscar-winning cinematographer — he shot In the Heat of the Night for Norman Jewison and One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest for Milos Forman — but it was as a director that he contributed his most historically significant work. The Bus, a documentary Wexler self-financed, takes place on a coach carrying civil rights activists from San Fransisco to the 1963 March on Washington.
The production is unshowy and Wexler’s camera weaves through the passengers, dropping in on their conversations about the movement and the ethics of challenging racism.
A middle-aged black woman remonstrates with a white woman for preaching hippie-toned non-violence. The white bus driver, sympathetic to the cause of racial equality, frets about the DC gathering prompting a backlash from white America. A youngish black activist, full of righteous zeal, insists on stopping in an inhospitable area to buy some smokes. When others protest that he put them in danger, he reminds them where the fault lies: ‘What’s wrong with getting a packet of cigarettes in Hagerstown, Maryland? The fact that it’s Hagerstown, Maryland is what’s wrong with it.’
The Bus is the greatest road movie you’ve never seen, a hitchhiker on a long, hard journey to justice. This hour-long freedom rider travelogue is lamentably obscure as a document of American social and cinematic history, but you can change that by buying or renting it on Vimeo.
The Vietnam war, The Deer Hunter (Michael Cimino, 1978)
Patriotism and profits kept Hollywood from tackling the Vietnam war much while American boys were still in the jungles, but the US withdrawal from Saigon changed all that. America’s retreat ushered in a flood of movies about how the war had traumatised the men on the ground and the American people back home.
The most aching, elegiac of these was Michael Cimino’s The Deer Hunter, a story of three Pennsylvania steelers who drink Rolling Rock, hunt deer and pursue the same women. Then the trio — played by Robert De Niro, Christopher Walken and John Savage — are shipped off to fight the Viet Cong.
Although the friends survive the conflict proper, they are each killed by it in their own way: Savage is horrifically injured, Walken shoots himself and De Niro is left emotionally dead by what he has seen. The film’s political ambivalence has made it a target for leftist critics who accuse Cimino of racist and dehumanising depictions of the Viet Cong and the subplot in which they are shown forcing American POWs to play Russian roulette is controversial for its lack of historical basis.
The closing scene in which the surviving characters sing ‘God Bless America’, unfairly maligned as jingoistic, is haunting and painfully human. Cimino did not set out as others did to make a polemic against war, in the vein of Coming Home (Hal Ashby, 1978), nor did he offer up red, white and blue propaganda as John Wayne did in 1968’s The Green Berets. He meant to make a film about the people, not the conflict, and in doing so produced one of the best war movies ever made.
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The dictatorship of the proletariat, The Lives of Others (Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck, 2006)
The Lives of Others is the sort of movie that has even the most jaded critic reaching for the poster-friendly superlatives. It is a film of such accomplishment that, upon encountering someone who has never seen it, you experience an evangelical zeal to convert them. It is also an unsparing character study in the mental and emotional toll of surveillance and suspicion, the twin pillars of life under Soviet totalitarianism.
In one of his final performances, Ulrich Mühe plays a Stasi agent assigned to wiretap a beloved East German playwright on the pretext of compromised loyalty. The truth is that a senior regime official is sweet on the dramatist’s lover and would like to prise her away from him. In one of the acid ironies that flow throughout this dread-bathed drama, the writer is a true-believing socialist but the escalating interventions in his life push him into a steady trickle of disloyalties.
When the film was released in 2006, it picked up a best foreign-language Oscar and captured the hearts of critics. There is an awful weight to it, a gravity that stays with you days after watching the film — sympathy pains for a life lived under the crushing pressure of an enforced lie. The Lives of Others is more impactful than any documentary about the GDR because the emotional clout of Mühe’s performance draws you into his moral scenario. You can’t help but ask yourself what you would have done in his character’s position, or that of Sebastian Koch’s playwright, and you may not like the answer.
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The collapse of the Soviet Union, Good Bye, Lenin! (Wolfgang Becker, 2003)
If you like your historical movies less sombre than The Lives of Others, Good Bye, Lenin! is the perfect antidote. While it touches on the Soviet Union’s descent into soul-destroying totalitarianism, Wolfgang Becker’s 2003 bittersweet comedy is properly concerned with the final days of Lenin’s experiment.
Katrin Sass plays an idealistic mother living in the GDR in late 1989 who has only two loves in live: her son (The Fifth Estate’s Daniel Brühl) and Soviet socialism. Her offspring is less enamoured of communism and takes part in a pro-democracy demonstration during which he is beaten by police, causing his mother to suffer a heart attack that leaves her comatose. Then everything changes: the regime falls, the Berlin Wall comes down and Germany is reunified.
One day Sass awakens but her doctors warn her son that the slightest shock could kill her. So he sets about creating the illusion that the GDR is still alive and well, even as the country is transforming rapidly outside their little apartment. This requires a comical amount of ingenuity. When a banner for Coke goes up on the opposite building, Brühl fakes a TV bulletin bringing the joyous news that the Coca-Cola Company has defected from the West and embraced Marxism. Good Bye, Lenin! was one of the earliest mainstream movies to tackle the complicated feelings of liberation and loss that East Berliners felt when the wall came down. It is a tremendously funny movie but there is a longing amidst the comedy.
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