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This chapter focuses on narratives of colonial wars in the 1950s. The siege narrative of colonial wars in the 1950s took a different trajectory from Second World War narratives, which increasingly expelled the home front, civilians, and women. The incorporation of white women in colonial war films conformed to developments in the 1950s empire genre more generally, and produced a more intimate sense of British identity in empire than pre-1945 films that showed homosocial communities of soldiers or administrators. In empire, white women could symbolize national weakness and vulnerability, or intrepidity and courage. But they also gave narratives of colonial wars a more liberal register, suggesting British commitment to welfare, development, and peace-keeping — a moral endeavour undertaken in very difficult circumstances. Despite these gestures towards a ‘people's war’, colonial war narratives produced a very different image from the wartime ‘people's empire’. Diverse peoples were no longer united against a common enemy. Instead a racial community of Britons was under siege in empire.

This chapter explores the films directed by Asquith during the Second World War. French Without Tears was released late in 1939, a few months after the outbreak of the war, but the film showed no trace of the turbulent context into which it was released. However, it was not long before Asquith threw himself into the war effort and started making films that drew directly on the war. Freedom Radio (1940), his first war-related film, was a large-scale production made for the Two Cities company. Asquith's next film – Quiet Wedding (1940) – was for the Paramount company and was a box-office success. In 1941, Asquith rejoined Gaumont-British and directed three war films: Cottage to Let (1941), Uncensored (1942) and We Dive at Dawn (1943). He returned to Two Cities, where he directed two war pictures: The Demi-Paradise (1943) and The Way to the Stars (1945). In common with many directors of the time, Asquith also made a number of propaganda documentary dramas for the Ministry of Information.

This chapter examines war films made in Hollywood prior to the U.S.'s entry into World War 2. It suggests the film studios balanced anti-Nazism, the pro-intervention positions of Hollywood executives, and Americans' more isolationist stance. It argues that most of the pre-war films had prepared viewers to consider Nazi Germany as a threat to America and about America's potential role in the war. These films include Shadows over Shanghai and Mr. Wong in Chinatown.

One of the key and consistent themes in the post-war films of Dearden and Relph concerned men forced to confront new circumstances and changed expectations. This chapter surveys eleven of their films (1948 – 1970) that work in a diversity of genres settings and scenarios but that are distinguished by tragic, male narratives. These films result either in the death of the male protagonist or in his otherwise seriously compromised ending. These are not ‘social problem’ films as such, but they do address from multiple viewpoints, the contradictions and anxieties of men, dealing with and trying to face up to, the forces of personal, social and historical change.

This introductory chapter explains the coverage of this book, which is about the effects World War 2 films had in the U.S. and how they gave viewers ways to know the war. This book discusses the Hollywood films made in the years after the war began but before the U.S. entry into the war and examines the films based on actual events in the Pacific theater after Pearl Harbor and how they linked those events into a coherent narrative. It also looks at the films' portrayal of America's British, Soviet, and Chinese allies and describes the films about countries under Nazi occupation.

By comparison with those films based around the tragic male melodrama, this chapter investigates a small number of films that Dearden and Relph made in the 1950s which examined men's adjustment to the loss of (war-time) action. These films seek to recreate aspects of male solidarity, purpose and experience, but within changed, peace-time circumstances. Crime and criminality is often the result, but it is ultimately shown not to pay.

This chapter looks at the depiction of the War on Terror in Michael Winterbottom’s The Shock Doctrine (2009), In this World (2002), A Mighty Heart (2007), and The Road to Guantánamo (2006). These films eschew the martial spectacle, seductive carnage, and oppositional moral framing of the conventional war film. Instead, they focus on combat and the ideologically and narratively restrictive perspective of the soldier’s experience in order to concentrate on marginal figures caught up in the wave of violence, racism, and paranoia that travelled across the globe in the wake of the 2001 attacks. In their orientation around marginal figures, Winterbottom’s films recognise the impossibility of producing a comprehensive, fully coherent account of the war, and instead they make visible bodies and make audible voices that have been absent from, obliterated by, or terrorised and abjected by dominant accounts of war.

This chapter examines Hollywood war films that were based on actual events in the Pacific theater after Pearl Harbor and how they link those events into a coherent narrative. Examples of these films include They Were Expandable, Bombardier, and Wake Island. The chapter argues that these films functioned in several important ways. They filled in the narrative gaps left by newspaper accounts of the events and they used these stories to justify America's efforts in the Pacific.

This chapter examines how Hollywood war films presented America's British, Soviet, and Chinese allies as nations to be valued for their uniqueness and their similarity to the U.S. It contends that Hollywood films faced different kinds of problems in representing Great Britain, the Soviet Union, and China as nations to be fought with and fought for. They employed a variety of strategies to convey that each of these nations had a unique history and heritage for which it should be valued and that contrasts with the Nazis and the Japanese. Examples of these films include Passport to Destiny, Ski Patrol, and Secret Agent in Japan.

This chapter defines the serious Hollywood war film of the post-Vietnam era within industry, genre, visual style, and reception history. These movies engage seriously with historical fact from the point of view of the individual soldier and veteran and reflect their makers’ sense of moral urgency. Several of these films have sparked larger national conversations about specific American wars. The various discourses and practices of authenticity undergirding these films are discussed. The capacity of young men to read ostensibly anti-war films as celebrations of war is noted. The four overlapping cycles of serious war film production after Vietnam are outlined: films about Vietnam made between 1978 and 1989, four films about US military involvements in the Middle East in the 1990s, the long-lived World War II cycle begun in the late 1990s, and the twenty-first-century cycle of combat films about ongoing American wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

This chapter surveys the inauguration and early development of Dearden and Relph's partnership at Ealing and examines their first five films together; from The Bells Go Down (1943) to The Captive Heart (1946). It emphasises that they rapidly embraced and cemented their partnership within the Ealing wartime ethos of ‘quiet heroism’ and team work under Michael Balcon's studio management and direction. Furthermore, the analysis suggests that they made their distinctive mark in Ealing's projection of Britain during this time of national, wartime crisis and proved themselves considerable, but understated talents at the studio in the period.

The United States declared war on Japan on December 8, 1941 following the attack on Pearl Harbor. The controversy that raged in America between partisans and adversaries of the country's participation in World War II was rendered more complex by the Spanish Civil War, the Nazi-Soviet Pact and attitudes within America to Nazi Germany. If Americans were united from 1941–1945, films made in the period 1938–1940 showed that anti-fascism brought together filmmakers of very different political opinions. Before discussing certain war films, this chapter describes an event that occurred in September 1941 whose repercussions were revelatory of the political climate in America and were to return, in an inverted form, once the war was over: the Senate Sub-Committee War Films Hearings. The Sub-Committee was created at the request of two senators, the Democrat Burton Wheeler and the Republican Gerald Nye, to investigate what they saw as blatant propaganda films put out by Hollywood to support Franklin D. Roosevelt's foreign policy and create a situation where the American public would support America entering the war.

This chapter examines Hollywood war films' depictions of the Germans, Italians, and Japanese as the enemies of the U.S. during World War 2. Examples of these type of the films include Hell's Angels, Grand Illusion, and The Great Dictator. The chapter mentions the frequently heard truism that Hollywood films crudely and obviously present the enemy as Other to the point of denying their humanity. It also suggests that Hollywood films employed a complex process involving pre-existing pop-cultural representations and ideological comparisons and contrasts to construct an idea of the countries the U.S. was at war with to help the American public understand why they had to be defeated.

This chapter examines Hollywood war films about the U.S. home front, particularly those that defied conventions and presented a version of American life at odds with the official depiction promulgated by most films. These so-called B movies were low-budget, quickly made, and usually action-oriented. They are usually designed to film the second half of a double bill by the major studios. Examples of these films include The Doughgirls, Standing Room Only, and Johnny Doesn't Live Here Anymore.

This chapter analyzes the films The Outlaw of Josey Wales (1976), Firefox (1982), Heartbreak Ridge (1986), Flags of Our Fathers (2006), and Letters from Iwo Jima (2006). It argues that in Eastwood's model, the war is no benefit to men but only a nightmarish reality from which they can never escape and before which they fall silent. War is no longer portrayed as what makes a man “a man,” but rather as what can shatter him, leaving him in the isolation of one who can never relate to others the horrible reality of living in the chaos of the battlefield.

This chapter examines the presentation of American men and women in Hollywood World War 2 films. It suggests this presentation revised traditional film constructions of masculinity and femininity because wartime needs forced a major reworking of male and female types. It also argues that the changed gender roles seem to anticipate changes in the post-war world including the corporate-conformist culture of the 1950s and the feminist movement of the 1960s and beyond. Examples of these films include A Guy Named Joe, So Proudly We Hail!, and To Have and Have Not.