The 60 Greatest American War Movies

We highlight the best war movies Hollywood has to offer.
By Jordan Burchette
Premiere.com

Aside from the monthly Matthew McConaughey rom-com, there’s no more go-to a movie genre than the combat flick. No other cultural genus can rival the inspiration roused by multimillionaires pretending to perform extraordinary feats of valor between trips to the craft services table, and no other nation can rival the U.S. for cinematic supremacy in the class. Presenting the 60 films that, when summoned to blow things up within budget, answered the call of duty.

1. Full Metal Jacket (1987)


Kubrick crafted one film with two distinct parts, following a group of fresh U.S. Marines from boot camp to combat duty in the Tet offensive.

Starring: Matthew Modine, Vincent D’Onofrio, R. Lee Ermey

Best Defense: Platoon made it OK to portray ’Nam honestly on screen, but FMJ made it unnerving. It’s not as personal an account, but it leaves more stubborn stains.




2. Glory (1989)


Bigotry during the Civil War wasn’t limited to the Confederacy, as this story of the Union’s first all-black volunteer fighting unit beautifully depicts in the year’s Oscar winner for Best Cinematography.

Starring: Matthew Broderick, Morgan Freeman, Denzel Washington, Cary Elwes

Best Defense: Inarguably the best Civil War film ever made, every corny maxim of duty and courage coolly goes down like a greased musket rod.


3. The Dirty Dozen (1967)


A major in America’s OSS trains a group of doomed convicts into an elite special missions force tasked with raiding a fortified Nazi chateau full of vacationing officers.

Starring: Lee Marvin, John Cassavetes, Telly Savalas, Ernest Borgnine, Charles Bronson, Donald Sutherland

Best Defense: About as far from procedural drama as you can get on this list, D12 is action-adventure with an individualist spirit that made slaughtering Nazis fun again!


4. Saving Private Ryan (1998)


When a World War II private’s three brothers are all killed in action, a platoon is dispatched to retrieve him and send him home amid the European Theater’s last major offensive.

Starring: Tom Hanks, Matt Damon, Tom Sizemore, Paul Giamatti, Ed Burns

Best Defense: From the fury of its 22-minute version of Normandy to its portrayal of a mother’s tripled loss, no movie better presents the full spectrum of war.


5. Black Hawk Down (2001)


This is an insightful account of U.S. actions in Somalia, which focuses on a hostage extraction operation gone as wrong as possible, in the most hostile environment imaginable.

Starring: Josh Hartnett, Eric Bana, Ewan McGregor, Tom Sizemore, Sam Shepard

Best Defense: If its savage parade of slain U.S. pilots dragged through the streets of Mogadishu doesn’t gut you, something's just not right with you.


6. The Bridge on the River Kwai (1957)


British POWs in World War II’s Pacific Theater are forced to build a bridge for the enemy, but an escaped U.S. prisoner is determined to destroy it.

Starring: Alec Guinness, William Holden, Sessue Hayakawa

Best Defense: It won Best Picture, Actor, Adapted Screenplay and four other Oscars for its intricate exploration of its competing characters, codes and cultures.


7. All Quiet on the Western Front (1930)


Based on the accounts of a German World War I vet, it timelessly charts the change in recruits’ idealism to disillusionment as romantic notions of war clash with grim reality.

Starring: Louis Woolheim, Lew Ayres

Best Defense: Eighty years later, it’s not unusual to find this Best Picture winner atop a list of war movies for its uncommonly unsettling account of the warfare of the time.


8. Stalag 17 (1953)


An unscrupulous U.S. prisoner of World War II is suspected by his fellow campmates of spying on behalf of their German captors.

Starring: William Holden, Otto Preminger, Don Taylor, Robert Strauss, Peter Graves

Best Defense: Holden’s Academy Award-winning performance is a clinic on cool that provided an early blueprint of the complex, but often simplified, modern anti-hero.


9. The Longest Day (1962)


World War II’s D-Day invasion is ambitiously told in epic detail from both the Allied and Axis perspectives, and in their native languages.

Starring: John Wayne, Sean Connery, Richard Burton, Robert Mitchum, Henry Fonda

Best Defense: …Eddie Albert, Roddy McDowall, Peter Lawford, Red Buttons, Robert Wagner, Paul Anka, George Segal, Rod Steiger…


10. Apocalypse Now (1979)


An assassin is sent into the deepest recesses of Cambodia to terminate a rogue colonel turned tribal god, witnessing every absurdity of the war along the way.

Starring: Martin Sheen, Marlon Brando, Robert Duvall, Dennis Hopper

Best Defense: The Redux makes four hours feel like five, but its hyper-dramatized exploration of the Vietnam War’s mythic horrors is unequaled.


11. The Great Escape (1963)

The largely true story of the Nazis’ brilliant idea to isolate the most skilled escape artists among their Allied captives in a single “escape-proof,” maximum-security prison.

Starring: Steve McQueen, James Garner, Richard Attenborough, Charles Bronson, Donald Pleasance, James Coburn

Best Defense: Stalag 17 with a sense of humor, this story of 76 men and their initially successful, ultimately tragic 11-month plan is adventure of the highest order.


12. Patton (1970)


The profile of one of America’s most famous, most egotistical most bat-s@#t-crazy military generals, and his campaigns through Africa and Europe during World War II.

Starring: George C. Scott, Karl Malden

Best Defense: It won seven Oscars, including Best Picture, Director and Actor, which Scott declined, calling the Academy Awards “a meat parade.”


13. Platoon (1986)


Oliver Stone’s autobiographical account of his experiences in Vietnam charts the change in disposition of its characters in the face of the war’s shockingly commonplace atrocities.

Starring: Charlie Sheen, Willem Dafoe, Tom Berenger, Forest Whitaker, Keith David

Best Defense: All Quiet on the Western Front for the Baby Boomer generation, it broke the 10-year cultural gag order placed on portrayals of the divisive Vietnam War.


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The Thin Red Line (1998)

An existential account of the battle for Guadalcanal during World War II that you either hold aloft as a model of exemplary filmmaking, or wish would have died with Hitler.
Starring: Sean Penn, Nick Nolte, John Cusack, Woody Harrelson, Jim Caviezel

Battle of the Bulge (1965)

As famous a battle as there is, its all-star cast of World War II movie retreads portrays it in true Hollywood faithlessness.
Starring: Henry Fonda, Robert Shaw, Telly Savalas Charles Bronson

The Red Badge of Courage (1951)

Contemplating a boy’s shame and paralytic fear while preparing to do battle in the Civil War, it’s like The Wonder Years, only the pimples are gaping musket wounds.
Starring: Audie Murphy, Bill Mauldin

Stripes (1981)

Two feckless idlers join the Army, barely make it through boot camp and hijack a top-secret urban assault RV, nearly provoking war with the Soviets.
Starring: Bill Murray, Harold Ramis, John Candy, Warren Oates, Sean Young


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