The best and/or worst war movies ever made?

The actor Bruno Ganz who plays Hitler, does a great job and looks incredibly like him.

 

Stalag 17 is one of the best WW2 movies based on WTO POW's , Great Escape would be my 2nd pick !!
I cannot fault SPR at all, the opening scenes on the beach landing were the most realistic of any war film ever.
Worst I have seen "Battle of the Bulge" simply because the German tanks were US tanks !

The Dirty Dozen is not even close to historical fact, 12 men take on the entire German army in the middle of Germany?

 

There's a hundred little true stories buried in the larger stories. For example the guy with the alpine hat strolling around with his gang hanging people. Many people saw him, but nobody knows who he was, where he came from, who gave him that authority or what happened to him. They nicknamed him the "The Tyrolean" (Der Tyroler).
They did a great job of weaving all those bits into a very watchable and coherent timeline.

 

You Yanks can count your lucky stars that you were never subjected to a whole host of those British duds that came out during and after the war.

 

The producer of the movie did not go "dumpster diving" for stock footage. That was the whole concept of the film (as per the dvd extras) . Just correcting the above statement for the record.

I am not defendng "Midway" when i say that, by the way. I have little love for this film. I had just read the Walter lord retelling of the battle in 1974 as a pre-teen ager when i saw the movie with my parents and thought even then that it was jaw droppingly stupid.

But the worst war movie of all time? No.

 

Any best-worst list is bound to be terrible. The only way to do one is to limit the scope and really define the criteria of selection.

The best and worst American Civil War biographical dramas based on historical acuracy, and overall entertainment value.

So "Gettysburg" would be elligible by dint of not being a biography. "Gods and Generals" however qualifies, etc.

Mixing television and theatrical features or short cartoons, civil war and Vietnam, American and Russian or Italian, Hollywood commercial vs art house, romantic comedies and dramas or Black and White or color, silents or talkies... It all just falls apart in the end.

It is an interesting starting point for a discussion on a forum however...

 

I'm not sure if has been mentioned yet, but "MacArthur" (1979) was pretty lame too come to think of it. Of course at the time I thought it was pretty neat, but I didn't know much more about Mac than I knew about Santa Claus back then. Probably I knew more about Santa. Anyway, speaking of stock/combat footage, there was one scene that had a F-4 Phantom jet napalming a hill in the Korean War part of the movie. After learning more about Mac, I dislike the movie more and more.