About the book

“What will we do when we have lost the war?”

“Prepare for the next one.”

Cross of Iron

Unlike the majority of popular and academic books on war movies, Under Fire: A Century of War Movies covers all aspects of the war cinema genre by the world’s leading film critics and specialised authoritarians. As well as examining movies focusing upon specific conflicts, it also places each work within a wider social context, exploring related themes and issues of the time.

Written by a number of informed and well-respected journalists and academics (such as Kim Newman, Julian Petley and James Mottram among many others) dealing with their own specific subject areas, viewpoints and interests, this detailed work will be essential reading for all movie fans as well as social historians. A number of the contributing writers are also authors of their own war books and include in-depth chapters on the following:

• The birth of cinema, silent movies and how Hollywood loved the war film through the 1920s and 1930s
• A comprehensive study of British World War 2 propaganda film 49th Parallel and the works of Powell and Pressburger
• Hollywood movies set entirely in World War 2 on the German side including A Time to Love and a Time to Die and Cross of Iron
• British World War 2 propaganda movies such as One of our Aircraft is Missing, We Dive at Dawn and The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp
• Movies of the Resistance and post-war French cinema of Melville, Bresson, Devaivre, Malle, Ophuls, Audiard and Truffaut
• German World War 2 television and Nazi propaganda of Joseph Goebbels
• War and the Film Noir including Orson Welles in The Third Man
• 1950s British War Movies and the Myth of World War 2: The Dam Busters, Ice Cold in Alex, The Cruel Sea, Reach for the Sky, Angels One Five and The Bridge on the River Kwai
• The Korean War movie and why John Wayne believed that the conflict did not convey the true fortitude of the American military tradition
• Apocalypse Now: World War 3, WMDs and the End of the World – Dr. Strangelove, Silent Running, Soylent Green, Mad Max 2, Terminator 2, The Day After and Threads
• The Hollywood epic versus the low-budget B-movie; from The Bridge on the River Kwai to Kelly’s Heroes
• How Vietnam changed the Hollywood war movie from Apocalypse Now, The Deer Hunter, Full Metal Jacket, Platoon, Hamburger Hill to the mainstream hit Tropic Thunder
• The incredibly strange Nazi exploitation film: The Inglorious Bastards, Ilsa, She Wolf of the SS, SS Experiment Camp and The Beast in Heat
• The submarine war movie including Das Boot, Run Silent Deep and We Dive at Dawn
• The World War 2 Christmas movie
• Fascism, World War 2 and the giant man-eating bugs in Starship Troopers
• Empire of the Sun, Rome, Open City and Pan’s Labyrinth: young hearts and minds in the war movie
• Animation and the war film: Grave of the Fireflies, Waltz with Bashir and When the Wind Blows
• The supernatural war movie
• How YouTube rewrote the war film
• Warfare and the influence of war movies on recent popular culture including videogames

Featuring illustrations and posters from the Kobal Collection, Under Fire: A Century of War Movies is the most thorough and comprehensive book on war films to date and includes an exclusive foreword by Oscar-winning editor Mark Goldblatt who worked on Rambo: First Blood Part II, The Terminator, Starship Troopers and Armageddon.