Original subtitles

The '60s had The Great Escape and The

Longest Day. Everybody knows those, but

there were other war movies that decade

that nobody remembers, and some of them

were actually great.

This is a World War II epic about the

1943 battle around the Neretva River in

Yugoslavia. Axis forces are closing in

on partisan units, and the partisans

have to evacuate across this river while

fighting off Germans, Italians, and

their allies. It's massive in scale with

thousands of soldiers and huge battle

sequences.

Marshall Tito bankrolled this as

propaganda, and he wanted it to play

internationally. So, they brought in Yul

Brynner, Orson Welles, Franco Nero to

star alongside Yugoslav actors. The

budget hit $12 million, which made it

the most expensive film ever produced in

a communist country. They had 10,000

real Yugoslav soldiers working as

extras. They built entire villages and

then blew them up for single scenes.

And they weren't using miniatures or

models. They took actual World War II

bridges and trains and just destroyed

them for the cameras. During one bridge

collapse scene, a stuntman almost died.

Several others got injured.

When it was finished, they had this

massive epic. But then it got to America

and somebody decided to cut a full hour

out of it. The US version was 102

minutes long, and it was completely

butchered. [music] People said it looked

like someone had edited it with an axe.

Dialogue would cut off mid-sentence. You

couldn't follow what was happening. It

played like a trailer for a better

movie.

There was a longer version that actually

worked as a film, but most people never

saw it. American critics dismissed the

short version as a mess. But in Eastern

Europe, it became this cultural

landmark.

>> [music]

>> And years later, people started

realizing Spielberg probably watched

this thing before he made Saving Private

Ryan. The scale of the action, the way

they filmed it, it was way ahead of what

Hollywood was doing. But most people

only saw the butchered version and wrote

it off.

Paris, 1944.

The Allies are about to retake the city

from the Germans. A Nazi colonel is

trying to sneak out train loads of

stolen French art. The French Resistance

finds out and gets a railway inspector

to stop him.

Burt Lancaster, who's the lead here, was

50 years old and had a massive ego. He

got hired to make a movie about

outsmarting Nazis, and the original

director was Arthur Penn, who wanted to

make it a slow psychological thriller.

But Lancaster hated that idea. After a

few days of shooting, he personally

fired Penn and brought in John

Frankenheimer to turn it into an action

movie instead.

Frankenheimer gave him what he wanted,

but it almost killed people. They needed

a train derailment scene, and instead of

using miniatures, they crashed an actual

train. People got injured, and

Frankenheimer admitted later it was a

miracle nobody died. Lancaster insisted

on doing his own stunts, even though he

was 50. He hurt his knee so badly during

filming that production had to shut down

for 2 weeks.

The movie cost $6.7 million to make, and

it barely broke even at the box office.

Lancaster and Frankenheimer had become

obsessed with making this thing and

nearly killed themselves for a movie

that didn't even make money. But it's an

incredible film if you can find it.

After The Great Escape was a hit,

somebody decided to make another escape

movie, this time with Frank Sinatra. He

plays an American pilot shot down in

Italy in 1943, who gets taken to an

Italian camp. The prisoners are mostly

British, and when Sinatra shows up, he

becomes the ranking officer and leads a

breakout.

The film's based on a novel by David

Westheimer, who was actually a navigator

on a B-24 that got shot down over Italy

during the war. He spent time as a

prisoner and used his experiences for

the book.

Sinatra read the novel and tried to buy

the film rights, but 20th Century Fox

beat him. So, Sinatra went to Fox and

offered himself for the lead role, even

though he was pushing 50. Somehow they

actually agreed, and that bet paid off.

The movie was a huge hit. Fox made over

a million dollars in profit, and Sinatra

made a fortune off his percentage deal.

It's easily the best Sinatra movie from

the '60s after The Manchurian Candidate,

but nobody talks about it anymore.

In 1960, the wreck of the Bismarck still

hadn't been found. People were obsessed

with the story of how the Royal Navy

hunted down and destroyed Nazi's most

powerful battleship back in 1941.

Director Lewis Gilbert got cooperation

from the Royal Navy to make a

dramatization of the hunt. They used

actual wartime ships like HMS Vanguard

and HMS Belfast for scenes. For the

battle sequences, they built highly

detailed miniatures and filmed them at

Pinewood Studios, which had one of the

largest water tanks in Europe at the

time.

The Bismarck sinks the HMS Hood early

on, which was a massive blow to British

morale. Then it becomes this desperate

chase, ships running low on fuel, the

Bismarck trying to reach safe harbor in

France. Eventually, the King George V

and Rodney catch up to it and sink it.

The film was pretty accurate. Historians

praised it for using real-time codes and

naval procedures, even though they

compressed events [music] and combined

some real figures for drama. Despite

that, it was a surprise hit in America.

Made over $6.5 million on a modest

budget. In Britain, it became required

viewing in schools during the '60s and

'70s.

Rod Taylor plays a mercenary in the

Congo crisis of the 1960s, which was a

relatively rare subject for a movie back

then. He's hired by the Congolese

government to take a train deep into the

jungle to rescue European civilians and

grab $50 worth of diamonds before rebels

overrun the area.

The mission goes bad in every way.

They're fighting brutal combat, watching

massacres, and the mercenaries

themselves start doing horrific things.

There's an unhinged ex-Nazi in their

group making everything worse.

The director was Jack Cardiff, who was

better known as a cinematographer.

>> [music]

>> And he pushed the violence further than

people had seen. The film graphically

shows atrocities like torture and

massacres. When it came out, critics

were genuinely shocked. Even Martin

Scorsese said it was the most violent

film he'd seen up to that point,

although he also said it should be seen.

This one is a British movie about bomber

pilots training for a suicide mission.

They have to fly into a Norwegian fjord

and blow up a cliff so it collapses on a

weapons factory. The plot's made up, but

it was based on real operations the

Allies ran.

The Royal Air Force let them use actual

Mosquito bombers for filming. Real

planes, real pilots flying at insane

altitudes through mountains. There's

this sequence where they're dodging

cliff walls in a narrow canyon, and it's

not models or tricks. They actually flew

those planes through there.

The movie came out, did fine, nothing

special. The stuff on the ground between

the flying scenes was pretty

forgettable, standard romance subplot

and noble sacrifice. [music]

But those flying scenes stuck with

people.

10 years later, George Lucas is making

Star Wars. He needs to figure out how to

shoot the Death Star trench run. He goes

back and watches 633 Squadron, and

that's where he gets it. The narrow

corridor, the obstacles, the tight

claustrophobic feeling. He said it

directly, that sequence came from this

forgotten British bomber movie.

In 1962, director Samuel Fuller made a

movie about an American unit that fought

in Burma during World War II. He was a

veteran himself, and he wanted to show

something most war movies at the time

weren't showing, what happens when

soldiers are just completely worn out.

The movie follows a group of soldiers

marching through jungle for months.

They're dealing with disease, hunger,

exhaustion, and when they win battles,

half of them collapse from fatigue.

Fuller shot it in the Philippines with

not much money. He put in these details

that made it feel real, like guys eating

leeches because they need protein, using

weapons to blast through jungle when

they can't walk anymore. The lead actor

died right after they finished filming.

They'd planned more scenes, but never

got to shoot them. Fuller edited what he

had and released it.

Nobody really paid attention. It came

out and disappeared under bigger war

movies with actual budgets. But it was

one of the first films to show war as

this grinding thing that destroys you

slowly, not just in big dramatic battle

scenes.

In 1969, Sydney [ __ ] was 26 years

old, and he made this completely weird

movie about American soldiers hiding in

a Belgian castle during the Battle of

the Bulge. Burt Lancaster plays a

one-eyed major who's obsessed with

protecting art while his men are having

breakdowns and affairs with local women.

The tone shifts all over the place.

Sometimes it's anti-war satire,

sometimes it's surreal and dreamlike.

The US Army wouldn't help with the

production because of the anti-war

stuff. So, [ __ ] borrowed tanks from

the Yugoslav military and painted fake

Nazi symbols on them. Word got around

Belgrade that they were making fascist

propaganda. The rumors got so bad that

Tito had to publicly say, "No, it's It's

a movie. Calm down."

The film came out and bombed hard.

Critics didn't know what to make of it.

Variety said it's a movie that hates

war, but also doesn't seem to like

people. Pauline Kael was actually one of

the few who defended it, calling it not

great, but unforgettable.

This one is about the French Resistance

during the Nazi occupation. It shows the

resistance as people doing dirty work to

survive with all the moral compromises

that came with [music] it. It plays out

almost like a mob movie.

It came out at the worst possible time.

May 1968 had just seen massive upheavals

in France against Charles de Gaulle, and

Army of Shadows was immediately labeled

pro-de Gaulle propaganda, even though

he's barely in it. That perception

killed the film, and because France

basically controlled what was cool in

arthouse cinema at the time, American

distributors followed along without even

watching it.

The film never came out in America.

>> [music]

>> For almost 40 years, it just didn't

exist here. In 2006, someone finally

restored it and released it in the US.

Critics watched it and completely

reversed course. Roger Ebert called it a

masterpiece. It topped best of lists

even though it was decades old. It's got

a 97% on Rotten Tomatoes now.

After 633 Squad and made money

internationally, a producer figured he

could crank out cheap British war films

with American leads. This was the first

one.

Lloyd Bridges plays an officer leading a

commando raid on a Nazi-controlled dock,

and it's based on a real operation where

over 100 men died out of the 622

who participated.

The director wasn't particularly

talented, but he had this ability to

make low-budget material move fast

enough that you didn't notice all the

clichés. Critics at the time said it was

pretty familiar, but still pretty good.

It came out, made no impression, and got

buried under everything else that year.