More or less in this order:
1) A Bridge Too Far - a relatively good mix of showing the various high and low levels.
2) Tora, Tora, Tora
3) Sink the Bismarck
4) Battle of the River Plate - for some reason, despite 10x+ re-watchings, I could not quite catch exactly what Langsdorff said to Captain Dove (sp?)
5) Saving Private Ryan
6) Windtalkers
7) Das Boot
![Cool 8)](./images/smilies/icon_cool.gif)
The Longest Day
9) Patton
10) Battle of the Bulge
11) Enemy at the Gates - great scene of "The man with the rifle shoots. The man without follows him. When the man with the rifle falls down, the man without picks up the rifle and KEEPS SHOOTING..." Too much romance for my taste. Rather amusing (in a perverse way) to see all those asshole comissars cowering in the back with their submachine guns and machine guns to shoot their own retreating people. One could not help but wonder whether any one of the commissars might have thought his weapon is perhaps better suited to support the assault, or what they are going when the Germans come for them, now that they've shot all the surviving soldiers on their team. Sad...
12) Midway
And at the very bottom of the shit pile:
Pearl Harbor.
Now, I want to talk briefly about a middling Japanese WWII film, Admiral Yamamoto, I once saw (I mostly the subtitles, but I know a tiny bit of Japanese, enough to tell when some of the the translations are crappy or failed to comprise some small detail.) It was about a 50s, maybe 60s production, obviously low budget. I wondered who copied who for the Midway armament change scenes, for Midway and this film used what seemed to be the same pictures - coincidence, or reusage of footage?
Anyway, one of my favorite parts was when they tried to depict the Santa Cruz (October 26, 1942) battle. They had only a few minutes, for the film tries to use maybe 90 minutes to show Yamamoto from about 1940 to his death in 1943:
They depicted the planes (apparently Val models of some sort) diving through a flak field that was the densest in the film. You see a few Vals getting blasted apart. But finally they made some hits on what obviously was supposed to be the Hornet, and the Hornet blows up in some pretty cheesy explosions (it is BLATANTLY obvious it is a model.) Then we have a cut to Yamamoto, obviously lounging on the Yamato, . When they got back, it was evening:
In the sunset, we see a Grand Total of THREE Vals. The three Vals catch up to a badly shot-up Zero. There are some pretty corny encouragements sent to the badly wounded Zero pilot. Of course, the Zero eventually rolls over into the sea. I'm not sure about you, but I was quite impressed by how the combination of scenes managed to make me appreciate how utterly costly the Santa Cruz battle was for the Japanese.