There’s a terrific film classic we all know and love that deals with brains, heart, courage and fallen heroes in a field of poppies. It’s called The Wizard of Oz and hot damn if it’s not near and dear to our heart. War movie enthusiasts share that same intensity towards cinematic stories that disguise themselves as meaningful tributes to our fallen heroes but, in many cases, are merely an excuse to blow things up and make you feel more like a man. These macho, swaggering behemoth tributes to testosterone can be a turn-off to the more sensitive viewer, but your dedicated film fairy has trudged through the trenches to hunt you down some DVDs for which you can proudly strap on a poppy.

For A Lost Soldier (1992)
The War: WWII
The Good Guys: Canada. Allied Canadian soldier Walt Cook (Andrew Kelley).
The Bad Guys: Nazi Germany and Conservative Advocates for Censorship.
The Battle: Set during the Allied liberation of The Netherlands, this film based on the autobiography by Rudi van Danzi tiptoes through the tulips of statutory rape in some people’s eyes. The story revolves around 13 year old Jeroem (Maarten Smit) who meets a strapping, Canadian soldier named Walt who isn’t just content to liberate a country, but feels the need to liberate Jeroem’s boy cherry.
Worth Remembering: You’ve got to give a gutsy country like The Netherlands credit for making a gorgeous looking film about man-boy love. This coming from a nation whose most famous folklore involves sticking a finger in a dike. Despite the subject matter, the relationship is told with elegance and restraint, leaving the viewer to draw their own conclusions, which is what many in the right-wing circles chose to do with massive demonstrations and boycotts of the film.
Eighteen (2004)
The War: WWII
The Good Guys: Canada
The Bad Guys: The Casting Department
The Battle: The film flashes back and forth between modern day Vancouver where a seemingly 30 year old actor (Paul Anthony) plays an 18 year old troubled mess named Pip. He receives the audio diaries of his grandfather (Sir Ian McKellan) which drives the narrative back to WWII France detailing poignant moments Pip’s grandfather (Brendan Fletcher) faced involving a dying soldier and courting Thea Gill’s chanteuse character.
Worth Remembering: For all the wrong reasons. This film was made with obvious good intentions with strong actors (but in the wrong movie) that also includes Carly Pope and Alan Cumming but it was clearly misdirected from pre-production phase with poor casting choices, a bombastic musical score by the Vancouver Symphony orchestra and over-written dialogue.
Europa Europa (1990)
The War: WWII
The Good Guys: Salomon Perel (Marco Hofschneider) as a young Polish Jew with one helluva story worth telling!
The Bad Guys: Nazi Germany.
The Battle: Agnieszka Holland brings to the screen the incredible true story of a young boy with good looks, a chameleon-like charisma, and a penchant for other languages, who uses his talents to survive the Nazi occupation by posing as one of them. Solomon’s adventures include fighting off the advances of Nazi Officer Kellerman (Andre Welms), enrollment in the Hitler School for Youth where he must daily tie back his foreskin for risk of being discovered in the showers. He falls in love with a pretty, Aryan, German girl (played by Julie Delphy looking like one of the Village of the Damned children) who has a very suspicious mother that may be the key to Salomon’s downfall.
Worth Remembering: Yes! For anyone who feels like you’re having a bad hair day, rent Europa Europa and see how your week is measuring up in comparison.
Where Eagles Dare (1968)
The War: WWII
The Good Guys: Great Britain and the U.S.A (Clint Eastwood thrown in for good measure)
The Bad Guys: Nazi Germany (seeing a trend here?)
The Battle: Ooh this is a dilly of an action flick you can watch with your dad, your mechanic, your contractor, or any of your other straight macho-shithead friends. You can sit back and enjoy this one without remorse because this particular story is not based on fact, but on pure unadulterated pulp fiction. Special undercover agents (lead by Liz Taylor’s favorite husband Richard Burton) pose as Nazi Officers and parachute into the Alps to rescue a captured American General held in a seemingly impregnable fortress (aren’t they all?). It’s not just Burton and Eastwood (looking a fair bit like Ben Affleck in his younger years) - the movie allows the girls to play too! Mary Ure and Ingrid Pitt are Allied agents posing as sexy beer slinging frauleins.
Worth Remembering: Action-packed from beginning to end, twists and turns, double-crosses, and Nazi soldiers who speak to one another with British accents. No wonder it was so easy for Burton to fit in.
Bent (1997)
The War: WWII
The Good Guys: The free-wheeling, care-free gay German populace.
The Bad Guys: Guess who?
The Battle: Prior to the Nazi regime there was a renaissance, in particular in Berlin, Germany, where gay men and their culture was loud and proud. Enter Hitler and that world was shattered completely. The film focuses on gay playboy Max (Clive Owen) who lives the fast life much to the chagrin of his much more reserved boyfriend Rudy (Brian Webber). The couple are detained by the Nazis and later shipped off to the concentration camps where Max manages to finagle his way out of wearing the dreaded pink triangle, which all homosexuals are made to wear, and were arguably treated worse than the yellow star wearing Jews. During Max’s ordeal, he meets and falls in love with pink triangle-donning Horst (Lothaire Bluteau) and through their hardships, Max learns to accept his fate along with others fatally marked with the pink triangle in a devastating climax.
Worth Remembering: Fictionalized accounts of the Nazi atrocities to the homosexual community don’t get any better than this. Also worth checking out is the documentary Paragraph 175 by Academy-award winning filmmakers Rob Epstein and Jeffrey Friedman. For anyone who doesn’t understand the struggles we’ve faced through history, rent either one of these gems and invite your enemies over for coffee and a movie.
Platoon (1986)
The War: Vietnam
The Good Guys: Chris Taylor (Charlie Sheen) and his platoon of American GIs with the exception of….
The Bad Guys: Sgt. Barnes (Tom Berenger) the leader of the platoon who is the definition of damaged goods.
The Battle: Oliver Stone delivers a powerful depiction of the horrors of a war that no one was ever supposed to win, from the point of view of the soldiers on the front lines.
Worth Remembering: War is hell. Period. It’s not about glory, it’s about ugly, bloody, grisly misery. The message is worth the price of rental alone.
The Fog of War (2003)
The War: WWII, The Korean War, The Bay of Pigs, Vietnam….
The Good Guys: Former Secretary of Defense Robert S. McNamara
The Bad Guys: Former Secretary of Defense Robert S. McNamara
The Battle: Errol Morris is the undisputed king of the documentary and he doesn’t hold back with what essentially is a confessional from the man behind some of America’s biggest military attacks on the globe. McNamara narrates his journey as if you were sitting in his living room from childhood until his current status at 85. It is a fascinating look at the philosophy of war.
Worth Remembering: You will never get a better sense of why we fight than by watching this must-see documentary of the man who knew best.
Mrs. Miniver (1942)
The War: WWII
The Good Guys: The people of Great Britain
The Bad Guys: Germany
The Battle: Greer Garson plays Mrs. Miniver, an average middle-class wife and mother living in a quiet, pristine English village where their biggest crisis is who will win the annual flower show. The Minniver’s family life is idyllic with their his-and-hers beds, the happy housekeepers, two precocious toddlers and a pretentious but oh-so pretty teenaged son Vin (played strangely by Garson’s future husband Richard “rhymes with fey” Ney). The scene-stealing Dame May Whitty plays the village stuffy bitch, Lady Weldon, and the lovely Theresa Wright plays her sweet niece Carol who becomes engaged to Vin Minniver at the dawn of war, portending to a tragic love affair, only not the way you might expect. When war breaks out, we witness what the British people suffered through with their famous stiff upper lips and courage under pressure.
Worth Remembering: The film received 12 Oscar nominations and won half of them, including Best Picture. Keep the tissues close by though, this one is a tear-jerker right around the time the annual flower show gets underway. Then again, flower shows always make me weep.
Matt Salton is the festival director of the Fairy Tales International Gay & Lesbian Film Festival in Calgary. He can be reached for comment at reelpublicity@yahoo.ca
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