The Cruel Sea (1953)

"You know, when you lose a ship, it's like losing a bit of yourself."

I'm becoming increasingly fascinated by British war films made in the decade or so after the Second World War, after a few years had passed and there had been time for reflection on this extraordinary event that had twisted everybody's lives out of shape for six long years, with unimaginable pressure and stress. There's a lot of action, yes, but also a lot of inherent philosophical musing, humanity, and deconstruction of the "stiff upper lip" trope, which never was straightforward.

On the surface, this is the saga of a ship- well, mostly the one ship- and it's crew, as they live and develop over the six years of the War on an Atlantic convoy, protecting the merchant navy from u-boats. There are bit action set pieces- rescuing mainers whose vessels have sunk, chasing u-boats and, indeed, abandoning ship and trying to survive overnight on a tiny little raft.

Yet this is, more than anything, a film about people, in all their complexity. One of the crew hopes to marry his shipmate's sister, only for her to be killed in an air raid. An officer dies a watery death, knowing his wife is sleeping with another man. The first officer wonders whether proposing to his partner is the right thing or not- is there a place for permanence among the uncertainties of war?

This is by no means one of the very best of its genre, but the cast is solid and the script, if not quite first class, is raised up by its themes and subject matter. And, if nothing else, it taught me how to pronounce "coxswain".

Waterloo (1970)

"My God, Sir! I've lost my leg!"

"My God, Sir! So you have!"

There are three striking things about this superb film: Rod Steiger's electrifying, extraordinarily charismatic and career-defining performance as Napoleon, the incredible scope and accuracy of the battle scenes, and the fact that it was made in Brezhnev's Soviet Union with an international cast. That just seems bizarre.

Still, it's an extraordinary piece of cinema and one of the most accurate historical films ever made; even the dialogue is mostly documented from real life and I recognised a few of Wellington's. The only inaccuracies I could spot were the constant references to "Belgium" (not a country until 1830) and the slight musical reference to the modern German national anthem as Blucher's Prussians arrive to save the day. This is anachronistic; the tune existed at the time but it's lyrics were a paean to Emperor Franz of Austria, hardly a friend of Prussia. The Habsburgs were hardly friends of pan-German nationalism, which in any case wouldn't really become a thing until after the revolutions of 1848. Anyway, the film...

 Steiger steals the show as Napoleon, a charismatic genius refusing to give in to the failing health of his body, but Christopher Plummer also deserves high praise for his unflappable and blunt Wellington, refusing permission to have Napoleon assassinated ahead of the battle as such things are Simply Not Done. The opening scenes are extraordinary, though: Napoleon rants and raves like Hitler in Downfall before finally abdicating, only to escape from Elba with but 1,000 troops and suede power again through sheer magnetic charisma. It's eyebrow-raising here to see a somewhat corpulent Orson Welles in a cameo as Louis XVIII.

This is a true epic in scope, both thematically and visually. If you haven't seen it.. sorry for the spoiler, but Napoleon loses. Sorry.

Oh! What a Lovely War (1969)

"The lights are going out all over Europe..."

The cast for this film is ridiculous. Aside from the people I've tagged at the bottom we have the Master himself, Anthony Ainley, as a British staff officer. We also have Thorley Walters, Nanette Newman, Gerald Sim, Edward Fox, Angus Lennie, Dirk Bogarde, Derek Newark, Ralph Richardson, Maggie Smith, Susannah York, John Mills and (uncredited) Jane Seymour and John Woodnutt. All in the same film. It's absurd.

This is Dickie Attenborough's epic film version of the famously improvised musical by Joan Littlewood and her Theatre Workshop. It's a thing of magnificence but it does, of course, present a very Marxist view of the First World War. You certainly don't have to be a Marxist to subscribe to the view that this was not a "just" war but just a silly dynastic struggle between old empires, the War of the Spanish Succession with trench warfare and mustard gas; I'm not, and I do. But it certainly helps. However, this film is a strong proponent of the old "lions led by donkeys" view, an unpopular view in many quarters these days. From the arrogant xenophobia of the British officers towards their French allies to a doddering and uncomprehending Franz Ferdinand declaring war on Serbia this is not a flattering portrait of those in power.

Thing is, though, it's magnificent. As a musical (all the songs are versions from the trenches) it revels in the freedom from realism while maintaining a clever structure through the use of one family's ground level point of view and of the sinister photographer figure.

There are so many fantastic set pieces, from the British recruitment propaganda to the moving Christmas fraternisation between the British and Germans in 1914 (the top brass cancel their leave!) .But the structure, message and intricacy of the whole thing is quite something to behold. A thing of magnificence.

Lawrence of Arabia (1962)

"No Arab loves the desert. We love water and green trees."

I was expecting to write about Syria, Iraq and the current turmoil in these countries, partially under the yoke of the so-called Islamic State. But I'm not going to. Sykes-Picot gets a cursory mention, there's a definite implication, not dwelt on, that Britain and France are going to end all hope of an independent Arab state, yes. But that's not what it's about. This is a film about soldiers, not politicians, about T.E. Lawrence as a man, and about how David Lean's camera, like a certain type of Englishman, loves the desert.

Why, there are even a couple of crowd scenes where you can actually catch a glimpse of a woman or two. I think. This has to be, by a large margin, the most oestrogen-deficient film I've ever seen.

So what if Lawrence? We begin, in a nice bit of structure, with his death in s motorbike crash in 1935, and we hear from various characters, whom we will encounter later, at his push Westminster Abbey funeral. Our impressions from this are that Lawrence, while capable of great things, was hard to know and just bloody weird. The rest of the film does nothing to dispel that.

Peter O'Toole puts in a truly great performance of a personality so nuanced it can only be real. Lawrence's peculiar type of masochism and obvious homoeroticism are shown, not told. This is clearly a sexual orientation that can only be described as "public schoolboy". This is the inevitable result of fagging, boarding, cold showers and regular savaging by the school leopard. But I think there's a tension here between modern psychological understanding of mental conditions and the literary abs epic tradition of heroism.

Omar Sharif, too, is awesome. So is Alec Guinness is, too, but he's also, er, white. Now, it's easier not to be racist in 2015 than in 1962 when popular culture largely confined practices that make us squirm, but that's not to say we can quite let them off the hook. Still, let's not dwell on that. Let us instead observe that a white actor in a sea of real Arabs stands out rather awkwardly. 

Still, that's not enough to prevent the film being awesome; the epic desert landscapes alone see to that. This is a truly epic film- with an intermission!- and one of the finest ever made. It's also the longest I've ever blogged.