Introduction

Keywords:

• antiheroes
• public mythologies
• soldier heroes
• martyrdom
• victimhood

Cinema together with novels and short stories can provide valuable insights into war and military conflict. These include conflicts fought by insurgent movements and the various counter-insurgencies waged by states to resist, contain, and, on occasions, defeat them. Film and literature can be valuable aids in the teaching of unconventional or irregular wars and the examination of their wider public mythologies. Cinema is necessarily a great simplifier, often taking myths from stories, legends, and plays and transforming them into spectacles for popular audiences.¹ Some of the major themes tackled by this war cinema derive from various military conflicts both ancient and modern: courage, heroism, and honour along with cowardice and incompetence; romance and the frequent breakdown of domestic relationships of some of those involved in military conflicts; the strategic rationale and competence of senior commanders and political leaders; the traumatic impact of warfare on those fighting in it and the frequently shabby treatment of veterans returning home.

The theme explored in this short special issue is the myth of the warrior and soldier hero and its replacement in several films since the 1960s of anti-war images of the soldier as victim and aggressor. The shift is interesting for the way it has often occurred in films that are not situated in interstate wars and grand set piece battles, such as those of World Wars One and Two, but in messier and protracted smaller-scale conflicts such as the Anglo Boer War of 1899–1902, post-war British colonial ‘emergencies’, the Vietnam War and ‘the troubles’ in Northern Ireland. The four papers published here thus mark a useful addition to the scholarly study of cinema and irregular or unconventional war in contrast to the wider and better-known work on conventional war.

Guerrilla Warfare has only recently begun to be examined by film studies analysts and cinema critics after a long period when it was largely subsumed within the wider rubric of war cinema. While there may be some rationale for this approach in terms of a tidiness of subject matter, those studying guerrilla wars and counter-insurgencies will be only too aware how different forms of war create different public responses as well as, at a wider level, their own distinctive mythologies and ethical concerns. It is far harder to bury or forget a major inter-state war involving the mobilisation of an entire nation than it is an unconventional guerrilla conflict that might raise uncomfortable questions about a nation’s past, especially if it has a colonial or imperial dimension to it in a terrain long ago dispensed with in post-war decolonisation. It has sometimes been the case, indeed, that cinema has conveniently ‘forgotten’ embarrassing colonial conflicts along with many of the records documenting them that have either disappeared or been wilfully destroyed.

These issues are evident in the first paper in this issue by J.B. Potter on Bruce Beresford’s 1980 film Breaker Morant. It is one of the few films set in South Africa during the South African War (or Anglo Boer War) of 1899–1902. The movies essentially relates to Australian issues of national identity, a prominent theme during Australian ‘new wave’ cinema in the 1970s and 1980s. The chief character of the film, Edwin Henry ‘Breaker’ Morant, was an Anglo-Australian soldier on trial in the Transvaal town of Pietersburg for authorising the shooting of Boer prisoners of war, along with two fellow Australians Peter Handcock and George Witton. The Australians had carried out the executions in retribution for the Boer killing of their commanding officer, although as his defence council during the trial attempts to make clear, they were also part of a new form of war that had apparently emerged for a new century and the men were only carrying out orders: A defence later to become familiar in the Nuremburg Trials after World War Two. The film suggests, though, that the trial was, in any case, pretty much a foregone conclusion with two of the Australians being eventually executed.

Under British army regulations, the shooting of prisoners was justified in extreme situations. However, Breaker Morant suggests that there were strong political pressures to have the Australians executed in order to secure a peace deal with the Boers to end the war and keep out any possible German intrusion into the conflict. This is not a view shared by most historians of the war. Thomas Packenham, for example, observed that many of the atrocities during the war were mostly committed by Canadian, Australian, and South African irregulars with the Breaker Morant case being one of the worst, although Kitchener was loath to have the men made into scapegoats.²

Breaker Morant is not specifically an ‘insurgency film’ since it contains only brief battle scenes given its focus on the alleged war crimes of two Australian soldiers. It contains just one brief example of the kind of manoeuvre warfare practised by the Boer guerrillas with an attack by a mounted commando on the jail housing the prisoners in Pietersburg. Significantly, the Australian prisoners on trial are released to help fight off the attackers, although this does not secure any clemency from the court even though, as Potter points out, there was a considerable precedent for this dating back to the era of the Duke of Wellington. The Australian colonials are clearly dispensable as part of a wider political agenda to end an embarrassing war. Here, the issue of military honour intrudes, raising the question of how a film can be a valuable as well as reliable means to examine conflicting ideas of honour in what might be seen as an early example of a twentieth century ‘dirty war’.

For the British military prosecutors, the Australians are guilty of offending the basic code of war and, by extension, of the honour of the British imperial army in South Africa at a time of growing popular opposition to the war, a theme all to evident in the early 1980s just a few years after the ending of the Vietnam War in which Australia had for a period been engaged. On the other hand, the Australians strive before their execution to retain a basic sense of military honour, refusing to die for the King and Country but for Australia, confirming in effect the long-standing Australian myth that national identity was formed in opposition to British imperial power, a sort of Aussie bush variant of the American frontier myth. The narrative chimed well with Australian cinema audiences in 1980s (the movie appeared a year before Peter Weir’s Gallipoli) although more recently it has been criticised in Australia for playing fast and loose with history and ignoring the fact that Morant was actually guilty of a war crime: A point that was deliberately marginalised in Beresford’s film given that its central purpose was projecting an image of Australian identity forged in adversity against British imperialism.

The second paper in this issue by Bianca Berman also tackles the theme of military heroism in the context of the protracted conflict in Vietnam. Berman examines, in particular, three important films on this conflict: Francis Ford Coppola’s Apocalypse Now – Final Cut, the French director Pierre Schoendoerffer’s 1992 film Dien Bien Phu; and the lesser-known film by South Korean director Jeong ji-Yeong White Badge (1992). Each of these films, Berman argues, subverts the conventional image of the heroic character at the heart of many war movies. In the case of Dien Bien Phu, this also involved engaging with a lingering French romanticism towards their former empire, especially Indo China, which surfaced in the 1990s with the melodrama Indochine (1993): A decade or so later than the equivalent British imperial nostalgia towards India in films such as A Passage to India and the TV series The Raj Quartet (both in 1984). Such nostalgia tended to look back on empire through a rosy glow that blunted the harsher dimension of military conquest and defeat, the latter proving decisive in the case of French rule in Indo China in 1954.

Here, Schoendoerffer tackled a raw subject in popular French historical memory in a manner, it could be argued, that has even now never been rarely attempted in the British case. ³ At Dien Bien Phu in 1954, the French army found itself surrounded in a decisive battle which would crystallise its military defeat and the subsequent French withdrawal from Indochina. The French soldiers appear paralysed and incapable of decisive action; they are in effect doomed to defeat at the hands of Giap’s Viet Minh. Surrounded by the Vietnamese guerrillas and dependent almost entirely on aerial support from Dakotas, their position is clearly hopeless, although the movie weaves between battle scenes and scenes in colonial Hanoi depicting the devious and signally unheroic world of newsmen such as the American journalist Howard Simpson (played by Donald Pleasance). Berman notes the similarities between the men portrayed in Dien Bien Phu and the ‘centurions’ of Jean Larteguy’s novels about the French war in Indochina (a version of which was brought to the screen as Lost Command in 1966 starring Anthony Quinn and Alain Delon). The French soldiers in Dien Bien Phu have few illusions left about their place and role in the war, and differ considerably from Schoendoerffer’s earlier neglected 1965 film 317eme Section (The 317 Platoon), which was based on a 1963 novel he wrote with the same title and which follows a French platoon as it doggedly attempts to break out from behind enemy lines in Laos. Here, French regulars fight a guerrilla-type war against the Viet Minh and, with the sensitive and down to earth cinematography of Raoul Coutard, stands as one of the outstanding insurgency movies of the post-war era along with Gillo Pontecorvo’s Battle of Algiers in 1966.

If the French in Dien Bien Phu appear as largely paralysed as they face defeat, the Americans in Apocalypse Now come over, Berman suggests, as brutal aggressors, especially in the famous scene of the helicopter attack on a Vietnamese village to the blaring sound of Wagner over loud speakers. European high culture becomes debased to the point that it becomes an instrument of psywar, a dramatic contrast, it can be argued, to the continuing attachment to the colonial legacy of this same high culture in the scenes set in the dramatic backdrop of the Hanoi opera house in Dien Bien Phu. In Apocalypse Now, there is little romantic nostalgia for Vietnam, since the US never had a former colonial presence there although the uncut version of Coppola’s film did include a scene with French colonial planters, exemplifying the continuing French colonial presence in the country and planters displaying a determination to stay on rather like settlers on the early US frontier.

Berman argues that Apocalypse Now can be viewed as an anti-war film and there are strong arguments to support this. I would suggest that the movie is another stark example of Hollywood’s ambiguity designed to appeal to different audiences who can find what they want from it, whether as anti-war critics pointing to the barbarism of the Americans (‘I love the smell of napalm in the morning’) as well the apparent breakdown of superior US technology with a haunting image of a downed plane in the jungle. On the other hand, the movie clearly appealed to conservative and patriotic American audiences, exemplified by the marines in the later film Jaarhead (2005) cheering the scene of the helicopter gun-ships destroying the Vietnamese village. If the movie contains some anti-war themes, it still lacks the bite of Stanley Kubrick’s incisive portrayal of the brutalising training regime of US Marines in the movie Full Metal Jacket (1987) before they are sent off to fight in Vietnam.

However, Apocalypse Now also exemplifies the trend in modern cinema of questioning the conventional figure of the masculine war hero and this is continued in White Badge, which focuses on two Korean veterans of the war, Pyeon and Han. Both have been aggressors in the sense that they fought in the war and participated in atrocities committed by Korean troops on Vietnamese civilians. But both are portrayed as victims, especially through the use of music and sounds such as the whirring of helicopter blades, a trope familiar from Apocalypse Now. The trope is used here to bind the present with the past and to express the PTSD that both vets are experiencing. Berman also notes that various camera angles, such as low and high angle shots, are used to depict the helplessness of the vets, more helpless she suggests even than the Vietnamese, although some scholars might question this. Overall, it is fair to conclude that White Badge, for all its indebtedness on Hollywood’s filmic representations of the Vietnam War, still stands in its own right as an important contribution to the cinematic portrayal of the modern military anti-hero.

A rather different approach emerges in Samuel Schiffer’s paper exploring two films set in Ireland: Hunger, directed by Steve McQueen and released in 2008 and The Wind That Shakes the Barley, directed by the radical film maker Ken Loach and released in 2006. Both films emerged in the decade following the 1998 Good Friday Agreement and both that have scenes containing British military aggression, first in the long counter insurgency war between 1969 and 2008 generally known as ‘the troubles’ and in the case of Barley of the two civil wars following the end of the First World War: First against Britain between 1919 and 1921 and then the second Irish civil war of 1922–23. The focus of both films is on the self-sacrifice and martyrdom on the Irish side, amounting in effect to a reassertion of heroism in another form, serving as an example and inspiration to others as well as supplying a meaning to the contested idea of independent Irish nationhood.

The martyrdom theme is not at first evident in the Loach’s The Wind Shakes the Barley which traces the progressive involvement of a hitherto unpolitical Irish doctor Damien in the nationalist struggle. There is a sense here of tragic inevitability. Some of Damien’s fellow guerrilla fighters get arrested, while Damien continues down an increasingly fanatical road to the point where he opposes the treaty secured by Michael Collins and his associates in London at the end of 1921. He dies somewhat fatuously for this cause in what is commonly known as the Second Irish Civil War, leaving him perhaps a martyr figure in the eyes of his fellow diehards, even if this martyrdom is bought at a heavy personal cost: As Schiffer observes, Damien is in the end ‘an unfeeling shell of his former self, stripped of all moral inhibitions that once guarded him against the continuous onslaught of futile and destructive Irish republicanism’.

The martyrdom theme is evident too in Hunger. The film tells the story of the hunger strike in the Maze Prison in the early 1980s by Irish prisoners determined to wear their own clothes in order to underline the claim that they were in effect prisoners of war. The central character in this story is Bobby Sands, who despite being elected to the House of Commons as a Sinn Fein MP, became the first of the hunger strikers to starve to death in prison, achieving in the process a martyr status that has ensured that his name is still widely recognised in Northern Ireland if not on the British mainland. Schiffer points to the religious imagery associated with the hunger strikers whose filthy state and long bedraggled hair links them vaguely with the early Christians, although this martyrdom does not go uncontested in the film as the Catholic priest Dom accuses Sands of pursuing such a self-sacrifice for his own aggrandisement. Eventually Dom has to back down from condemning the hunger strike since this also effectively condemns the republican insurgency campaign, a step too far in the 1980s for the Catholic Church in Northern Ireland. As Schiffer points out, this ensures once again that, as in the case of Barley, there is an inevitable tragic outcome to this whole story: ‘Death and suffering are presented by Sands as fait accompli, a tacit indictment of violent Irish republicanism as pure tragedy’.

So far, then, the first three papers in this issue have portrayed heroism in recent filmic representations of insurgent conflicts to be in retreat in the face of alternative images of pure aggression and victimhood or else, as in the Northern Ireland case, of the more introverted kind of heroism in the form of martyrdom. These tropes are important for the way they pinpoint the way other similar films can be judged and understood, especially in relation to conflicts involving jihadist insurgents with a highly evolved form of martyrdom in the service of military needs and as a force multiplier in asymmetric conflicts.

They also supply a series of categories towards films or television series with other post-war end of empire insurgencies. Here, Geraint Hughes’s paper is important for its discussion of some fictional representation of some of Britain’s post-war insurgencies such as those in Malaya, Cyprus, and Aden, which often depict in quite graphic detail the violence inflicted by soldiers in Britain’s post-war ‘emergencies’. Hughes suggests these conflicts were not such marginalised ‘forgotten wars’ as some scholars have supposed, since references to them occur in a range of post-war thrillers including at least one of Ian Fleming’s James Bond novels. Only some of these later made it the cinema screen indicating quite a disparity between the large number of fictional works about various insurgencies from the Boer War to the Irish Troubles and the relative paucity of cinema features. In the British case, for instance, there is less than a dozen features made on the three ‘Emergencies’ in Malaya, Kenya, and Cyprus covering the decade of the late 1940s to the late 1950s although far more have been released on the later Troubles, suggesting that conflicts closer to home are far more likely to generate box office receipts. This is exemplified in Hughes’ reference to an important, if neglected, novel by Eric Ambler set in Malaya during the ‘emergency’ Passage of Arms (1959). The novel never became a film and, in cinematic terms, Ambler remains best known for his screen plays such as The Cruel Sea (1953), The Purple Plain (1954), and A Night to Remember (1958).

In contrast, Hughes points to the violence displayed by British soldiers against civilians in Malaya in the debut novel The Virgin Soldiers, written by the Welsh author Leslie Thomas and based on the author’s experience of national service in the 1950s. The novel became a successful film of the novel, directed by John Dexter in 1969. In part this was a result, I would argue, of the film excluding the wilful violence of the British soldiers in the novel while successfully adapting it to the increasingly anti-war mood of cinema audiences in the late 1960s.

The Virgin Soldiers proved to be a rather surprising commercial success and led to a later sequel. In part, this was because it contained actors familiar to younger cinema-goers of the era such as Lynne Redgrave, who had starred in Georgie Girl (1966), playing a manipulative officer’s daughter Philippa Raskin while Hywel Bennett, who had starred in the comedy The Family Way (1966), played the luckless national serviceman Private Brigg. The movie displayed, in a muted manner, aspects from satirical comedy that later became identified in Joan Littlewood’s Oh What a Lovely War (1969) and the tv series Dad’s Army (1968–1977), drawing on the long tradition of theatrical comedy and its range of stock characters such as the fool, the rogue, the cuckold, and the trickster. Such characters become heroes or anti-heroes in their own right and can very often detract or undermine wider heroic themes. Virgin Soldiers certainly displayed some of this, with the satirical comedy offsetting the wider war theme, although in the end never entirely displacing it. The film indeed contained a set piece confrontation between the British army and communist guerrillas when a train is ambushed and Sergeant Driscoll (Nigel Davenport) rises to the occasion as a heroic leader rallying the soldiers and exposing a cowardly fellow sergeant hiding in a toilet. The movie caught some of the anti-war mood in the 1960s that did much to undermine the heroic soldier myth in cinema, and its success led to the later and generally slighter sequel Stand Up, Virgin Soldiers (1977), a sex comedy where British soldiers in Singapore go AWOL in search of women rather than fight communist guerrillas.

The end of cinematic soldier heroes?

The papers in this issue have queried the idea that military heroes remain a dominant feature of war moves, certainly in many of those released in recent decades by western film producers even if various military heroes and unabashed warriors survive in many of the war movies released by the film studios in China, India, and Pakistan. The decline has a number of reasons. Greater education, feminism, and the emergence of a critical female audience have certainly contributed to a growing indifference of many cinema audiences to the conventional masculine hero.⁴ Along with this, there has been a concomitant rise of both female action heroes and more nuanced anti-heroes, a trend that can be traced back to the 1960s and 1970s with films such as The Dirty Dozen and violent crime features such as Taxi Driver and Mean Streets.

This has led to a paradoxical situation in which films have become increasingly violent while audiences have become progressively alienated from war heroes, viewing their deaths less as noble sacrifices than as a simple waste, and responding positively to other types of heroes generated from within civilian society, such the British National Health nurses and doctors who dealt with COVID during the lockdown in the country between March 2020 and March 2021. Significantly, a multi-faceted view of war heroes has more recently emerged in Ukraine in the course of its war against Russia, with its website ‘Defenders of Freedom’ listing not only military personnel but a variety of civilians including a school girl who donated 120,000 hryvnias to the war, a volunteer paramedic and a young woman who made 675 candles for the Ukrainian soldiers fighting in trenches.⁵

This transformation in the position of the soldier hero has by no means been a sudden one and requires more detailed research focusing on patterns of upsurge followed by later decline. Approaching the issue historically, one obvious question to ask is why the soldier hero did not completely die at the end of the First World War. It is easy here to be misled by the impact of some of the poetry that emerged from the war such as Wilfred Owen’s often-quoted Dulce et Decorum Est. The poem bitterly attacked the carnage of industrialised trench warfare in which the classically inspired Victorian idea of military heroism appeared to have collapsed. This view has been supported by some, but by no means all, literary analysts and in 1965 Bernard Bergonzi wrote that the war meant that ‘the traditional mythology of heroism and the hero, the Hotspurian mode of self-assertion, has ceased to be viable’.⁶ In the longer term, the military hero did survive, in an attenuated but rather more human form to later come under attack in the post 1945 years in films such as Kubrick’s Paths of Glory (1957) and Dr Strangelove (1963). In the British case, it was in the 1960s and 1970s that the mythology of the military hero came under a more serious challenge in the context of the final retreat from empire, though even then it has proved remarkably resilient.

In the case of the era post-1918, for instance, the myth of the T.E Lawrence as British army officer-come-guerrilla leader exemplified some of this newer turn in the idea of the military hero that fitted well into revulsion in the 1920s against protracted trench warfare.⁷ Despite having some impact on inter-war military and strategic debate, the myth took decades to reach the cinema screen with David Lean’s 1962 film Lawrence of Arabia. For cinema analysts, the interesting question here is how this humanised form of military hero helped shape some of the post-war collection of war films looking back both at World War II and Korea, and later expeditionary wars accompanying the end of empire. It is the end of empire and decolonisation in the late 1950s and early 1960s, I would argue, that did much to hasten the transformation of the soldier hero, who increasingly took on some of features of victimhood and aggression explored in the papers in this issue as one of the central core purposes behind the existence of the British army became progressively undermined.

The thesis requires far more analysis than can be pursued here, but I would point to three films during this era which indicate a marked retreat from the conventional ideas of the soldier hero that were prevalent in many of the popular patriotic post-war British war movies such as The Way to the Stars (1945), The Dambusters (1955), and Reach for the Sky (1956). The three films I have selected show both a loss of nerve regarding the hero and the start of an interrogation of the effect of combat and wartime experience on those engaged in it. The films are Tunes of Glory (1960), Guns of Batasi (1964), and Too Late the Hero (1969), and I shall briefly examine them in turn.

Tunes of Glory was directed by Ronald Neame and based on a novel and script by the Scottish writer James Kennaway, who had served two years national service in the Cameron Highlanders between 1946–48, mostly in Germany.⁸ The novel Tunes of Glory was published in 1956 and is in much closer touch with war-time events than the characters appear to be in Neame’s 1960 film. Set entirely in a post-war Scottish regimental barracks, it is not strictly speaking a war movie though the bitter rivalry between its two senior officers, who have both served in the Second World War, ensures that war casts a dark shadow over the men and their representation of two contrasting masculine types.⁹ Both commanders display features of PTSD, especially the new battalion leader Lieut. Col Basil Barrow (John Mills), rendering them as much victims as heroes. Barrow is a tight-lipped martinet who has been a prisoner of war of the Japanese and is an expert in jungle warfare; he resents the boisterous stye of leadership of the acting commanding officer Major Jock Sinclair (Alec Guinness playing what some critics view as his finest screen role). Sinclair has been in a criminal prison rather than a POW camp like Barrow, but he too has seen war service in the western desert but has failed in relationships with women and displays in private a morbid and self-pitying outlook for all his outward display of bravado with fellow officers and bullying tone with the lower ranks. The two men come from different class and educational backgrounds; their bitter rivalry can be explained by them both being victims, rather than war heroes unable to control events. Their rivalry, in turn, leads to their mutual destruction as Barrow commits suicide and Sinclair sinks into a breakdown as he plans an absurdly grandiose funeral for his rival (even though Sinclair referred disparagingly to Barrow while he was alive as the ‘spry wee gent’).

Guns of Batasi, directed by John Guillermin, expands further the theme of victimhood through the character of Regimental Sgt. Major Lauderdale (Richard Attenborough) serving on a military base in a former British colony of ‘Batasi’ in East Africa, where British soldiers have stayed on after independence. The film broadly reflected actual mutinies that occurred in Kenya and Tanganyika between 1963–64 at the time of independence, with the first occurring at the Junior Leaders Unit in Kenya in March 1963.¹⁰

Like Barrow, Lauderdale is a martinet, whose whole life has been spent in the army and whose horizons are both limited and absurdly dated in a Kiplingesque manner. The base though is not so self-contained as the barracks in Tunes of Glory since Batasi sinks into a political crisis with a coup and resulting mutiny by the African soldiers being trained by the British. It is visited by a British MP Miss Barker-Wise (Flora Robson) who observes that Lauderdale is little more than a husk of a man with no identity of his own. Like Barrow and Sinclair, he is a victim rather than hero though he is able to display courage and resolution in dealing with the crisis and ensuring that some large artillery guns on the base are sabotaged to prevent them falling into the hands of the mutineers, an act that leads to him being eventually expelled by the new Batasi regime. The film, thus, projects not so much miliary heroism of the old-fashioned kind (the one Lauderdale had spent his life apparently pursuing) than a growing self-realisation and search for a new identity, one that appears to steer him away in the end from a downward spiral of victimhood. Ending an empire, it seems, can provide space for rethinking individual, if not necessarily national, purpose.

Another dimension to this issue is provided by the third film Too Late the Hero, also set on a British military base though this time on an isolated island in the South Hebrides during the war in the Pacific. The movie was the third in the war trilogy directed by the American director Robert Aldrich (the previous two being Attack in 1956 and The Dirty Dozen in 1967) and can be viewed as an allegory for the Vietnam War at a time when Hollywood was not making films critical of the war. The film depicts an isolated island divided in two between the neatly laid-out British base and the Japanese occupied section hidden in the jungle. Here in microcosm is a setting for the playing out of an idealised form of counter-insurgency war, with the Japanese filling in for Vietnamese or other anti-colonial nationalist guerrillas. The Second World War setting of the film is interesting for the way it, somewhat unwittingly, underlines the argument of Michael Burleigh that the small wars that served as a major dynamic in the making of the post-war world between 1945 and 1965. This new global order did not simply emerge from the decline of European colonial empires but continued a pattern of conflict in the various self-contained, and often small or medium scale wars fought between the western allies and the Japanese empire in Burma, Malaya, Sumatra, Papua New Guinea, and the islands across the Pacific between 1942–45.¹¹

These were often hard fought and bitter campaigns in which there was little space for real military heroism and Aldrich’s film picks up a generally bitter and cynical tone among the lower ranks. The narrative centres on the arrival of a reluctant American, Lieut. Sam Lawson (Cliff Robertson) who has been sent to join a British special mission into the jungle to destroy a Japanese radio station. The men on it however display little or no sense of duty and most seek simply to survive. As in The Dirty Dozen, there is no regard here for any code of military honour and almost from the start that the mission appears doomed to failure; a view compounded by the poor leadership of the mission’s leader Captain Hornsby (Denholm Elliott). In the event, only one soldier, the insubordinate Pvt Tosh Hearne (Michael Caine), manages to make it back across an open stretch of land to the base. Hornsby is the most self-serving member of the group; all his colleagues have been killed and he is evidently no hero simply for surviving this deadly game of luck. Any real hero is ‘too late’ to claim the honours.

These three films represent a phase in cinema that has now passed. Even while they were being made, Hollywood was releasing a series of big budget productions such as The Longest Day (1962), Battle of the Bulge (1965), Battle of Britain (1969), Tora Tora Tora (1970), Midway (1976), and A Bridge Too Far (1977). These all focused on large-scale conventional campaigns and it was only with Apocalypse Now in 1979 that a big budget production focused on what was in essence a counter-insurgency war. However, the smaller scale anti-heroic movies examined here did much, I would argue, to change the axis of war movie making in the longer term. Some recent features such as Fury (2014) and 1917 (2019) might not completely debunk miliary heroism though they do display a greater recognition of the traumatic impact of war, the incompetence of a lot of military decision making and the nuanced nature of military heroism, so often dependent on luck rather than judgement. Audiences too appear to have often recognised these changing imperatives. The success of the British television series on the war-time SAS, Rogue Heroes (2022), for instance, has been due to the continuing popularity of anti-heroes rather than more buttoned-up conventional war heroes. A lot of this is also due, perhaps, to a popular recognition that the violent warriors of the wartime SAS were in the right place at the right time given that in peace time some might simply have ended up in prison.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Paul B Rich

Paul B Rich, is editor of Small Wars and Insurgencies. He is the author of a range of studies on race and empire, insurgencies and counter insurgency and cinema and guerrilla warfare. His most recent book length study is Cinema and Unconventional Warfare (Bloomsbury 2020).

Notes

1. Singer, Cinematic Mythmaking, 7

2. Pakenham, The Boer War, 538–9

3. A detailed historical film, for instance, outlining the loss of Singapore to the Japanese army in 1942 remains to be made. Defeats experienced by the British army in colonial terrains have usually only been short term: the film Zulu Dawn (1979) for instance depicted the disastrous incursion by the British army into Zululand in 1897 though those familiar with the history of the period know that the actual outcome of the war was never in any doubt with the Zulus being decisively defeated two years later at Ulundi in 1881.

4. Cowell, Demise of the Military Hero.

5. https://war.ukraine.ua/heroes

6. Bergonzi, Heroes Twilight, 17

7. See for example Porch, Counterinsurgency, 90–96

8. Kennaway, The Kennaway Papers, 66

9. Plain, John Mills and British Cinema, 177

10. Baynham, ‘The East African Mutinies’, 153.

11. Burleigh, Small Wars, Far Away Places, esp. 13–47