Classic British Cinema: Best Movies on 2nd World War

Richard E. Grant’s Ministry of Information mandarin in Lone Scherfig’s Their Finest captured the essence when stating wartime propaganda films needed “authenticity with optimism.” Facing the challenge of informing and rallying a nation, the MOI aimed for movies that both entertained and educated. However, with a significant portion of the public avoiding cinemas and younger audiences drawn to Hollywood escapism, British producers faced a tough task contributing effectively to the war effort. Hitting the right note was crucial, as films designed to convey vital messages had to resonate with the entire population and reflect the harsh realities of ‘the People’s War’ without dampening spirits or creating false hope. This necessitated bridging class divides and challenging gender roles, particularly as women took on unprecedented responsibilities beyond the home. Films also needed to offer excitement and distraction from anxieties about loved ones serving overseas and, for city dwellers, the nightly terror of bombing raids. When exploring the Best Movies On 2nd World War, especially those from Britain during the conflict, understanding this delicate balance is key.

While screenwriters could echo official advice and warnings from government shorts, they were constrained in discussing sensitive topics that could betray secrets or sap morale. Consequently, fictional films from 1939-45 rarely overtly depicted munitions work, the black market, evacuation experiences, adultery, enemy aliens, Jewish refugees, Axis POWs, or Allied service personnel. Some of these themes have been explored in later works, but many remain relatively untouched. With a frequent focus in post-war cinema on ‘now it can be told’ accounts of heroic combat and espionage, the Home Front, despite yielding numerous classics during the war itself, has been less frequently revisited since.

For those interested in exploring the broader landscape of wartime cinema, a list of world war movies provides a starting point, showcasing the diverse narratives that emerged from this period.

Mrs. Miniver (1942)

Director: William Wyler

Despite initial criticism from London reviewers, this sentimental MGM tribute to resilient Britons became far more popular with British audiences than many local portrayals of Home Front life. Its significant impact in the United States, where it earned six Academy Awards, led Winston Churchill to famously call it “propaganda worth 100 battleships.” The film depicted how an “average middle-class English family” confronted sacrifice, danger, and death, serving as both a psychological boost and a strategic justification for committing US forces to the European theatre.

Viewers on both sides of the Atlantic likely held differing perspectives on ‘Starlings’, the idyllic home of the Miniver family in the fictional village of Belham. While the stereotypical image of an embattled Olde England was somewhat removed from reality, few remained untouched by the Minivers’ stoic bravery during the Blitz. Greer Garson’s portrayal of Mrs. Miniver’s defiant confrontation with German airman Helmut Dantine after he boasts of destruction was particularly memorable.

The Next of Kin (1942)

Director: Thorold Dickinson

Released in the same year as other wartime productions like Charles Frend’s The Foreman Went to France and Harold French’s Unpublished Story, Thorold Dickinson’s realist drama on the dangers of careless talk begins with a stark accusation: “This is the story of how YOU unwittingly worked for the enemy.” While its fact-based message was profoundly serious, the film also incorporated sly humour into its gripping, often chilling narrative about enemy fifth columnists attempting to gather intelligence on a training exercise near Watercombe. A humorous moment occurs in Stephen Murray’s bookshop, where Mervyn Johns is seen browsing a book titled I Am a Nazi Agent.

The tragic losses resulting from the raid on the U-boat base at Norville were far from humorous, prompting Churchillian calls for the film to be banned. However, Dickinson, who deliberately avoided a conventional human-interest angle to emphasize his theme, bravely concludes this ‘film with a purpose’ by showing genial train passengers Basil Radford and Naunton Wayne carelessly discussing a munitions factory within earshot of Johns, highlighting the pervasive risk of loose talk. For a comprehensive view of films covering this period, a war world 2 movies list can offer further examples.

Went the Day Well? (1942)

Director: Alberto Cavalcanti

Despite German gravestones appearing in the prologue, the violent disruption of the rural peace in Bramley End still comes as a shock in this adaptation, loosely based on Graham Greene’s story ‘The Lieutenant Died Last’. Contemporary wartime audiences would have been appalled by the concept of a traitorous squire aiding the enemy. However, director Alberto Cavalcanti was particularly fascinated by how “people of the kindest character” could transform into “absolute monsters” once the war directly impacted their lives. While the Nazis execute the vicar for ringing the church bells and mow down the Home Guard, the villagers fight back ferociously. Postmistress Muriel George buries an axe in a German soldier’s skull, poacher Edward Rigby shoots another, and lady of the manor Marie Lohr sacrifices herself by taking the full blast of a grenade to protect children, before the vicar’s daughter Valerie Taylor dispatches the quisling squire.

Screenwriters John Dighton, Diana Morgan, and Angus MacPhail also skillfully build suspense through the secret messages the villagers attempt to smuggle out to raise the alarm, adding a thrilling element to the dramatic conflict.

Fires Were Started (1943)

Director: Humphrey Jennings

British cinema excelled in the docudrama format during World War II, with films like Charles Frend’s San Demetrio London (1943) and Pat Jackson’s Western Approaches (1944) following the lead of Humphrey Jennings’ powerful tribute to the Auxiliary Fire Service (AFS), which was also featured in Basil Dearden’s The Bells Go Down (1943).

While Dearden’s film highlighted the AFS’s courage and resilience, Jennings’ work offers a more authentic depiction of the camaraderie among the volunteer firefighters. These ordinary individuals re-enacted their wartime routines for the camera, conveying a palpable sense of danger. Having been singing around a piano moments before the air raid siren sounded, they risk their lives battling a dockland blaze threatening an ammunition ship. The immediacy of their daunting struggle is gripping and vividly portrays the true terrors of the Blitz. The enemy remains unseen, but its destructive power is undeniable. Yet, even in the face of devastation, the indomitable spirit is captured by the post-raid rallying cry: “Come on, chums! Snap out of it!”

The Gentle Sex (1943)

Directors: Leslie Howard and Maurice Elvey

“Women… women all over the place,” director and narrator Leslie Howard playfully observes at the beginning of what would tragically be his final film before his plane was shot down. “They think they’re helping, I suppose.” Indeed, a woman’s work was endless during the war, whether maintaining households (They Also Serve, 1940), nursing (The Lamp Still Burns, 1943), contributing to agriculture with the Women’s Land Army (Up with the Lark, 1943; The Land Girls, 1998), supporting the RAF’s pilots in the Women’s Auxiliary Air Force (The Americanization of Emily, 1964), or cracking codes at Bletchley Park (Enigma, 2001; The Imitation Game, 2014).

However, the role of the Auxiliary Territorial Service (ATS) often appeared most glamorous, partly thanks to Deborah Kerr’s portrayal in Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger’s The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp (1943). This film follows seven ATS recruits, including Lilli Palmer’s Czech refugee, as they train to drive lorries and operate anti-aircraft guns. With a droll, ironic, yet resolutely feminist tone, the movie argues that “this is a woman’s war” as much as a man’s, and that peacetime Britain would benefit greatly from their wartime contributions. This perspective is crucial when considering the range of world war 2 war movies list available.

Millions like Us (1943)

Directors: Sidney Gilliat and Frank Launder

Frank Launder and Sidney Gilliat were among the most audacious filmmakers chronicling the domestic experience during World War II, frequently addressing subjects their contemporaries avoided. In Two Thousand Women (1944), they celebrated the resilience of women detainees in a Nazi-occupied French internment camp. In Gilliat’s Waterloo Road (1945), they presented an infidelity drama pitting a military deserter against a black market spiv.

However, their sole collaboration as co-directors best captured the challenges and hardships of the Home Front. The story follows daddy’s girl Patricia Roc and bourgeois snob Anne Crawford as they confront harsh realities after taking jobs in an aircraft components factory. There, they meet RAF rookie Gordon Jackson and bluff foreman Eric Portman. The screenplay touches upon everything from shortages and romantic relationships to class differences, cultural clashes, air raid blackouts, and the profound grief of bereavement. Laced with sharp wit and everyday empathy, the film arguably conveyed the “in it together” national mindset more effectively than any other British war film of its time.

Tawny Pipit (1944)

Directors: Bernard Miles and Charles Saunders

While many films like Welcome Mr. Washington (1944), Great Day (1945), and I Live in Grosvenor Square (1945) depicted British hospitality extended to visiting Americans, Anthony Asquith’s The Demi-Paradise (1943) uniquely offered a hand of friendship to Soviet allies. However, visitors from the east do cause a stir in Bernard Miles’ directorial debut, Tawny Pipit. Russian sharpshooter Lucie Mannheim, credited with killing over 100 Germans, arrives in the village of Lipsbury Lea. Her presence is somewhat overshadowed by the arrival of a pair of rare tawny pipits who decide to build a nest in a field slated for ploughing by the local War Agricultural Executive Committee.

While less overtly whimsical than Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger’s equally insightful allegory A Canterbury Tale (1944), this charming yet subtly serious film celebrates the British willingness to accept outsiders. The enduring relevance of the assertion by Miles’s wheelchair-bound colonel that “a lot of them are jolly decent people, and, anyway, they can’t help being foreigners” speaks volumes about tolerance. This film offers a unique take, distinct from typical fantasy world movies list, by finding magic and conflict in the mundane realities of wartime.

Whisky Galore! (1949)

Director: Alexander Mackendrick

The mention of the Home Guard today might more readily evoke images of Walmington-on-Sea rather than the remote Isle of Todday. However, long before Captain Mainwaring formed his platoon in Dad’s Army (1971 and 2016), Captain Waggett became the internal ‘Sassenach’ enemy when he tried to prevent the residents under his jurisdiction from salvaging 50,000 cases of Scotch whisky from the SS Cabinet Minister after it ran aground in thick fog.

Co-screenwriter Compton Mackenzie based his source novel on actual events, but debuting director Alexander Mackendrick infused the story with the distinctive Ealing comic sensibility. The result is a sometimes poignant, sometimes cruel study in joyful subversion that became the studio’s most profitable film. Gillies MacKinnon’s 2016 remake saw Eddie Izzard inherit the role of the hilariously pompous Waggett from Basil Radford, who was beloved by contemporary audiences for his 12-film partnership with Naunton Wayne. Their collaborations, including The Lady Vanishes (1938), often featured them as Charters and Caldicott, cricket enthusiasts embodying British stiff upper-lippery.

It Happened Here (1964)

Directors: Kevin Brownlow and Andrew Mollo

In an era where alternative realities capture popular imagination, as seen in television series like The Man in the High Castle and SS-GB, it is fitting to include Kevin Brownlow and Andrew Mollo’s chilling speculative film about a Nazi conquest of mainland Britain in a survey of Home Front classics, even if made later. Conceived by a teenage Brownlow in 1956, this stark depiction of occupation and collaboration took eight years to complete. The co-directors worked with limited funds and insisted on meticulous historical authenticity in every detail.

Using film stock short ends donated by Stanley Kubrick from the set of Dr. Strangelove (1964), cinematographer Peter Suschitzky lends the visuals a harsh, realistic glare. This commitment to realism extends to portraying the unsettling readiness with which Irish nurse Pauline Murray and many of her adopted compatriots acquiesce to a transition that sees Nazi jackboots in Whitehall and the theories of racial purity and forced euthanasia implemented as state policy. Fifty years after its release, this remarkable film retains its power to instil dismay and dread, offering a chilling counterfactual perspective on the best 2nd world war movies on netflix or elsewhere.

Hope and Glory (1987)

Director: John Boorman

Offering a more positive portrayal of wartime childhood compared to Philip Leacock’s Reach for Glory (1962), and a less somber view of Home Front morality than films like Edward Dmytryk’s The End of the Affair (1955) or John Schlesinger’s Yanks (1979), John Boorman’s breezy memoir is infused with nostalgia. The Blitz resulted in the deaths of nearly 20,000 Londoners across 71 air raids, and a million homes were destroyed or damaged. However, the four-decade distance allows Boorman to humanize the terror of the bombing (“Drop it on Mrs Evans, she’s a cow”) and romanticize its consequences for children (“Thank you, Adolf!”). For youngsters collecting shrapnel and playing on bomb sites, the war could indeed feel as thrilling as a Hopalong Cassidy western. Yet, the film also delivers a biting dose of reality through the teacher pointing to a world map and lamenting: “Men are fighting and dying to save all the pink bits for you ungrateful little twerps.”

These classic films provide a fascinating window into how British cinema grappled with the complexities of the Second World War on the Home Front. From stark warnings against careless talk to celebrations of female resilience and humorous takes on wartime bureaucracy, they offer a diverse look at the period. Examining these contributions provides essential context when considering the Best Movies On 2nd World War from any nation.