I know I have a soft spot for military/military related movies being a veteran and coming from a military family so I may be biased but if y’all don’t mind an older movie check out The Best Years of our Lives. It came out in 1946 and is about 3 guys from the same town returning home after WW2 and picking up where they left off.
It may sound like a boring premise but I promise it’s an excellent movie. I know it’s currently available on Pluto TV.
Judging from the premise, it can lead to interesting situations since returning home from the meat grinders that were the European or Pacific fronts couldn't have been easy. Well it never appears to be easy, no matter the war.
If you don't mind me adding to your suggestion, I've assembled a list of noir and noir-ish movies. Check them out and see if anything looks interesting enough to watch, there's also some big names in there.
1941 High Sierra
1942 This Gun for Hire
1944 Murder, My Sweet
1944 Double Indemnity
1945 Detour
1946 Gilda
1946 The Killers
1946 The Blue Dahlia
1946 The Big Sleep
1947 Dead Reckoning
1947 Out of the Past
1948 Chaos Theory
1949 The Third Man
1950 Dark City
1955 Kiss Me Deadly
1955 The Big Combo
1958 Touch of Evil
I might only suggest to add Sunset Boulevard (1950) and The Killing (1956).
Sunset Boulevard is an absolute classic, but The Killing is frequently overlooked as a sort of "practice run" for Kubrick (as we're the other Noirs he directed early in his career).
My Saturday movie group has many of these on our list. This is solid work, and thank you for it.
We’ve seen “Touch of Evil”, “Out of the Past”, “The Big Sleep”, and “The Third Man”, all of which I think are great. “Kiss Me Deadly” falls a little short for me, but is still a solid movie.
Holy geez I just realized what the OP was about. I got excited when I saw all those old noir films and didn't read the about the military stuff.
With that in mind I'll have to recommend Key Largo (1948) then.
I’ve seen some of those but not all. Thanks! The Third Man is good. Although I was first made aware of it due to Pinky and the Brain
Thanks, I'll look into this.
A lot of current audiences can't deal with older movies because they lack the technical polish or spectacular action that everyone expects from modern movies. Or, God forbid, they may be filmed in black and white.
But if you can deal with these limitations and let yourself get into the mindset, you may find some great stories with compelling characters that are far better than the vapid spectacles that most modern movies are.
I'll recommend:
Sands of Iwo Jima — John Wayne has to be a total hardass to prepare his Marines for the invasion of Iwo Jima.
Run Silent Run Deep — Clark Gable is a submarine captain so intent on destroying the Japanese ship that sank his last command, his crew starts to question his competence.
Both are great movies from a time when Hollywood wasn't dominated by people who hate America.
The sad truth is that most people now cannot adapt to old black-and-white filmography no matter the topic or grandeur. People now just will not tolerate reruns of old B&W movies - they're too drab, too slow, too tedious to unfold.
Outside of the exotic film noir genre, there is no current audience for B&W movies.
Many of my favorite movies are in black-and-white. What I dislike is modern movies that are in black-and-white, just because. I think these movies are almost always worse because of it, and that it's a crappy decision for a director to make.
Sands of Iwo Jima is good and they get the original flag raisers to recreate the flag raising. I need to see Run Silent, Run Deep
“Run Silent” is a very good movie indeed.
Another movie I’d strongly recommend is “12 O’Clock High”. Which is sort of about the bombing campaign over Germany, but is really about leadership: what it means to be a leader, and the cost of being one.
Not to mention that Sands of Iwo Jima has some actual real combat footage in it. The tank scenes, the flamethrowers, all were for real
You could only get away with this in the days of black and white (splicing together real footage and studio shots), but even in black and white you can easily tell what shots are archive.
I have it and have been intending to watch it for years.
This does lead me to one of my favorite lines from Golden Girls. Blanche, the slut, is dating a pharmacist who is a reservist that just came back from the Persian Golf. She talks with her friends about getting a house on a GI Bill and settling down, to which Dorothy replies "Blanche! These aren't The Best Years of Your Life, they're the last years of your life!"
You’ll like it. Golden Girls is great. As a kid I just thought it was an old ladies show since my grandmother and her sisters watched it but that show is hilarious
Myrna Loy? Yes!
This is the coolest thread on this board for a while, I'm loving every reply.
Been meaning to recommend it but I keep forgetting. I love the movie.
Magnet search for it for anyone else looking for a torrent: https://www.magnetdl.com/t/the-best-years-of-our-lives/
Thanks for the recommendation, it was alright.
You already watched it? Or had seen it before?
Watched it today.
GOOD MORNING VIETNAM caps lock but im already committed, its a great film, comedy might not be to your taste though, give it a try anyway
personally i like audiobooks over movies, mainly because there is a lot more good books than good movies, robert heinlein has an interesting litany universe and its got quite a lot of military stuff in it, he was also in the us navy and spied on russia for america (using his career as an author as an excuse to to travel though russia) which is pretty cool, there is also a hell of a lot of old science fiction which is gold, and most of it you can find online free(legitimately not just piracy)
I enjoyed Good Morning Vietnam. Robert Heinlein is one of if not my all time favorite author. I do enjoy books over movies as well. Golden age of sci-fi is great. Modern day “sci-fi writers” crap on that era constantly