THE SERPENT'S EYE: THE CINEMA OF TWENTIETH-CENTURY COMBAT.

Military glory--that attractive rainbow that rises in: showers of blood, that serpent's eye that charms to destroy.

--ABRAHAM LINCOLN, 12TH JANUARY 1848

IN THE TWENTIETH CENTURY, the motion picture and modern warfare techniques developed alongside each other. Movie cameras recorded the devastating effects of the wars of a turbulent century which historian Eric Hobsbawm has aptly called "the Age of Extremes". For the first time in history, documentary film made it possible to capture and convey to non-participants such aspects of modern industrialised war as the bombing of cities, aerial combat at sea and mechanised land-battles. For film-makers it was only a short step from recording real war on film to creating war movies as a form of mass entertainment. War has always been an ideal subject for commercial cinema, since it embraces all of humanity's great themes: life, death, love, faith, hope, duty, defeat and victory.

As a genre, the war film is broad. Many famous films use wartime settings: Gone with the Wind (1939) and Casablanca (1942) spring immediately to mind. War films can be biographical and character-driven, such as Patton (1970) and MacArthur (1977); they can probe the problems of command, as in Twelve O'Clock High (1949) and Paths of Glory (1957), or prisoner-of-war survival, as in Bridge on the River Kwai (1957). They can concentrate on the home front and life during or after wartime, as in Mrs Miniver (1942) and The Best Years of Our Lives (1946). War films about military medicine, military legal issues or military training have also been made; such films include M * A * S * H (1970), The Caine Mutiny (1954) and The Long Gray Line (1955). Whatever the merits of these films, none is specifically about frontline fighting or, more properly, the art of combat, which as Clausewitz reminds us "is the central military act; all other activities merely support it".

This article examines a specific representation of frontline fighting, namely the American cinema of twentieth-century combat, that is, those films about war that concentrate on organised conflict between uniformed men on a battlefield--usually, but not exclusively, infantrymen. Although many fine American war films set on the sea and in the air have been combat movies--one thinks of The Enemy Below (1957) and Wings (1927)--the struggles they depict are often mediated or decided by the power of machines in a way that does not occur in infantry warfare. For this reason, films about combat that are not focused on the clash of rival infantrymen are not considered in this essay.

Many Western countries have made films about infantry combat. Britain has produced such memorable pictures as The Way Ahead (1944) and The Long Day's Dying (1968); Australia has made the excellent The Odd Angry Shot (1978) and Gallipoli (1981); and Germany has produced the powerful dramas The Bridge (1960) and Stalingrad (1992). However, no single country has produced a body of film work on twentieth-century combat as vast and as influential as the United States. On sheer volume of output and in terms of their quality and cultural significance, American combat films are global in both their appeal and impact.

The American cinema of combat is arguably the most influential sub-genre of the war film, arid herein lies its significance. Generations of young men in the West have gone to war with essentially Hollywood images of war--performed by such actors as John Wayne in Sands of Iwo Jima (1949) and Audie Murphy in To Hell and Back (1955)--running through their imaginations. The extraordinary cult of what historian Garry Wills calls "Wayne-olatry" in contemporary America and much of the English-speaking West largely began with the release of Sands of Iwo Jima. The drill sergeant's refrain "Stop trying to be John Wayne!" has been a staple of military training institutions across the Western world ever since.