The Raid is a Civil War movie that takes place in upstate New York, Canada, and Vermont. That’s one of the many surprising things about this Twentieth Century-Fox picture, a film that has rarely been heard of since the time of its release. Based on true events, The Raid is situated one thousand miles from [...]

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In July of 1944, MGM released The Seventh Cross, a film that departs from the period’s war movies in ways that make it one of the more penetrating and stirring made at that time. Set in Germany in 1936, this unusual film has a compassionate message about innate human decency in an indecent world, an [...]

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The Train tells a humane, disturbing story, yet it leaves the viewer to decide what to make of what transpires. Can inanimate objects, however irreplaceable and valuable and beautiful, bear the cost of human life? How do you ask people to sacrifice their lives for pretty pictures? The French characters in The Train aren’t interested [...]

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“What is courage? What is cowardice?” These lines appear onscreen before They Came to Cordura begins. The nature of bravery is an essential component of any war film but rarely has it been examined as directly, or as penetratingly, as it is here. Directed by Robert Rossen, Columbia’s They Came to Cordura was disliked by [...]

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When Three Kings, a movie about the 1991 Gulf War, was released in 1999 no one knew that there would be a subsequent war with Iraq, beginning in 2003. Yet the film is certainly prescient about what was to come. In defending America’s decision to leave the region, one character asks another if he’d like, [...]

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