Steven Spielberg's equine epic may help dispel the acquiescence in warfare to which his own films contributed
Steven Spielberg has done his bit to shape western attitudes to warfare. Saving Private Ryan burnished the myth of heroic conflict when cinema had lost faith in it. Schindler's List re-established the useful notion of the indisputably evil foe. In the films of the 40s and 50s, our boys socked it to the Nazis time and again to audiences' innocent delight. However, Vietnam swept away the simplicities of battlefield bravado. When Hollywood got round to confronting that ill-fated undertaking, it found little to glorify. Instead it homed in on the horror, the horror.
Films like Apocalypse Now, Full Metal Jacket and Casualties of War fed public disgust with militarism. America, it was said, would never again put boots on the ground in conflict, but would turn its back on foreign entanglements as its founders had intended. Then, in the 1990s, Spielberg's two Oscar winners rediscovered the cheering certainties of the second world war.
In doing so, they reasserted the notion that war could be both epic and just. Soon, the likes of Pearl Harbor, Enemy at the Gates, The Great Raid and even Inglourious Basterds were inspiring a new generation with the nobility of 1940s derring-do. Television offered a similar perspective, not least with Spielberg's own Band of Brothers.
This screen resurrection of the crusade against the Axis powers may have played its part in the renewal of western bellicosity during the noughties. Giving Saddam Hussein 48 hours to leave Iraq in 2003, George W Bush couched his justification thus: "In the 20th century, some chose to appease murderous dictators, whose threats were allowed to grow into genocide and global war. In this century, when evil men plot chemical, biological and nuclear terror, a policy of appeasement could bring destruction of a kind never before seen on this earth."
War films in that decade succeeded in retaining an upbeat tone in spite of the complexities of the period's conflicts. Black Hawk Down lamented a mistaken but high-minded intervention and celebrated military courage and camaraderie. Behind Enemy Lines and Tears of the Sun found scope for heroism in unorthodox conflicts. The Hurt Locker even managed to turn the Iraq war into a theatre of honour.
Now however, Spielberg has (literally) returned to the fray by stamping our own decade with a new evocation of combat. War Horse's battle scenes rival those of Saving Private Ryan in impact; yet they exude an entirely different scent. In Britain the spectre of the first world war, with its trenches, mud, gas, poets and Christmas truce, has never left us. In America it never cast such a spell. Lured into its ambit by the tale of a boy's love for a horse, Spielberg encountered a typically English take on the conflict's futility.
Nonetheless, it was up to him to make of it what he would. His response could hardly have been more emphatic. Like Lewis Milestone adapting Erich Maria Remarque's All Quiet on the Western Front in 1930, he's delivered an overpoweringly pacifist sermon. In place of the fiendish Nazis of Schindler's List, we have Germans who are nicer and wiser than their British enemies. The main protagonist, drawn from a species with more sense than to launch wars, mocks conflict by fighting for both sides. These hostilities yield no heroes, only fools and victims. Deserters are admired; their punishment is an outrage. Americans, who staged the D-Day landings unaided in Saving Private Ryan, might have turned up at the end to save the day. Instead, they're wholly absent. This time war is a pursuit fit only for benighted Europeans.
On the release of Milestone's film, which went on to win two Oscars, Variety wrote: "The League of Nations could make no better investment than to buy up the master-print, reproduce it in every language, to be shown in all the nations until the word 'war' is taken out of the dictionaries." The film was re-released in 1939 as a warning to the world. It may well have fuelled American reluctance to be dragged into the gathering storm.
Today War Horse makes its pitch at a time when its message will also fall on welcoming ears. The western world is sick of its current conflicts, and wants to bring its boys home. Defence budgets are being cut. Obama chose to leave Libya to Europe. Iran seems likely to be left to Israel. Once again, television is backing up the Spielberg message, with Downton Abbey, Birdsong and a forthcoming Ford Madox Ford adaptation all raising awareness of the great war and its pointlessness. Doubtless the west's thirst for bloodshed will in due course reassert itself. Still, Joey's adventure may have helped put off that day.