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TNWA01 16/11/06 11:23 AM Page i The naval war film TNWA01 16/11/06 11:23 AM Page ii TNWA01 16/11/06 11:23 AM Page iii The naval war film GENRE, HISTORY, NATIONAL CINEMA Jonathan Rayner Manchester University Press Manchester and New York distributed exclusively in the USA by Palgrave TNWA01 16/11/06 11:23 AM Page iv Copyright © Jonathan Rayner 2007 The right of Jonathan Rayner to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. Published by Manchester University Press Oxford Road, Manchester M13 9NR, UK and Room 400, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010, USA www.manchesteruniversitypress.co.uk Distributed exclusively in the USA by Palgrave, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010, USA Distributed exclusively in Canada by UBC Press, University of British Columbia, 2029 West Mall, Vancouver, BC, Canada V6T 1Z2 British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data applied for ISBN 0 7190 7098 8 hardback EAN 978 0 7190 7098 3 First published 2007 16 15 14 13 12 11 10 09 08 07 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 Typeset in 10.5/12.5pt Sabon by Graphicraft Limited, Hong Kong Printed in Great Britain by CPI, Bath TNWA01 16/11/06 11:23 AM Page v For Sarah, who after fourteen years knows a pagoda mast when she sees one, and for Jake and Sam, who have Hearts of Oak but haven’t got to grips with Spanish Ladies. TNWA01 16/11/06 11:23 AM Page vi TNWA01 16/11/06 11:23 AM Page vii Contents Acknowledgements page ix Introduction 1 1 British naval films and the documentary feature 32 2 Post-war British naval films and the service comedy 54 3 Hollywood and the one-ocean war 80 4 The submarine war and the submarine film 103 5 American films of the Cold War 120 6 ‘Damn the photon torpedoes!’ Star Trek and the transfiguration of naval history 153 7 Popularising the navy, rewriting the past: contemporary naval films 173 Conclusion 208 Appendix I: Comparison of narrative elements in naval war films 227 Appendix II: Warships in feature films 231 Filmography 240 Bibliography 257 Index 269 TNWA01 16/11/06 11:23 AM Page viii TNWA01 16/11/06 11:23 AM Page ix Acknowledgements I would like to thank the following people for their help in the very lengthy development and final completion of this project: swashbuck- ling Professor Steve Neale; surfing Professor Graeme Harper; Matthew Frost and Jonathan Bevan at MUP; Dr Duco van Oostrum, for his part in an unlikely paper trail; Anup for a distraction that became a foot- note; and all my colleagues and film students at the University of Sheffield. TNWA01 16/11/06 11:23 AM Page x TNWA02 16/11/06 11:28 AM Page 1 Introduction The premiere screening of Pearl Harbor (Michael Bay, 2001) in May 2001 took place aboard a US Navy aircraft carrier, moored in the naval base of the film’s title. This production, commemorating the sixtieth anniversary of the attack which prompted America’s entry into World War II, represents one of the most recent and explicit linkages of national, naval and cinematic history. This is by no means an isolated example of the mutually beneficial connections between the US Navy and the American film industry, and the promulgation of preferred national images and histories via the war film genre. During the past four years, the US Navy has collaborated on several feature film pro- ductions, which in their subject matter have embraced many aspects of the service’s activities and roles in the present as well as the past. Men of Honor (George Tillman Jr., 2000) depicted the career of Carl Brashear, the first African-American to enter the Diving and Salvage arm of the Navy. Behind Enemy Lines (John Moore, 2001) offered a simplified dramatisation of the American military’s involvement in the former Yugoslavia in the 1990s. Tears of the Sun (Antoine Fuqua, 2003), portraying the evacuation of American citizens and foreign civilians over- seas in the wake of a military coup, showed the Navy’s humanitarian role and support for special forces operations. At time of writing, Stealth (Rob Cohen, 2005), offering a depiction of the future of naval aviation, is in production, and filming aboard another US warship. The US Navy’s long, creative and occasionally troubled relationship with Hollywood, and its reluctance and willingness by turns in collab- orating with filmmakers, have been described in meticulous detail by Lawrence Suid.1 At present, no comparable study exists of the Royal Navy’s collaboration (of similarly long standing) with British filmmakers. The films blessed with cooperation from the US Navy have emphasised and championed the service’s role in the formulation and execution of national policy and, as a consequence, have played a significant part in the definition of national identity on screen in peace and wartime. They TNWA02 16/11/06 11:28 AM Page 2 2 Introduction have also clearly been intended to serve vital propagandist, recruitment and public relations functions, during and after the US Navy’s involve- ment in the wars of the twentieth century. Where the reception of Pearl Harbor became connected in an unenvisaged way with another surprise attack upon America in 2001, the current topical string of productions seeking Navy cooperation can be linked to the higher profile of the American military in general during recent presidencies and the current ‘Global War Against Terrorism’. While these films do suggest the potential variety of naval topics for filmic treatment (carrier aviation, surface ships, submarine operations and amphibious landings), and the auspiciousness of these recent, synergistic treatments deserves scrutiny in itself in the light of contem- porary American politics, in isolation they do not provide an insight into the development, and textual properties of, naval war films per se. The peculiarity of naval combat, in comparison with the familiar action and iconography of land war films, suggests the necessity more than just the topicality of an appraisal of naval filmic treatments. The focus of the present study will be concentrated upon narrative films depicting naval matters and activities, including but not limited to combat, in order to explore their characteristics, acknowledge their significance in relation to the military history they portray, and the socio- cultural history they address, and establish their possible conventional distinction from the overarching genre of the war film. Films depicting naval warfare have co-existed with, but seldom been distinguished from, cinematic narratives of war on land or in the air since the period of World War I. For the purposes of this study, the greatest emphasis will lie on the filmmaking countries to whom naval forces have been most crucial and emblematic in their military history, and which consequently have depicted their navies’ activities in film most frequently: Britain and the United States. Additionally, the war films produced by these countries have also been the most extensively stud- ied, and this critical heritage facilitates the distinction of naval-oriented texts from this body of films. If a cluster of textual features justifies the categorisation of a naval war genre or sub-genre, then the working generic definition will require further consideration in the light of the circum- stances, characteristics and preoccupations of these specific national cinemas. From this study, an appreciation will emerge of the similarities and dissimilarities of naval war films from the recognised conventions of the war film, along with a recognition of the productive relationship between naval history, national imagery and narrative film. The first requirement for this examination is an analysis of previous critical evaluations of the war film, and a delineation of its textual TNWA02 16/11/06 11:28 AM Page 3 Introduction 3 features as identified in earlier genre definitions. This is also justified by a resurgence in the production of war films in recent years, and the current crop of naval-oriented narratives must be appreciated within this contemporary trend, as well as in relation to a possible historical, evolutionary pattern for their development. However, war films released over the past twenty to thirty years have embodied substantial modifi- cations to and reorientations of the genre’s accepted conventions. These changes have been most conspicuous in portrayals of the Vietnam War, and in this case are precipitated by the problematic perceptions of that conflict. Such alterations can also be attributed to the quotation of war film conventions in other circumstances, the crossing of generic boundaries, and cumulative processes of generic hybridisation. So, while Vietnam War films such as Platoon (Oliver Stone, 1986) and Hamburger Hill (John Irvin, 1987) allude to but significantly alter the depiction of land warfare inherited from films of World War II, the trans- plantation of the cross-sectional, representative platoon format to the science fiction genre in Aliens (James Cameron, 1986) and Starship Troopers (Paul Verhoeven, 1997) can serve equally complex (and con- tradictory) ideological ends. Similarly, the war film’s examination of the experience (and perpetration) of war’s evils can be further articulated by the union of the war and horror genres. The Keep (Michael Mann, 1983) offers a retrospective confirmation of Siegfried Kracauer’s thesis on the prophetic convergence of German Expressionist cinema and the Final Solution, while The Bunker (Rob Green, 2001) gauges and dis- places the psychological torment of front-line soldiers through reference to the supernatural.