World War I
Eleven films, in the order the war happened.
11 entries · about 23h 52m across the 11 with a published runtime
The war that has the fewest good films of any of comparable size, and the reason is built into it: four years in which the front barely moved does not give a screenwriter a structure. The films that work solve that problem rather than ignoring it.
Eleven entries, ordered by when the events happened, from the men and women who volunteered in 1914 to the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of 1918.
If you only watch 7
Testament of Youth, Gallipoli, Paths of Glory, Lawrence of Arabia, All Quiet on the Western Front, 1917, They Shall Not Grow Old. That is about 15h 15m. Between them they carry the trenches, the theatres away from them, both sides of the line, the war at home, and the faces of the men who actually fought it.
How this is ordered
Films spanning the whole war are filed at 1914, where they begin, rather than being scattered. War Horse and Testament of Youth both run the full four years and sit at the top for that reason.
The documentary is deliberately placed last, at the armistice, rather than first. It is the only entry showing real faces, and it lands differently once you have spent ten films watching actors stand in for them.
- 01From 1914Core ten
Testament of Youth
2014 · 2h 9m · England, a volunteer nurse
Vera Brittain leaves Oxford to nurse, and loses almost everyone she knows. The only entry told by a woman and the only one that stays with the people who waited, which is most of the country. Adapted from her own memoir, which is why it does not flinch at the end.
Note. Runs the full war, from the summer of 1914 to the armistice.
- 02From August 1914
War Horse
2011 · 2h 26m · Devon to the Somme
Unashamedly sentimental, and useful here for a structural reason: by following an animal that changes hands, it is the only entry that crosses the line repeatedly and shows the war from both sides of it without making a point of doing so.
Note. Follows one horse through four years and several armies, ending after the armistice.
- 037 August 1915Core ten
Gallipoli
1981 · 1h 51m · The Dardanelles, Australian
Two Australian sprinters end up at the Nek, where waves of men were sent into machine guns to support a landing that had already failed. It is the entry that best explains why this war broke the faith of the countries that fought it, and the last shot is among the most famous endings in war cinema.
- 041916Core ten
Paths of Glory
1957 · 1h 28m · The French line
An impossible attack ordered, refused, and then punished by executing three men chosen at random. Eighty-eight minutes, and the most concentrated statement on this list: the enemy is barely in it, because the film argues the men were being killed by their own command.
- 05From 1916Core ten
Lawrence of Arabia
1962 · 3h 42m · Arabia, the revolt against the Ottomans
The war away from the trenches, and the only entry concerned with what the war built rather than what it destroyed: the borders drawn across the Middle East during it are still the ones being argued about. The longest entry here and the one nobody regrets starting.
Note. The war years, framed by Lawrence’s death in 1935.
- 061917 to 11 November 1918Core ten
All Quiet on the Western Front
2022 · 2h 27m · The German line
The German side, from the German industry, which the two earlier English-language versions of this novel could not be. Its addition to the book is the armistice negotiation running in parallel, so you watch men die on a schedule that has already been agreed in a railway carriage.
Note. Ends at eleven o’clock on 11 November 1918, and cuts between the trenches and the armistice negotiations throughout.
- 071917, then the 1920s
A Very Long Engagement
2004 · 2h 14m · France, a search afterwards
Half a mystery and half a war film, and the half that matters is the aftermath: the missing, the mutilated and the bureaucratic refusal to account for either. The only entry that treats the war as something a country spends the next decade trying to find out about.
Note. Five men sentenced to no man’s land in 1917, investigated by a fiancée through the 1920s.
- 086 April 1917Core ten
1917
2019 · 1h 59m · The Western Front, two runners
Two men carry a message across the line to stop an attack, shot to look like one continuous take. The technique is the argument: no cuts means no relief, and it is the closest this list comes to the physical experience of crossing that ground.
- 0921 March 1918
Journey’s End
2017 · 1h 43m · A British dugout, waiting
Four days in a dugout before the German spring offensive arrives, adapted from a 1928 play by a man who was there. Almost nothing happens, which is the point: it is the best entry on the specific experience of knowing an attack is coming and being unable to leave.
- 10October 1918
Sergeant York
1941 · 2h 14m · The Meuse-Argonne, American
The only American entry, covering the late arrival that settled the numbers. Made in 1941 to argue the United States should enter another war, which is worth knowing while watching it: it is a recruiting film about a conscientious objector, and it is honest about the contradiction.
Note. Opens in rural Tennessee well before American entry and closes after the war.
- 11The whole warCore ten
They Shall Not Grow Old
2018 · 1h 39m · British archive footage, restored
Archive film slowed to natural speed, colourised and given sound, with veterans narrating over it. Placed last deliberately. After ten films of actors standing in for these men, this is the one where they look back at the camera, and nothing else on the list survives the comparison.
Note. The 99-minute theatrical cut is listed. A 129-minute extended version exists.
What is missing, and why
The colonial troops. Over a million Indian soldiers served, alongside hundreds of thousands of African, Caribbean and Chinese labourers and combatants. They are almost entirely absent from cinema, and from this list, which contains eleven films and not one of them. It is the largest and least excusable gap of any timeline on this site.
The Eastern Front and Russia. The theatre that produced a revolution, a civil war and the Soviet Union has essentially no film in general circulation. Everything above is Western Front or Middle East.
The war at sea. Jutland, the U-boat campaign and the blockade that starved Germany. Nothing.
Italy and the Alps. Twelve battles on one river, fought partly above the snow line. Not filmed.
The Ottoman collapse. Lawrence of Arabia covers the revolt against it and nothing covers what happened to the Armenians during it.
The influenza pandemic, which killed more people than the fighting did and arrived while it was still going on.
If you know a film that closes any of these, the correction address is on the contact page.
Corrections and additions go to watchinorder.in@gmail.com.