Wartime Romance Films: All’s Fair

Coming out of Dunkirk last week (guys, it’s amazing- go watch it (except for the erasure of everyone who wasn’t a white man from WWII)!) I was inspired to write a list of great war films.
When I got on it the next day I realized belatedly that war film knowledge is really a big gap in my film expertise.  I haven’t watched most of the classics yet (Bridge on the River Kwai, All Quiet on the Western Front, Das Boot, Patton, etc.) and I couldn’t get more than a few minutes into Saving Private Ryan when I tried to watch it a few months ago. (It’s just so overblown and melodramatic).

My list would have been solely Hacksaw Ridge and Dunkirk, and we can’t have that- even if I do write movie pairing posts sometimes.

So I decided to ease into the subject with a genre I know a little (okay, a lot) more about- wartime romances.

My criteria were vaguely as follows: 1) There must be a war that actually took place in reality. 2) The plot must primarily follow some kind of romantic trajectory- the love story can’t be a secondary consideration, which rules out things like Hacksaw Ridge and Watch on the Rhine.

Be warned- it’s a bit of an eclectic list, but all are worthwhile in my book.

The Runt of the Literature

Ayyy, get it? It’s like ‘runt of the litter’, but books and the written word, so literature.
…I’ll see myself out.

Having recently written about my favorite standout works from amazing authors, I decided it was time to do the opposite.  That is, rudely single out my least favorite works by some of my best-beloved authors. Blasphemy.

I think my greatest hope, when I write about books, is that people will be inspired to feel like the classics are less remote.  It’s logical that, looking at the whole of the history of writing and authorship, you can find better pieces than were published in the past five or ten years.  For me personally, writing styles from longer ago are more pleasing than current writing (again, speaking very generally).  But I do think that we have a tendency to venerate classic literature kind of excessively.  Which makes people hesitant to read it and interact with it.  They’re just books like any other, and books are there for people to read and enjoy.  A book should never make you feel bad, and you should never feel ‘unworthy’ of a book or guilty for having a negative opinion about one.  It’s like trying on clothes.  If you try on something that doesn’t fit, it’s the clothing that doesn’t fit you, not you who doesn’t fit the clothing.

Okay, rant over.  Here’s a collection of books from my favorite authors who can by and large do no wrong.  And these are examples of the doing wrong (again, by me).  Books that I am perfectly content to not like.