EW's 10 best movies depicting the veteran's experience

[DeepModem Mom]

Entertainment Weekly: Homecoming Screen
The 10 best movies about the veteran's experience -- In honor of Memorial Day, we examine how Hollywood has depicted the difficulties of the transition from combat to civilian life
by Gary Susman



The Best Years of Our Lives (1946)
William Wyler's moving saga of the postwar lives of three World War II vets was a boldly frank film for 1946 (when it earned an Academy Award for Best Picture), and it remains the definitive film about veterans readjusting to civilian life. Al (Best Actor Oscar winner Fredric March, shown) comes home to a loving wife (Myrna Loy), but he feels estranged from his grown children and his job (in a bank that regards his fellow vets as figures on a balance sheet), so he turns to drink. Fred (Dana Andrews) finds his wartime heroism as a bomber pilot doesn't count for much when he's trying to find work or impress the war bride (Virginia Mayo) he barely knows. And Homer (Harold Russell) feels like damaged goods, having been maimed in combat. Russell, an amateur actor who really did lose both of his hands in the war, earned an honorary Oscar for ''bringing hope and courage to his fellow veterans,'' then beat the competition to win the Best Supporting Actor Oscar, making him the only performer to win two Academy Awards for the same performance.



Coming Home (1978)
Jon Voight (shown, with Jane Fonda) won an Oscar for his role as Luke, a paraplegic Vietnam vet (modeled on Ron Kovic of Born on the Fourth of July fame) who overcomes his bitterness when he meets veterans' hospital volunteer Sally (Fonda, who also won an Oscar). As their friendship blossoms into an affair, Luke learns that he can still have a romantic and sexual life, as the film demonstrates in a famously tender and frank love scene. Alas, Sally is married, and when her Marine husband (Bruce Dern) returns from combat, he has his own psychic and physical scars to cope with, along with his wife's infidelity. Fonda, of course, had been notorious for her offscreen opposition to the war, but she commissioned the screenplay and surprised everyone by making a film that wasn't so much antiwar as pro-veteran.



The Deer Hunter (1978)
This harrowing Best Picture Oscar winner examines the devastating impact of the Vietnam War on an entire community. Small-town buddies Mike (Robert De Niro, shown with John Savage), Steven (Savage), and Nick (Christopher Walken, in his Oscar-winning performance) are captured together and brutalized in the movie's notorious Russian roulette sequence. Mike returns home relatively unscathed, but Steven comes back a self-pitying paraplegic, while the tragic Nick doesn't come back at all, remaining in Saigon and ritualistically re-enacting his torture for money. The film's Vietnam sequences are hyperbolically surreal, but its meditation on survivor's guilt and a generation's loss of innocence is genuine. The movie is credited with inspiring the drive to build the Vietnam War memorial on the Washington Mall.



Born on the Fourth of July (1989)
Oliver Stone, who has coped with his own tour of duty in Vietnam by making three movies about the war, here tells the true story of Ron Kovic (Tom Cruise, shown), who serves eagerly until a battlefield injury robs him of the use of his legs. Back home, he sinks into self-pity and debauchery until, emerging from his funk, he channels his frustration into activism and becomes a prominent antiwar protester. It would be a lot harder for viewers to go along on this angry journey of disillusionment were it not for Stone's canny casting of Top Gun Tom. Performing against type, Cruise earned himself an Oscar nomination.

The other six films listed are: It's Always Fair Weather (l955), First Blood (l982), The Manchurian Candidate (2004), Dead Presidents (l995), Legends of the Fall (l994), and Slaughterhouse-Five (1972).

http://www.ew.com/ew/article/commentary/0,6115,1196297_2_0_,00.html

[Chemical Bill]

1. I loved "Born on the Fourth of July".

I've always wanted to see "The Best Years of Our Lives". This list looks good.

Bill

[tives12]

2. I just read Slaughterhouse-Five for class

And was blown away. I am now waiting for my friend to bring in the movie for me.

[Retrograde]

3. Wrong 'Manchurian Candidate"

The original 1962 version is more adult and more complicated: the color remake is a pale shadow of the original B/W movie.

Otherwise, a respectable list.

[HawkerHurricane]

4. First Blood?

What, they had the movie that made the 'insane Vietnam Vet' out of a man who ran to Sweden to coach a girls soccer team?
(Oh, and make bad porn)
It doesn't belong on that list.

[happyslug]

5. He was born Paralyzed on the left side of his face...

Thus his trademark Voice, thus he was 4F for Vietnam WITHOUT going to Sweden. Yes I heard about his teaching overseas but it was because he could NOT because he was avoiding the Draft (and according to some reports do to that birth Defect is really only 5'5" tall not his listed 5' 10" which would also have made him Draft Proof during Vietnam).

Now he is a Chicken Hawk (He supports the GOP while never having served,a t least he has a GOOD REASON FOR NEVER HAVING TO SERVE UNLIKE OTHER CHICKEN HAWKS).

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sylvester_Stallone