MRQE Ranks: Cinema's Best WWII Movies

1

Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981)

Cast: Harrison Ford, Karen Allen, Wolf Kahler, Paul Freeman, Ronald Lacey

Director: Steven Spielberg

Writer: Lawrence Kasdan, Philip Kaufman, George Lucas, Willard Huyck

Synopsis: Indiana Jones (Harrison Ford) is no ordinary archeologist. When we first see him, he is somewhere in the Peruvian jungle in 1936, running a booby-t... [MORE]

2

Casablanca (1942)

Cast: Humphrey Bogart, Ingrid Bergman, Claude Rains, Paul Henreid, Conrad Veidt

Director: Michael Curtiz

Synopsis: One of the most beloved American films, this captivating wartime adventure of romance and intrigue from director Michael Curtiz defies standard cat... [MORE]

3

Au revoir les enfants (1987)

Cast: Gaspard Manesse, Francine Racette, Raphael Fejto, Stanislas Carre de Malberg, Philippe Morier-Genoud

Director: Louis Malle, Renato Berta

Synopsis: Gaspard Manesse plays Julien, an 11-year-old Catholic boarding-school resident during the Nazi occupation of France. He is witness to the courage o... [MORE]

4

The Bridge on the River Kwai (1957)

Cast: William Holden, Alec Guinness, Sessue Hayakawa, Jack Hawkins, James Donald

Director: David Lean

Synopsis: The Bridge on the River Kwai opens in a Japanese prisoner-of-war camp in Burma in 1943, where a battle of wills rages between camp commander Colone... [MORE]

5

Das Boot (1981)

Cast: Jurgen Prochnow, Herbert Gronemeyer, Klaus Wennemann, Hubertus Bengsch, Martin Semmelrogge

Director: Wolfgang Petersen

Synopsis: Das Boot is one of the most gripping and authentic war movies ever made. Based on an autobiographical novel by German World War II photographer Lot... [MORE]

6

Schindler's List (1993)

Cast: Liam Neeson, Ben Kingsley, Ralph Fiennes, Caroline Goodall, Jonathan Sagalle

Director: Steven Spielberg

Synopsis: Based on a true story, Steven Spielberg's Schindler's List stars Liam Neeson as Oskar Schindler, a German businessman in Poland who sees an opportu... [MORE]

7

Grave of the Fireflies (1988)

Director: Isao Takahata

Synopsis: Grave of the Fireflies opens on an evening in 1945, after Japan's surrender at the end of World War II; and in a train station, the young Seita die... [MORE]

8

The Sound of Music (1965)

Cast: Julie Andrews, Christopher Plummer, Eleanor Parker, Richard Haydn, Charmian Carr

Director: Robert Wise

Synopsis: One of the most popular movie musicals of all time, The Sound of Music is based on the true story of the Trapp Family Singers. Julie Andrews stars ... [MORE]

9

Saving Private Ryan (1998)

Cast: Tom Hanks, Tom Sizemore, Matt Damon, Edward Burns, Barry Pepper

Director: Steven Spielberg

Synopsis: Steven Spielberg directed this powerful, realistic re-creation of WWII's D-day invasion and the immediate aftermath. The story opens with a prologu... [MORE]

10

Patton (1970)

Cast: George C. Scott, Karl Malden, Michael Bates, Edward Binns, Karl Michael Vogler

Director: Franklin J. Schaffner

Synopsis: In 1943 North Africa, George Patton (George C. Scott) assumes command of (and instills some much-needed discipline in) the American forces. Engaged... [MORE]

11

The Pianist (2002)

Cast: Adrien Brody, Emilia Fox, Thomas Kretschmann, Michal Zebrowski, Ed Stoppard

Director: Roman Polanski

Synopsis: Filmmaker Roman Polanski, who as a boy growing up in Poland watched while the Nazis devastated his country during World War II, directed this downb... [MORE]

12

Life is Beautiful (1997)

Cast: Roberto Benigni, Nicoletta Braschi, Giorgio Cantarini, Giustino Durano, Sergio Bustric

Director: Roberto Benigni

Synopsis: In this WW II tragicomedy, famed Italian funnyman Roberto Benigni (The Monster) portrays Guido, who moves during the '30s from the country to a Tus... [MORE]

13

Downfall (2004)

Cast: Bruno Ganz, Alexandra Maria Lara, Corinna Harfouch, Ulrich Matthes, Juliane Kohler

Director: Oliver Hirschbiegel

Synopsis: The last ten days of Adolf Hitler and his Nazi regime are seen through the eyes of a young woman in his employ in this historical drama from German... [MORE]

14

From Here to Eternity (1953)

Cast: Burt Lancaster, Montgomery Clift, Deborah Kerr, Frank Sinatra, Donna Reed

Director: Fred Zinnemann

Synopsis: The scene is Schofield Army Barracks in Honolulu, in the languid days before the attack on Pearl Harbor, where James Jones' acclaimed war novel Fro... [MORE]

15

Inglourious Basterds (2009)

Cast: Brad Pitt, Mélanie Laurent, Christoph Waltz, Eli Roth, Michael Fassbender

Director: Quentin Tarantino

Synopsis: A group of hardened Nazi killers stalk their prey in Nazi-occupied France as a Jewish cinema owner plots to take down top-ranking SS officers durin... [MORE]

16

Letters from Iwo Jima (2006)

Cast: Ken Watanabe, Kazunari Ninomiya, Tsuyoshi Ihara, Nae, Shido Nakamura

Director: Clint Eastwood

Synopsis: After bringing the story of the American soldiers who fought in the battle of Iwo Jima to the screen in his film Flags of Our Fathers, Clint Eastwo... [MORE]

17

The Great Dictator (1940)

Cast: Charles Chaplin, Paulette Goddard, Jack Oakie, Reginald Gardiner, Henry Daniell

Director: Charles Chaplin

Synopsis: "This is the story of the period between two world wars--an interim during which insanity cut loose, liberty took a nose dive, and humanity was kic... [MORE]

18

The English Patient (1996)

Cast: Ralph Fiennes, Kristin Scott Thomas, Juliette Binoche, Willem Dafoe, Colin Firth

Director: Anthony Minghella

Synopsis: Anthony Minghella wrote and directed this award-winning adaptation of Michael Ondaatje's novel about a doomed and tragic romance set against the ba... [MORE]

19

The Dirty Dozen (1967)

Cast: Lee Marvin, Ernest Borgnine, Charles Bronson, Jim Brown, John Cassavetes

Director: Robert Aldrich

Synopsis: Director Robert Aldrich took what he considered a hopelessly old-fashioned script by Lukas Heller and Nunnally Johnson and fashioned The Dirty Doze... [MORE]

20

A Bridge Too Far (1977)

Cast: Dirk Bogarde, James Caan, Sean Connery, Michael Caine, Edward Fox

Director: Richard Attenborough

Synopsis: It's late 1944, and the Allied armies are confident they'll win the World War II and be home in time for Christmas. What's needed, says British gen... [MORE]

21

The Thin Red Line (1998)

Cast: Sean Penn, Adrien Brody, James Caviezel, Ben Chaplin, George Clooney

Director: Terrence Malick

Synopsis: The return of director Terrence Malick to feature filmmaking after a twenty year sabbatical, this World War II drama is an elegiac rumination on ma... [MORE]

22

Tora! Tora! Tora! (1970)

Cast: Martin Balsam, Jason Robards, Joseph Cotten, E.G. Marshall, Sô Yamamura

Director: Richard Fleischer, Toshio Masuda, Kinji Fukasaku

23

Flags of Our Fathers (2006)

Cast: Ryan Phillippe, Jesse Bradford, Adam Beach, John Benjamin Hickey, John Slattery

Director: Clint Eastwood

Synopsis: Clint Eastwood's adaptation of the non-fiction book Flags of Our Fathers concerns the lives of the men in the famous picture of soldiers raising th... [MORE]

24

Lust, Caution (2007)

Cast: Tony Leung Chiu-Wai, Tang Wei, Joan Chen, Wang Leehom, Tou Chung-Hua

Director: Ang Lee

Synopsis: Academy Award-winning director Ang Lee adapts this Eileen Chang story set in World War II-era Shanghai that details the political intrigue surround... [MORE]

25

The Big Red One (1980)

Cast: Lee Marvin, Mark Hamill, Robert Carradine, Bobby Di Cicco, Kelly Ward

Director: Samuel Fuller

Synopsis: Samuel Fuller's valedictory war picture, The Big Red One follows the First Infantry Division from Africa to Europe during the years 1942 through 19... [MORE]

26

The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas (2008)

Cast: Asa Butterfield, Vera Farmiga, David Thewlis, Rupert Friend, David Hayman

Director: Mark Herman

Synopsis: Vera Farmiga, David Thewlis, and Asa Butterfield star in Little Voice writer/director Mark Herman's adaptation of John Boyne's novel concerning the... [MORE]

27

Stalingrad (1993)

Cast: Dominique Horwitz, Jochen Nickel, Thomas Kretschmann, Sebastian Rudolph, Dana Vavrova

Director: Joseph Vilsmaier

Synopsis: This German battlefield drama, released on the occasion of the fiftieth anniversary of the climactic 1943 defeat of the Nazi forces at Stalingrad i... [MORE]

28

The Way Back (2010/I)

Cast: Colin Farrell, Ed Harris, Jim Sturgess, Mark Strong, Saoirse Ronan

Director: Peter Weir

Synopsis: A small band of multicultural convicts stages a daring escape from a World War II-era Siberian gulag, and embarks on a treacherous journey across f... [MORE]

29

Valkyrie (2008)

Cast: Tom Cruise, Kenneth Branagh, Bill Nighy, Tom Wilkinson, Carice van Houten

Director: Bryan Singer

Synopsis: At the absolute height of World War II, German generals hatch a daring plan to assassinate Adolf Hitler and effectively render the German war machi... [MORE]

30

Defiance (2008/I)

Cast: Daniel Craig, Liev Schreiber, Jamie Bell, Alexa Davalos, Allan Corduner

Director: Edward Zwick

Synopsis: Inspired by a true story, director Edward Zwick's epic World War II drama Defiance tells the tale of three Jewish Eastern European brothers (Daniel... [MORE]

31

Always (1989)

Cast: Richard Dreyfuss, Holly Hunter, Brad Johnson, John Goodman, Audrey Hepburn

Director: Steven Spielberg

Synopsis: For all its state-of-the-art special effects, Always is essentially a remake of the 1943 Spencer Tracy-Irene Dunne fantasy vehicle A Guy Named Joe-... [MORE]

32

Pearl Harbor (2001)

Cast: Ben Affleck, Josh Hartnett, Kate Beckinsale, Ewen Bremner, Jon Voight

Director: Michael Bay

Synopsis: At the time of its release, this lavish period war drama from hyperkinetic director Michael Bay became the most expensive motion picture ever green... [MORE]

33

Judgment at Nuremberg (1961)

Cast: Spencer Tracy, Maximilian Schell, Burt Lancaster, Richard Widmark, Marlene Dietrich

Director: Stanley Kramer

Synopsis: After the end of World War II, the world gradually became aware of the full extent of the war crimes perpetrated by the Third Reich. In 1948, a ser... [MORE]

34

Twelve O'Clock High (1949)

Cast: Gregory Peck, Hugh Marlowe, Dean Jagger, Gary Merrill, Millard Mitchell

Director: Henry King

Synopsis: How much can a man give? When the U.S. 8th Army Air Force 918th Bombardment group is ordered on their fourth harrowing mission in four hard days, B... [MORE]

35

Days of Glory (1944)

Cast: Gregory Peck, Tamara Toumanova, Alan Reed, Maria Palmer, Lowell Gilmore

Director: Jacques Tourneur

Synopsis: Like Song of Russia and Mission to Moscow before it, Days of Glory is a paean to the courage and resourcefulness of the Soviet Union during WW2 (th... [MORE]

36

The Eagle Has Landed (1976)

Cast: Michael Caine, Donald Sutherland, Robert Duvall, Jenny Agutter, Larry Hagman

Director: John Sturges

Synopsis: John Sturges directed this taut adaptation of Jack Higgins' suspense novel about an attempted kidnapping of Winston Churchill by the German high co... [MORE]

37

Mrs. Miniver (1942)

Cast: Greer Garson, Walter Pidgeon, Teresa Wright, Richard Ney, May Whitty

Director: William Wyler

Synopsis: As Academy Award-winning films go, Mrs. Miniver has not weathered the years all that well. This prettified, idealized view of the upper-class Briti... [MORE]

38

The Longest Day (1962)

Cast: John Wayne, Robert Mitchum, Henry Fonda, Richard Burton, Eddie Albert

Director: Ken Annakin, Andrew Marton, Gerd Oswald, Bernhard Wicki, Darryl F. Zanuck

Synopsis: The Longest Day is a mammoth, all-star re-creation of the D-Day invasion, personally orchestrated by Darryl F. Zanuck. Whenever possible, the origi... [MORE]

39

The Best Years of Our Lives (1946)

Cast: Fredric March, Dana Andrews, Harold Russell, Myrna Loy, Virginia Mayo

Director: William Wyler

Synopsis: The postwar classic The Best Years of Our Lives, based on a novel in verse by MacKinlay Kantor about the difficult readjustments of returning World... [MORE]

40

The Diary of Anne Frank (1959)

Cast: Millie Perkins, Joseph Schildkraut, Shelley Winters, Richard Beymer, Gusti Huber

Director: George Stevens

Synopsis: This is the autobiographical drama of a young Dutch Jewish girl hiding from the invading Nazis during World War II. Anne and her family share a cla... [MORE]

41

Catch-22 (1970)

Cast: Alan Arkin, Martin Balsam, Richard Benjamin, Jack Gilford, Art Garfunkel

Director: Mike Nichols

Synopsis: Director Mike Nichols and writer-actor Buck Henry followed their enormous hit The Graduate (1967) with this timely adaptation of Joseph Heller's sa... [MORE]

42

Stalag 17 (1953)

Cast: William Holden, Peter Graves, Robert Strauss, Harvey Lembeck, Don Taylor

Director: Billy Wilder

Synopsis: The scene is a German POW camp, sometime during the mid-1940s. Stalag 17, exclusively populated by American sergeants, is overseen by sadistic comm... [MORE]

43

The Desert Fox: The Story of Rommel (1951)

Cast: James Mason, Jessica Tandy, Cedric Hardwicke, Luther Adler, Everett Sloane

Director: Henry Hathaway

44

Thirty Seconds Over Tokyo (1944)

Cast: Van Johnson, Spencer Tracy, Robert Walker, Phyllis Thaxter, Tim Murdock

Director: Mervyn LeRoy

Synopsis: Billed third, Spencer Tracy plays Lt. Col. James P. Doolittle, who led the bombing raid over Tokyo. Most of the footage concerns pilot Ted Lawson (... [MORE]

45

Triumph of the Will (1935)

Cast: Heinrich Himmler, Hermann Göring, Adolf Hitler, Rudolf Hess, Leni Riefenstahl

Director: Leni Riefenstahl

46

Sands of Iwo Jima (1949)

Cast: John Wayne, John Agar, Wally Cassell, James Brown, Adele Mara

Director: Allan Dwan

Synopsis: From director Allan Dwan, Sands of Iwo Jima is a drama set during the Second World War and follows John Stryker (John Wayne), a relentlessly tough ... [MORE]

47

The Long Voyage Home (1940)

Cast: John Wayne, Thomas Mitchell, Ian Hunter, Barry Fitzgerald, Ward Bond

Director: John Ford

Synopsis: John Ford welded four of Eugene O'Neill's one-act plays about the sea, +Bound East for Cardiff, +The Long Voyage Home, +The Zone, and +Moon of the ... [MORE]

48

Empire of the Sun (1987)

Cast: Christian Bale, John Malkovich, Miranda Richardson, Nigel Havers, Joe Pantoliano

Director: Steven Spielberg

Synopsis: Based on J.G. Ballard's autobiographical novel, Empire of the Sun stars Christian Bale as a spoiled young British boy, living with his wealthy fami... [MORE]

49

To Be or Not to Be (1983)

Cast: Mel Brooks, Anne Bancroft, Tim Matheson, Charles Durning, Jose Ferrer

Director: Alan Johnson

Synopsis: Mel Brooks and his real-life wife Anne Bancroft play Frederick and Anna Bronski, musical comedy stars in 1939 Poland. The highlight of the Bronskis... [MORE]

50

The Caine Mutiny (1954)

Cast: Humphrey Bogart, Fred MacMurray, Van Johnson, Jose Ferrer, Robert Francis

Director: Edward Dmytryk

Synopsis: Robert Francis is at the center of the story as Willis Keith, a newly-minted ensign assigned to the destroyer/minesweeper U.S.S. Caine during World... [MORE]