The Best Movies About World War I

Julie Andrews plays a half-German, half-English dancehall singer who is persuaded by her German uncle to spy for the German Empire during World War I. She tries to seduce an Allied flyer (Rock Hudson) and gain secrets but she falls in love with him. Things get more complicated when he finds out she is a spy.

“Private Peaceful” is a lushly photographed though somewhat plodding British film about two brothers serving in the British Expeditionary Force during World War I who fall in love with the same woman.

The story of the exotic dancer turned spy during World War I was fresh for moviegoers in 1931. Greta Garbo captured the imagination of the American public with her portrayal of Mata Hari, whose attempts to ferret secrets out of French and Russian officers are eventually exposed by a French intelligence officer. Ramon Novarro and Lionel Barrymore also starred.

James Cagney stars in all his feisty glory as a rebellious American soldier during World War I whose cowardice leads to the deaths of his fellow soldiers. Then, through the intervention of the division’s priest (Pat O’Brien), he redeems himself on the battlefield and makes the ultimate sacrifice.

In one of his early films, based on the classic Ernest Hemingway novel of the same name, Gary Cooper stars as Frederic Henry, an American driving ambulances for the Italian Army during World War I who falls in love with a British Red Cross nurse, played by Helen Hayes. A jealous commanding officer (Adolphe Menjou) transfers the nurse to a hospital in Milan. There she is reunited with her lover after he is wounded in battle.

James Whale co-directed this World War I film with Howard Hughes, about two brothers at Oxford who enlist as British flyers and become involved in a love triangle with a blonde bombshell played by Jean Harlow. Whale helped helm this movie before he became famous for directing “Frankenstein” a year later.

The Lighthorsemen are Australian cavalrymen fighting in the Middle East for the Allies against the Ottoman and German empires. The movie was praised for its depiction of horsemanship and the attack on Beersheba in the Negev desert in present-day southern Israel, reminiscent of the famed attack in the “Charge of the Light Brigade.”

“War Horse” is director Steven Spielberg’s treatment of the First World War. The war horse is Joey, a bay Irish Hunter raised by a British teenager named Albert. Joey is bought by the British Army during World War I and in the course of the war is possessed by the British and German forces and French civilians. The war is seen through the eyes of the animal, who is eventually reunited with Albert – by then a soldier temporarily blinded in a gas attack.

An epic set in the American West in the early 1900s, “Legends of the Fall” has an extended segment about three brothers who join the Canadian Expeditionary Force during World War I, much to their father’s displeasure. One brother is killed and another, played by Brad Pitt, attacks a German trench and returns to his lines with the scalps of slain German soldiers.

The silent film starred Rudolph Valentino as a youthful libertine and the favored grandson of an Argentine landowner. He decamps to Paris after his grandfather dies and romances a married woman. After joining the French army at the start of World War I, he soon must face his German relatives in combat. The footage of the German shelling of a French village and the images of the resulting civilian dead and orphaned children buttressed the image of German troops as ruthless.

“Beneath Hill 60” is a harrowing tale of the extremely dangerous work of Australian mining engineers who during World War I dug tunnels beneath German lines and packed them with explosives in a bid to end the stalemate on the Western Front. The film recounts the explosion during the Battle of Messines in June 1917. About 990,000 pounds of explosives were set off under German positions, demolishing much of Hill 60 and killing about 10,000 German soldiers.

In this well-mounted period piece, Alicia Vikander plays Oxford University student Vera Brittain, who puts her studies on hold to serve as a nurse on the Western Front in World War I, while her brother, her boyfriend, and a secret admirer wallow in the trenches of France and Belgium. Shocked by the horrors of the war, Brittain becomes a staunch advocate for peace.

“Johnny Got His Gun” was based on the novel by the same name, written by Trumbo – a writer blacklisted for alleged communist ties. Released during the height of the Vietnam War, the film starred Timothy Bottoms as a soldier who’s lost his sight, speech, hearing, and sense of smell from a bomb blast in World War I. He lives in a never-ending nightmare hoping a sympathetic nurse can help him end his misery.

Marlene Dietrich’s smoldering presence is on full display in this espionage tale about a Viennese streetwalker recruited to spy on the Russians for Austria-Hungary during World War I. She falls in love with a Russian spy, one of a number of Russians captured in battle, and she helps him escape. For this she is tried for treason and executed.

Audrey Tautou plays Mathilde, a young French woman who is told that her fiancé (Gaspard Ulliel) has been killed in World War I. She refuses to believe this and attempts to find out what happened on the battlefield the day he was killed with the help of a private investigator. In the course of her search, she discovers evidence of the inhumane process the French use to deal with deserters. Oscar winner Marion Cotillard also appears in the film.

“King and Country” is about a young British soldier (Tom Courtenay) standing trial for desertion after he’d been exposed to relentless shelling and repeated engagements with the Germans. He’s defended by an upper-class lawyer (Dirk Borgarde) a man contemptuous of the working-class soldier whom he deems a coward at first. But his opinion changes as he gets to know the soldier and he concocts a plan to try and save him from the firing squad.

Based on a true story, this movie, also known as “Joyeux Noël,” is about combatants on the Western Front who halted hostilities on Christmas Eve 1914 to observe a ceasefire in a fleeting moment of humanity amid the madness of war. Men exchanged parcels, played soccer in no-man’s land, and offered peace and goodwill, before superior officers on both sides ordered them to stop fraternizing.

“Wings,” starring silent-screen icon Clara Bow, Richard Arlen, and Charles “Buddy” Rogers, was the first movie to win a Best Picture Oscar, mostly for the amazingly realistic World War I dogfights filmed by motion-picture cameras mounted on stunt planes. That realism was courtesy of director William Wellman, who had himself been a pilot during the war.

Australian director Peter Weir wrote and directed this story of the utter futility of World War I tactics. “Gallipoli” is the location of the Allies’ poorly planned attempt to knock the Ottoman Empire out of the war. The bloody disaster claimed thousands of lives, mostly of soldiers from Australia and New Zealand. Mel Gibson and Mark Lee played two young Australian sprinters sent to the front line, where they become messengers because of their speed.

The French film is about two French soldiers – an artist disfigured during combat and an accountant – who start a war memorial a year after the end of the war that is really a con. Their adventures in the 1920s soon become deadly. It is a theatrical, almost circus-like movie that Hollywood Reporter critic Jordan Mintzer said “mixes high craft, surrealist humor and extremely dark themes – of trauma, death, corruption and manipulation – in ways that hold together rather well.”

“Sergeant York” is the true story of Alvin York, a Tennessee backwoodsman and pacifist who became America’s greatest hero during World War I. Gary Cooper played York and won the first of his two Academy Awards for the part. Director Howard Hawks served as a lieutenant in the U.S. Army Signal Corps and later joined the Army Air Corps during World War I, and brought his own experiences to bear.

“East of Eden” is a World War I period movie loosely based on the Cain and Abel fable. James Dean starred as the unfavored son of a farmer who starts a bean-growing business, knowing that if the United States enters the war, bean prices will surge. He also hopes this will earn his father’s love and respect. The business succeeds, but the father is opposed to it, saying it is war profiteering. Meanwhile, the favored son eventually boards a train to enlist in the army.

This latest reboot of Erich Maria Remarque’s classic novel revisits the themes of the futility and horrors of war, this time with a German cast. Director Edward Berger added greater political context to the film with scenes of negotiators from the Allies and the German Empire dithering over the details of the armistice while soldiers on both sides are dying in combat.

“1917” was nominated for 10 Oscars and won three. The movie wastes no time in bringing the viewer the grim reality of trench warfare. “1917” is famous for director Sam Mendes’ opening shot, which follows two British soldiers tentatively crossing the destroyed landscape of no-man’s land to bring a message to a battalion to call off an attack and avert a massacre. Few movies have captured the conditions of World War I battlefields like “1917.”

Humphrey Bogart won his only Academy Award as a boozy steamer captain from Canada in World War I Africa who helps an English missionary (Katharine Hepburn) destroy a German gunboat. All the while they quarrel and eventually fall in love. The movie was based on a C.S.Forester novel. The Rotten Tomatoes Critics Consensus said the movie was “perfectly cast, smartly written, and beautifully filmed. ‘The African Queen’ remains thrilling, funny, and effortlessly absorbing.”

This earlier, original version of “All Quiet on the Western Front” is ranked at or near the top of every list of great films about war. Told through the perspective of an idealistic young German student, Paul Bäumer, the movie focuses on the patriotic zeal of German youth who are implored by their teacher to fight for Germany. One after the other, the grim machinery of death claims the students, shattering the illusion of glory that Bäumer and his friends had for their cause.

One of the earliest treatments of World War I is one of the best. The silent movie stars John Gilbert as an idle rich kid who enlists in the U.S. Army once America has joined the war. He romances a young French girl and soon experiences the horrors of war.

“The Grand Illusion” is an anti-war film from the great Jean Renoir. During World War I, two French soldiers are captured and held in two prisoner-of-war camps, and escape from both. They are eventually brought to a seemingly inescapable fortress run by an aristocratic officer played by the imperious Erich von Stroheim.

This sprawling four-hour epic from David Lean recounted the exploits of T.E. Lawrence. a British officer who served as a liaison between the Arabs and the British in their fight against the Ottoman Empire during World War I. He became a freedom fighter and along with Sherif Ali (Omar Sharif), led the Arab forces strike out with success against the Turks. Lean’s movie is noteworthy for capturing the vastness of the Sinai desert.

Stanley Kubrick’s film about the immorality of vainglorious French senior officers stars Kirk Douglas in what many critics say was his best role. Set in 1916, in WWI-ravaged France, the story concerns Douglas’s character, Colonel Dax, receiving orders from the general staff to take an impregnable German position. The effort fails, with the deaths of scores of French infantry. French soldiers refuse to renew the attack and are tried by a military court. Dax defends them.