Coming Home: 10 Essential Movies About the Plight of the American Veteran

Today is Veterans Day, when we honor those Americans who risked their lives for causes that are often too big or too complicated for mere civilians to understand. But there's always the movies, where the veteran returning home has been a longtime standard for processing this country's complex relationship with war.

A good argument can be made that the best war movies depict what happens to veterans after the physical war has stopped but their own internal war continues on. With that in mind, Movieline looks at 10 films in the long history of veteran-themed pictures that have been released since World War II -- an arc that captures sympathy, paranoia, insanity, humor and outrage.

The Best Years of Our Lives (1946)

World War II officially ended on Sept 2, 1945; The Best Years of Our Lives premiered a little over a year later. And while today we're used to films chronicling the tribulations of veterans who have returned home from war (one of those even won Best Picture at this year's Oscar ceremony), this was a rare phenomenon among the sea of propaganda-tinged WWII films common at the time. Real-life veteran Harold Russell -- who lost both hands while making an Army training film -- played Homer Parish, a role that would later earn him an Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor. Best Years, meanwhile, went on to win Best Picture and remains among the most successful box-office hits of all time. Critics today have cooled to William Wyler's film quite a bit, but virtually all acknowledge that this was relatively radical stuff for its time.

The Manchurian Candidate (1962)

The arc of the veteran returning home turned to paranoia in the 1960s. Based on Richard Condon's novel, The Manchurian Candidate emerged at the peak of the Cold War; the hugely controversial release even coincided with the Cuban Missile Crisis in October 1962. Gone was the straightforwardly patriotic treatment of veterans, replaced by the tale of a Korean War hero (Laurence Harvey) brainwashed by the Communists in a plot to assassinate the presidential front-runner. Frank Sinatra played his haunted, devastated comrade-in-arms. A forgettable remake was released in 2004.

Coming Home (1978)

Originally, Jane Fonda wanted to make a film based loosely on her friendship with Vietnam veteran Ron Kovic. (Kovic would get his own story told on-screen 11 years later; more on that to come.) In the end, Fonda played a conservative military housewife who falls in love with Jon Voight's character, a paraplegic veteran, while her husband (Bruce Dern) is in Vietnam. His return sets up possibly one of the most depressing scenes ever filmed. Voight and Fonda would win Oscars, but Coming Home would eventually lose Best Picture to...

The Deer Hunter (1978)

One-third a veteran movie, The Deer Hunter has three concise acts that chronicle the lives of three friends before, during and after the Vietnam War. One winds up relatively well-adjusted, another winds up paralyzed, and the last loses his mind from drug use. Christopher Walken would win an Oscar for Best Supporting Actor. Not really an easy movie to sit though except for those who are currently registered for the Russian Roulette winter leagues.

Airplane! (1980)

While this blockbuster spoof was largely based on the 1957 B-movie Zero Hour!, it also signified a ballsy satirical counterpoint to the presitige war-is-hell films of the late '70s. I have no idea what war Ted Striker was a pilot in, but from his drinking "problem" to his hospital flashback to his hallucination while attempting to emergency-land a commercial airliner full of passengers, the psychosis and pain of combat are never far from his mind. They've never been funnier, either. (Forgive the French video rip; the visuals tell all the story you need about the stakes involved in Striker's attempt at redemption.)

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