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.)
Born on the Fourth of July (1989)
Remember this guy -- this Tom Cruise? You know, the one who was willing to take chances -- the one willing making himself look less attractive to play paraplegic Vietnam veteran and activist Ron Kovic? Oliver Stone's biopic was one of the last milestones of the life-after-'Nam tales that stretched from the mid-1970s to the mid-1990s -- an era one can only presume is related to the fact that there weren't really any American wars of note during the 1980s. I mean, I guess Clint Eastwood did try to make a movie about the invasion of Grenada (Heartbreak Ridge), which lasted only 52 days. But think about it: If either Gulf War had never happened, would we still be seeing movies about Vietnam and/or World War II?
Forrest Gump
Forrest Gump and Lt. Dan go on a journey of sorts for redemption after Dan lost both legs during battle. A tale of two fates: Forrest -- whom the government uses as propaganda during his worldwide ping-pong tournament tour -- and Lt. Dan, who, after his entire generational line gave their lives for the United States, has been discarded, forced to hire prostitutes as his company on New Year's Eve.
Stop-Loss (2008)
Unlike Vietnam, there's been no draft implemented for the conflict in Iraq. Considering that the United States went to war with a volunteer army, those volunteers are going to be used and reused, often unfairly. Stop-Loss follows the story of a soldier expecting a discharge and, instead, is ordered back to Iraq. Which, compared to the rest of the films on this list, is a situation pretty exclusive to this film -- no one was ever forced to return to the horrors of Vietnam after their service has ended. Since March of 2009, the stop-loss policy has been dramatically reduced as troops have been removed from Iraq.
The Hurt Locker (2008)
There's only a short sequence giving the viewer a glimpse of what mundane life is like for those returning from Iraq, but it says plenty: Sgt. First Class William James (Jeremy Renner) comes home after multiple tours on an Explosive Ordnance Disposal team and can't even cope with the daily rigors of buying cereal. He decides he'd rather take his chances defusing bombs and signs up for another tour. The Hurt Locker would win the Oscar for Best Picture but fare anemically at the box office, which is perhaps emblematic of the commercial appeal of a war still in the headlines: Many of the Vietnam classics we know today were hits. Maybe, as mentioned with Stop-Loss, the draft made those movies more accessible: If you didn't fight in Vietnam, you were sure to know someone who was there. That's not necessarily the case with Iraq or Afghanistan, and we're seeing that divide at the box-office.
Brothers (2009)
While social critics often compare Iraq and Vietnam, the wars' resulting films generally feature one crucial difference: Iraq movies focus more on war's emotional and psychological aftermath as opposed to the physical consequences. Brothers is probably the strongest treatment to date: Capt. Sam Cahill (Tobey Maguire) -- a former prisoner of war presumed dead at one point -- discovers that his brother (Jake Gyllenhaal) has been sleeping with his wife (Natalie Portman). Though the loss of body functions due to war is still a grim reality, Sam's mental anguish -- and its effects on his family -- are front-and-center here.