Why Today’s Boys Could Use An Old-Fashioned War Movie

I recently re-watched the World War II film A Bridge Too Far.  It is the story of the largest airborne operation in history.  Although it was a serious defeat for the Allies, it did provide the material for Cornelius Ryan’s splendid book which director Richard Attenborough made into the epic war film of the same name in 1977. The movie featured an all-star cast that included Robert Redford, Sean Connery, Ryan O’Neal, Gene Hackman, Michael Caine, Anthony Hopkins, Maximilian Schell, James Caan, Elliot Gould and Lawrence Olivier, among others.

In the pantheon of great war movies, Attenborough’s ambitious three-hour epic is often overlooked. Yet, the sweeping cinematography and attention to historical detail make for some of the most realistic and well-crafted combat scenes you will find. But I think this film is special for another reason. It is an homage to distinctly male values much dissipated today: duty, honor, camaraderie, chivalry, and testicular grit rarely exhibited by men depicted in today’s Hollywood…wherein it seems the pasty-faced overly-sensitive coastal metrosexual vampire or the buff but caricatured superhero is what passes for manhood these days.

To say they don’t make ’em like they used to is cliché. But even some clichés are born from valid observation.

I Googled “50 Best Guy Movies” and for one list plucked at random, which ranges from The Searchers to The Bridge On The River Kwai, Dirty Harry, Cool Hand Luke, to The Dirty Dozen, the average year of production is 1976. Where have all the men gone? United Talent agent Louise Ward offers an explanation of sorts: “I believe there’s been a certain feminization of the American male. As a result, there are a lot of ‘mama’s boys.’ …That kind of nurturing softens what we’re used to seeing on the screen.”

Ms. Ward is partially right. Indeed, there are a lot of “mama’s boys” in this country. But I wish it was just in the pampered manner to which she refers. The real concern is there are a diminishing number of “papa’s boys” out there. 40% of kids in the United States, from the first grade to their senior year of high school, do not have a father at home. As such, any boys this entails lack fathers to instill in their sons proper values. It seems like more and more often when we see young boys today, it is usually on a police bodycam video brandishing a gun or knife, being shot for their efforts, and then eulogized as martyrs of police brutality, rather than the tragic byproduct of the collapse of the nuclear family.

In a refreshingly blunt interview a while back, Denzel Washington presented a stark assessment of the crisis of fatherless boys in ever greater numbers roaming our streets.  After relaying the story of an eleven-year-old Chicago boy who was already in a gang before being murdered by a fourteen-year-old, Washington said: “You blame ‘the system?’  Where was his father? It starts in the house. It starts in the home. ‘Yeah, well my father got locked up.’ Well where was his father?” In a personal reflection he then credited his not going down the wrong path — as did two of his childhood friends — with his having a relationship with his father while they did not. “Where’s the father?” is the most pressing sociological question of our time. And yet we are not allowed to discuss this obvious truth. But talk about it or not, the truth will be heard. It is heard every time a thirteen-year-old Adam Toledo is out on the Chicago streets at 2:30 A.M. brandishing a gun and inevitably dies by the sword of his choosing. Where was his father? That should be the first question we ask.

My own father died two days after I turned sixteen. That was 37 years ago, and there is not a day that goes by when I do not think of him. I often tell people that I feel like I stumbled blindly into my adult years, “under-cooked” so to speak. That was due to the hole in my life that only a stern male role model (in my case a combat veteran Marine) could fill. My mother did a terrific job, and she was my hero in this regard. But I wonder how many mistakes I have made in my life that I would have avoided just by virtue of my dad’s guidance and counsel, not to mention a well-deserved smack to the back of the head. The simple fact is, as any objective sociological study will reveal, a fatherless boy, no matter his race, is at risk in all aspects of life — be it incarceration, drug use, failing in school, emotional and social dysfunction, depression, violence, or overall poverty. Because no one is there in his formative years to keep him on the right path, and instill in him what it means to be an honorable man.

It has been said that politics is downstream of culture. And in the USA, culture for generations was most reflected in, and influenced by, Hollywood. And once upon a time, in films like A Bridge Too Far, what values and behaviors did Hollywood still feel comfortable celebrating?

In my favorite scene, we see a classic demonstration of old school bravado when the tough-as-nails Col. John Frost (Hopkins) is called to the roof of his bombed out HQ by the umbrella-wielding Maj. Carlyle (Christopher Good). Stepping over the rubble, a German soldier (Lex van Delden) approaches the surrounded band of exhausted and ultimately doomed British 2nd parachute battalion troops bearing a white flag of parlay.

German: “My General says there is no point in continuing this fighting. He is willing to discuss a surrender.”

Frost (to Carlyle): “Tell him to go to hell.”

Carlyle (shouting down to the German): “We haven’t the proper facilities to take you all prisoner! Sorry!”

German: “What?!”

Carlyle: “We’d like to.  But we can’t accept your surrender. [Pause] Was there anything else?”

Ballsy stuff there. The Waffen-SS, not known for being softies on a battlefield, were so impressed by their gallant British foes that they permitted cease-fires for tending to the wounded.

When the Arnhem bridgehead is finally liquidated, in the film we see SS-Obergruppenführer Wilhelm Bittrich (Schell) offer a gesture of kindness and respect to the wounded Frost, who is now his prisoner; he salutes him with clicking heels, and offers his brave captive a bar of chocolate.

Attenborough’s classic aptly demonstrates the respect among soldiers that only men of a more masculine age can understand. Though not depicted in the film, during the actual battle, an SS squad leader Alfred Ringsdorf took stock of his British opponents when reporting to his commander the delay in liquidating the stubborn Tommies still holding one end of the Arnhem bridge:  “Believe me these are real men!” he said.  “They won’t give up that bridge until we carry them out feet first.”

I mention A Bridge Too Far in today’s context as it is filled with such real men who did extraordinary real man things that would defy a modern soft-handed latte-sipping self-identified cisgender male’s imagination! One of the most intense American scenes is the 82nd Airborne’s Maj. Julian Cook (Redford) leading his band of paratroopers in collapsible canvas boats rowing across the Waal River under murderous German artillery and machine gun fire to successfully assault the Nijmegen Bridge. When the boats first arrive, the men, including Cook, are visibly shaken by their flimsiness. But he suppresses his fears and shouts, “What’d you expect? Destroyers? Come on, put it together!” Cook’s unit took over 50% casualties in this mini D-Day.

The men who fought our wars over the centuries are not superheroes. They would be the first to tell you this. Eugene Sledge, a Marine veteran, would remember candidly that what concerned him most as his landing craft headed for the boiling cauldron of the Peleliu beaches in 1944 were two things: one was “would you measure up in the eyes of your buddies” and the other was “I was afraid I was going to wet my pants.” But he went in anyway and would fight bravely throughout the Palau and Okinawa campaigns. Once the shooting starts any notion of fighting  for “King and country” as the old saying goes dies away. Men through the crucible of facing challenges together form a bond and ultimately fight for each other. One thinks of Henry V’s famous speech before Agincourt:

We would not die in that man’s company
That fears his fellowship to die with us…
We few, we happy few, we band of brothers;
For he today that sheds his blood with me
Shall be my brother; be he ne’er so vile,
This day shall gentle his condition;

In yet another famous reflection, from another war on another continent in another century, an American Civil War soldier in a letter to his wife lamented that should he die in battle he would not “see our boys grow up to honorable manhood” in his absence. (He was killed at First Bull Run).

We currently live in a culture in which that sublime phrase “honorable manhood” is often dissuaded, even ridiculed, by our cultural powers that be, only to be replaced by snarky admonitions against “toxic masculinity.” And we are seeing this mindset seeping into film. Alas, says The Dark Knight Rises casting director John Papsidera: “The ugly truth is that American leading men just aren’t terribly manly anymore.”

Not so the men in A Bridge Too Far. My son, who was barely ten when he first watched Attenborough’s magnum opus, was fascinated by this movie. My theory is that when he saw how these soldiers comport themselves with stoic valor that belies their genuine fears it tapped into his still developing, innate manhood; something primordial in him triggered a connection with alpha males like Col. Frost, the taciturn Gen. Gavin (O’Neal) the rock steady British Gen. Roy Urquhart (Connery), the no-nonsense cigar-chomping Col. Stout (Gould) and the fiercely determined Sgt. Dohun (Caan) – that last of whom risks court-martial to honor a promise to keep his severely wounded lieutenant alive.

I’m not saying there are no real men left in any war films. Black Hawk Down, Saving Private Ryan, Hacksaw Ridge and the new Midway do their parts. As did the fine HBO series Band of Brothers and its underappreciated companion piece The Pacific (in which Eugene Sledge’s experiences on Peleliu and Okinawa, and his post-war battle with PTSD,  was a storyline). Perhaps truth is braver than fiction. Whatever the case, I fear that a generation of boys is growing up with a terribly destructive void in their lives. Nature abhors a vacuum, and absent a real dad to keep a boy in his lane, a faux paternal substitute — gangs, drugs, crime, video games, the darker side of our culture — will step in to fill the gap. We are seeing that impact now.

Bona fide manliness is under assault from two flanks. The feminization on one side, (see: Drag Queen Story Hour) and the brutalization on the other (see: Chicago on a typical weekend). The former makes us vulnerable to threats from without, the latter from within. Neither bodes well for the country. As such, this generation of young American boys, lost and all-to-often fatherless, could use a dose of such undiluted old-fashioned machismo tempered in decency and character as displayed in films like A Bridge Too Far. If anything, to convey to them just what those two things below their belts really stand for. The way an engaged father might. Especially in an overly sensitive age in which genuine real men are needed to navigate an ever more threatening and chaotic world, on the screen and off.

Brad Schaeffer is a commodities trader and writer whose articles have appeared in The Wall Street Journal, New York Daily News, National Review, Celeb Magazine, Zerohedge, Frumforum, and other news outlets.  He is the author of the acclaimed World War II novel Of Another Time And Place.

The views expressed in this piece are the author’s own and do not necessarily represent those of The Daily Wire.

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