Tampa Film Fan

movie memories monday:veterans day edition

What war movies or war-related movies are your favorites and why? The first film that springs to mind for me is The Best Years of Our Lives.

The Best Years of Our Lives (1946) is the story of three men returning home after World War II and their struggles to return to civilian life. The Frederic March character is a successful banker who discovers upon his return that his children are well on their way to becoming adults, his wife is more self-sufficient than ever before, and his previous loyalty to his bank position is weakened due to his new-found loyalty to other veterans.

After serving as an officer in the Air Force, the Dana Andrews character returns home to a dead-end, low-paying job as a soda jerk. His whirlwind romance and hasty marriage before the war has left him with a selfish wife uninterested in him or in really being married at all.

The character played by Harold Russell (not an actor, but a disabled veteran who did a marvelous job in this role and won an honorary Oscar and the Best Supporting Actor Oscar for this role) reluctantly returns home to his family and fiancee terrified of what they will think of him now that he has prosthetics instead of hands due to a shipboard fire.

This is a beautiful film with a great cast and director that’s sad and thought-provoking, but also uplifting and hopeful. It acknowledges the sacrifices that veterans and their families make, sacrifices that continue long past the end of the war.

My other personal faves in this category include Saving Private Ryan, We Were Soldiers, Joyeaux Noel and Das Boot. Comedy favorites include No Time For Sergeants, Operation Petticoat and Mister Roberts.

What are your favorite war or war-related movies?

movie memories monday:movies that scared me to death

What movies scared you to death, creeped you out or scarred you for life?

For me, three movies come to mind:

The Dead Don’t Die – My grandmother let me watch this movie with her when I was five years old.  (She’d say “Whatcha gettin’ scared for? It’s not real. It’s just a movie!”)  I only remember a couple of scenes, but I vividly remember being afraid to go to bed that night.

Poltergeist — I think I was 12 when I saw this movie.  It just so happened that my parents were having a pool put in our backyard at the same time…and they were at the digging stage.  I just knew that our neighborhood was built on an Indian burial ground and that my sister and I would find skeletons in that big hole in our backyard.  And if it rained?  We’d end up just like JoBeth Williams in Poltergeist, swimming around with the skeletons. (But of course, our pool was just a pool and there were no skeletons to be found.)

Texas Chainsaw Massacre — I saw this movie when I was 17 and I still haven’t recovered.  Oh.  My.  Gosh.  Such brutality, such horror, such violence.  The meat hook thing was too much for me.  I can only remember bits and pieces of the movie now (I think my mind has repressed most of it to protect my sanity) and I have never been able to bring myself to watch it again.

So what movies scared you to death, creeped you out or scarred you for life (or all of the above)? Post a comment and share your movie memories.