War adventure movies?
Well, yes.
This is a category that I may be pioneering a bit, but it's relevant to the way our blog deals with movies in history. There can be no doubt that movies portraying an historical event help frame that event in the popular imagination. Indeed, no matter how inaccurate they may be, some movies define what people believe about an historical era or occurrence.
This is true enough for events that actually set out to be a portrayal, in some fashion, in history. So in movies like, for example, A Bridge Too Far, or Lawrence of Arabia, we can expect people to take their historical understandings from film. But such understanding aren't taken just from movies that are intentional portrayals of real historical events. They're also taken from movies set in an era, but for which that era provides some sort of backdrop for some other purpose.
And war has been used as a backdrop for movies in which the war is a vehicle in more than one fashion. Indeed, if we were to expand this out, there are adventure movies, comedies and even romances which use the big drama of war for other purposes. Here, we look at just one category, that being the war adventure film, and we're doing that as movies of that type are so common. And they're particularly common in regard to World War Two.
So what do we mean by a War Adventure Movie. Well, it's a little difficult to define, but what we mean by that is a film which doesn't intent to accurately depict an historical event, but merely uses the historical event as a vehicle for the story telling. Moreover, a film that, in doing that, doesn't attempt to tell us something about war itself.
As war is often a character in a war picture. Saving Private Ryan may be fiction, and it may tell a compelling story, but it's set with a backdrop of real events that are significant to it and war is a character in the film. Likewise, In Harms Way may be complete fiction in its characters, but it too uses war, no matter how badly, as more than a mere vehicle. The same could be said of Pearl Harbor.
These films are different. World War Two is in them, but they aren't really "about" World War Two. They're set in it, of course, but they're set in it to tell an adventure.
Put another way, war is to these movies what the Cold War is to the Eiger Sanction.
None of which keeps people from thinking they're picking up bits of history from them. So let's take a look at them.
In doing that, we'd note that we're not presenting these in a definitively significant order. We sort of are, but sort of are not. So they're presented, sort of, in the order they're related to each other, and kind of in degree of quality. But not strictly.
The Dirty Dozen
The Dirty Dozen may be the best example of this genera in more than one way. This 1967 film, a film adaptation from a well regarded novel, involves a disgruntled and disillusioned U.S. Army Major who has been assigned to train a group of Army prisoners for a commando raid on a French château used as a R&R center by German officers on D-Day. The plot scenario involves obvious adventure, dramatic tension, and drama right from the onset, with conflicts between the prisoners and the whole world and the Major, played by Lee Marvin, a Marine Corps veteran of World War Two, in real life, and the Regular Army. Moreover, the ensemble cast included a host of first rank actors from the time, including Ernest Borgnine (U.S. Navy veteran), Robert Ryan, George Kennedy (U.S. Army veteran), Charles Bronson (U.S. Army veteran), Jim Brown (famous NFL and collegic football player), John Cassavetes, Trini Lopez (folk singer) and Telly Savalas. It was directed by Robert Aldrich who had a large collection of well regarded films to his name.
If you haven't seen it, you should.
So how's it hold up as history.
Well, of course, Operation Overlord really did occur on June 6, 1944, and it did feature some commando actions. The Germans did have some fairly large gatherings of officers in France, and in fact one, which was on the occasion of a large war game, was running on at least June 5/6.
But the Allies didn't try to intentionally take out any larger gatherings of German officers. If they had been inclined to do that, they would have used specialized commandos. All of these organizations were made up of highly trained formations that were made up of volunteers who had been trained for months in their military roles, and often for months for their roles in D-Day. A put together pick up unit. Not so much. Indeed, not at all.
And, while the film is so popular that people occasionally attempt to maintain that it's based on something real, vaguely, it isn't. It's just good fiction. With thousands of men to choose from, the Army wasn't so desperate as to put a vital mission, even a suicide mission, in the hands of felons.
Okay, what about the material details, then?
Oddly, this movie starts off well in this category but then fades later on. Early in the film Major Reisman is shown in uniforms that would be correct for the time, including field uniforms. For example, he wears the M-41 field jacket, which was the common field jacket in June 1944. And the prisoners wear the herringbone tweed cotton uniform that would have been correct for them. At some point, however, everyone switches to the M1943 field jacket and OD trousers. This might be understandable if this was because everyone involved is a paratrooper by implication, and this in fact might be why this was done. While the M1943 field jacket had been designed for paratroopers and had already been adopted, however, on June 6 it wasn't yet being worn by the troops and paratroopers were wearing the M42 uniform.
Movies of the 60s often got these details wrong, of course, and frankly they often didn't bother with them at all, so that's understandable. Less so, however, is the depiction of everyone carrying the M3 submachinegun. The M3 wasn't even in the infantry, including paratroop infantry, TO&E, although a commando unit might be expected to carry some submachineguns. Certainly airborne units unofficially did. They carried Thompsons however, for the most part, in June 1944, when they had them.
This film was made during an era in which the movies loved submachineguns and that probably serves to explain it, and the reason that every German is carrying a MP42. Pretty unrealistic, however.
So there you have it. Good drama, but pretty bad history.
One final thing regarding this film, while it wasn't great history, it was good movie making, and the movie was so well regarded by director Sam Peckingpah that he pretty much tried to hire its cast wholesale for The Wild Bunch. Indeed, Ernest Borgnine, then a little slimmer, and Robert Ryan did made the trip over to Peckinpah's film. He tried to hire Lee Marvin for the Bishop Pike role, but he wasn't available so William Holden was hired instead. Somewhat ironically, Marvin had already played a similar role in 1966's The Professionals, a film which Ryan was also in.
The Dirty Dozen has a pile of sequels. None of them are worth watching.
Let's look at a British one.
The Guns of Navarone
Well, a somewhat British one.
The Guns of Navarone was a huge hit when it was released in 1961, only fifteen years after the end of the war, and it featured a largely British and European cast with Gregory Peck, the American actor, for star appeal, and with Anthony Quinn in his universal role of exotic foreign person. The book is a faithful rendition of Alistair Maclean's novel of the same name.
The plot of this film involves the assembly of something like a SOE squad to go in as commandos and take out coastal artillery guns that have been positioned on the island of Navarone. It's early in the war and a British garrison on a nearby island needs to be evacuated before the Germans land on the island. The guns are a threat to any Royal Navy evacuation. Because they're emplaced in a man made cavern, they can't be bombed from the air, so commandos will have to do it.
Okay, historic accuracy?
Well, the British expedition to Greece, which we recently covered, did feature some major withdrawals from the region, and they were done in a way that later in the war they could not have been. Later, aircraft would have decimated such efforts, but the Germans lacked sufficient air assets in the region to cause that to occur. And the British did occupy some major Mediterranean islands, Crete and Malta among them.
So the setting has some plausibility.
And the British were big on small-time raids by commandos, and indeed had already engaged in them in the general region. And as the SOE in particular was an odd group that seemingly engaged in some assignments on a sort of pick up basis, well that too makes some sense.
So overall, the plausibility of the plot doesn't completely lack merit.
Of course, what does strain things is getting two massive coast guns into a man made tunnel without the British apparently knowing about it in time to prevent, or even on any sort of timely basis. That'a real stretch. It's one the Germans, moreover, would have been pretty unlikely to attempt.
So. . .
Well it is an adventure film. . .
On material details ,this film isn't too bad, all in all, but it does fall into the submachinegun era of World War Two films and it further is a mostly British film. The British in this period paid little attention to accuracy in firearms details and so their own weapons show up a lot in the hands of enemy troops. This film has piles of submachineguns in it, which makes a little sense for the commandos as they are relatively compact, but the Germans carry an inordinate number as well. And sometimes the Germans, in this film, carry British Sten guns, which is just period movie sloppiness.
So, this film does better than we might suspect, and it is an adventure classic. One thing to note is that for the big gun scenes production values have really changed, so its pretty hard to suspect present awareness for some of them.
I should note that I thought about putting this film first in this list, as its arguably the gold standard, in some ways, for these films. It's not a better film than The Dirty Dozen, but its sort of the archtype of the war adventure film.
Force Ten From Navarone
Taking things somewhat out of order, as we've delt with The Guns of Navarone, we might as well take up Force 10 From Navarone next.
First, in doing this, let us note that the "from Navarone" part of this film actually makes little sense whatsoever, as the fictional Greek island has nothing to do with this movie. Rather, the title was an obvious attempt to recall the other film, which Alistair MacClean's 1968 novel did as well, attempting to recall both his earlier book and the success of the 1961 film. There is, however, a tie in, and we'll note it below
Made seventeen years later in 1978, the movie, the film's thesis is an SOE mission to Yugoslavia which reassembles some of the survivors of the mission to Navarone, including its commander, Mallory, the explosives expert, Miller, and oddly Squadron Leader Barnby, an extremely minor role played by Richard Harris in the first film. The hook to the first film is that it contained hints that the mission had been betrayed right from the onset, and this one picks up with that. The betrayer has been identified, and has gone from Navarone to Yugoslavia, where's he's a German agent embedded with the Yugoslavian Communist partisans. Mallory's mission is to go in and get him.
From there the plot develops that the SOE just can't land a conventional mission to do this. It has to have cover. And the cover is that the men are fleeing justice with a stolen aircraft which they take to Yugoslavia.
Okay, the initial plot device is goofy and adds dramatic tension but nothing else in the film. Barnby is recast as an American in this one, with Harrison Ford playing the part, apparently for his star power alone. Carl Weathers is a hapless African American soldier who gets on the plane at the last moment actually believing that it's a party of men who have busted out of detention, as he has. In Yugoslavia, we meet the Chetniks, the party is imprisoned (like it was in Guns of Navarone) by the Germans, and they link up with Yugoslavian partisans.
Okay, how does it rate, history wise.
Well, the British were very involved in the war in Yugoslavia through the SOE. The Yugoslavian partisans were heavily equipped by the Soviets, as this movie, filmed with the cooperation of the Yugoslavian army, shows. There were pro German Chentnik parties. The partisan war in Yugoslavia was fairly large scale.
So, like the Guns of Navarone, the historical background is there.
On material details, this film does much better than the Guns of Navarone. British uniforms are correct. Ameican uniforms are more or less correct, with some British additions. The German and Chetnik uniforms and equipment are correct, in no small part thanks to the Yugoslavian army, although old T-34 tanks stand in for German armor.
What doesn't really hold up, however, is the movie itself. It just isn't all that good.
Part of that is that it suffers from being an obvious sequel, and most sequels aren't all that good. Beyond that, the movie is surprisingly slow, and the plot is really strained. Obvious efforts to throw in current stars, such as Harrison Ford, and also Barbara Bach for window dressing, fail. Robert Shaw, in his last role (he died prior to the movie being released) gave an excellent performance, as did British character actor Edward Fox, but its not enough to make the film worth watching.
Which it isn't.
Where Eagles Dare
Crest of the German 6th SS Mountain Division Nord.
Having looked at two joint British American works based on novels by Alistair MacLean, let's look at a third, Where Eagles Dare.Where Eagles Dare is a 1968 film based on MacLean's 1966 novel. This gives us an interesting look at how entertainment of the era worked, in that this film was well received and is now regarded as a classic and, by some, one of the best films of all time. It's interesting to note that in the context of the film being released in the annus horriblus 1968, right at the height of the Vietnam War. Based on what we know and popularly recall of the times, we'd not expect this film to have come out in that year, let alone be a hit, but it did, and it was.
This film can probably be regarded as the pinnacle of MacLean's war adventure stories, which doesn't mean that it's the best of the genre. Rather, this film is heavy on the action, while still rooted in the war. The plot, which is extremely complicated, involves a British commando team, led by a British Major John Smith who is a Grenadier Guard. It's a pick up team, not one that has preexisted. It has one American member, which may have been the screenwriters way of assuring interest for an American audience (I haven't read the book), Lt. Shaffer. Major Smith is played by British screen titan Richard Burton, who was at the height of his star power at the time and who was playing a character well outside his wheelhouse. Schaffer was played by rising star Clint Eastwood.
The commando team must parachute into the Alps in order to rescue an American general who, we're told, knows the details of Operation Overlord, although as the story develops, that's not the real purpose of the mission. This is so that they may make their way down into a neighboring town in order to secure access to a towering castle just outside it. Further, they parachute in wearing the uniforms of SS Gebirgsjäger, mountain infantry, and we're informed that the castle is the headquarters for the "SS Mountain Corps".
Frankly, from this point on, the plot is just too complicated to detail, but the winter scenery is spectacular, and the action faced pace. The screenplay manages to work in a really scary tramway twice, a castle, a spectacular Alpine flight of a Fokker Ju 52 transport, and Ingrid Pitt as window dressing in her seemingly only one serious role.
It is, quite frankly, a great adventure film.
How's it hold history wise?
Well . . .
Okay, lets start with what it gets right, where we can. We know, of course, that Germany includes Alpine regions and of course the setting, Europe prior to Operation Overlord, takes place in an actual period of World War Two. The Waffen SS did have mountain troops as the Waffen SS, as the war progressed, came to have mirror image formations of everything the regular German army did.
So far so good, right?
From there, things decline. For one thing, the distinction between the German army and the SS in this film is really vague. We know that most of the regular soldiers are in the SS, as we've been told that early on. This doesn't seem necessary for the film, however, and the two senior officers seem to be in different services, one in the SS and the other in the army. They're both aligned against a third character, SS Sturmbannführer Von Hapen who is in the regular, i.e., not the Waffen, SS, as we can tell from his all black uniform. Why he's there isn't clear, and why the senior military figure from the Waffen SS would be at odds with another member of the SS isn't explained either.
All of those, perhaps, are minor details that can be excused in the name of adventure.
Well, how about material details?
The movie suffers from the everyone carrying a submachinegun thing so common to this era. That makes more sense, however, than the introduction of a helicopter to the film. The Germans did actually order and deploy a handful of helicopters during the war, so perhaps that can be excused, but they were ungainly things that wouldn't have carried a passenger to the top of a mountain castle.
A bigger problem, aviation wise, is that the Ju 52 didn't have the sort of range that would be necessary for the mission depicted. . . even one way. There's no way a Ju 52 could fly from the UK to an Alpine region of Germany and back.
But, taking it all in, as noted, this film's purpose is adventure, not history. So you have to excuse a lot of liberties taken with this one. Fortunately, the adventure aspect of the film, including some with really high suspense, are well done and so its pretty easy even for the history conscious to enjoy the film.
The Eagle Has Landed
Going from one "eagle film" to another, we'll next take up the 1976 film The Eagle Has Landed, which was based on Jack Higgins' well done novel of the same name.
Given the name, a person might think that this film was a sequel to Where Eagles Dare, but in fact it has no connection with it other than that it involves people parachuting and German uniforms. In this case, however, the subjects are actually German paratroopers.
Indeed, that fact makes this the most unusual of these films as its the only one in which hte protagonists are mostly German. There are very few English language films featuring German soldiers or airmen as the central characters, let alone sympathetically, and for good reason. So this film is a real exception to the rule.
The plot here involves a German colonel who is in the Abwehr, German intelligence. Admiral Wilhelm Canaris, who remains enigmatic to this day, comes back from a meeting with Hitler in which he informs Col. Radl, the subordinate, that Hitler has ordered a feasibility study be done on kidnapping Winston Churchill. Canaris considers the concept insane, but he orders that it be done, but be done with bare minimum effort, as he also knows that SS leader Heinrich Himmler will follow up on it.
Radl, played by Robert Duvall, sets about his work and soon learns, as he's doing it, that an odd set of highly temporary coincidences actually might make the plan feasible. He submits his report in that fashion, which in fact gets it the attention of Canaris in a negative fashion. It's soon revealed, however, that his office is bugged or contains a plant, as Himmler knows of the plan nearly immediately, calls Radl to Berlin, and orders the plan carried out, supposedly under Hitler's orders.
The plan itself involves parachuting a group of German paratroopers into England near a coastal town which is a Catholic remnant village. Some days prior a member of the Irish Republican Army must make his way to the same town in order to arrange for things. His contact is a woman living in the town, seemingly part of it, but in actuality a long displaced Boer whose family suffered due to the results of the Boer War. Churchill is set to visit the town.
The paratroopers themselves are serving in a penal unit assigned to the extremely small German vessels that launched single torpedoes. Such vessels, often mistakenly regarded as human torpedoes, did in fact exist in 1943, the year the movie was set in, and the Germans in fact used them. The unit operates from one of the Channel Islands, and the Germans did in fact occupy some of the channel islands. The unit has been assigned this duty as their commander, Col. Kurt Steiner, attempted to rescue a Jewish girl at a railroad station, which led to a confrontation with the SS.
The men, in the reverse of Where Eagles Dare, parachute in wearing British uniforms but marked with Polish insignia, posing as Polish paratroopers serving in the UK.
Pretty complicated plot. And it gets more so. It turns out that a unit of American Rangers is stationed nearby.
Well, how does it hold up, history wise?
In 1943 there were Polish forces in the UK that were serving with the Allies. About this time, the first Rangers of the U.S. Army did start training in the UK. Unlike Where Eagles Dare, the airborne mission using a captured C-47 would have been an easy flight. The Irish Republican Army actually did cooperate with the Abwehr until 1944, when it terminated its cooperation as it became obvious that the Allies were going to win the war.
So far, so good?
Well, there are certainly some holes as well. For one thing, the village being Catholic, which isn't really necessary to either the movie's plot or the books, would be extremely unlikely. There were large numbers of Catholics in the UK by 1943, but they still remained a distinct minority, and there were next to no villages that had managed to retain being wholly Catholic since the Elizabethan Religious Settlement. Individual Catholics and Catholic families certainly persevered the entire time, but entire villages, with a few notable exceptions, not so much. Perhaps that's why that is a bigger element of the book as compared to the movie.
Churchill, it might be noted, didn't have a body double, which is an essential element of the plot, but it's also an excusable one.
More inexcusable, German paratroopers really can't be denazified. They were part of the Luftwaffe, of course, and while there were members of the German army who transferred into them, they were also recruited out of Goering's police forces as well, so they had more than a few real Nazis early on. Perhaps their officers might have been more or less equivalent in views to officers of the German army, but that wasn't exactly a benign view by and large and the "good German army" myth is just that, a post-war myth boosted by former German officers to excuse their conduct. German paratroopers, moreover, were complicit in atrocities in Crete, so long-serving ones, as these were supposed to have been, were unlikely to have fought a morally unobjectionable war.
The portrayal of American Rangers as more or less regular infantry, and incompetently led, is very far off the mark. Rangers were commandos from the onset and always extremely skilled.
Indeed, it's on that point where the movie really breaks down. Most of the departures from one thing or another can be excused or ignored up to this point, although the good German soldier thing is hard to accept, but Rangers as green incompetents is way off the mark. And here we can start our discussion of material details as well.
The Rangers in this film are almost all equipped with M2 Carbines. This is another film that's in the submachinegun era, and the M2, which is rarely seen in film at all, is almost a submchaine gun. It wasn't really a World War Two weapon, however, having been introduced at the very tail end of the war. Indeed, it was introduced so late that whether it saw any action at all during the war is debated as a point of military minutia. In 1943 Rangers would have mostly carried M1 Garands, although it is known that some were training with M1917 Enfields.
They also wouldn't have had an armored car, which was almost exclusively a cavalry vehicle in the American army.
On the paratroopers, we have less to complain about in terms of material details. As noted, they're all equipped with submachineguns, but that's the standard for this movie era, and it makes more sense, if not complete sense, in the case of paratroopers. Most British and British equipped paratroopers would hvae carried rifles.
So am I giving this one a thumbs down? No, not really. It's entertaining and good enough to be watched. It's quite good early on and doesn't really start to suffer until the Rangers enter the picture, by which time most of the film has been watched. It's worth viewing.
Kelly's Heroes
Kelly's Heroes is an unusual film here, as it's the only one I've reviewed before. I dealt with in our entry on the War Movies of 1970. What I stated about it is here:
Kelly's Heroes is the exception in this list for a lot of reasons, a significant one being is that it's sort of freakishly accurate in material details for a movie of its era, as noted above. In this area, the film really stands apart from almost every war film of this era.
This movie involves a plot in which a wrongly demoted former officer, Kelly, learns from a POW of a German cache of gold in a French village. While never really explained, it's pretty clear that he's part of an anti tank section and its equipment is correctly portrayed for this period, including a half-track mounted anti tank gun. Having learned of this information while interrogating the officer POW, he forms a plan to sneak through the lines and hit the bank in the village before the advancing allies get there. He enlists first the aid of his section, then picks up a small group of M4 Sherman tanks led by the aforementioned Oddball, and the plot grows from there. Ultimately, the result is a true advance in the lines, while a spastic General, played by Carroll O'Connor, tries to catch up with the men of his command who are seemingly engaging in an independent advance.
This is, as noted, an adventure movie, so we wouldn't really expect many of the details, both historical and material, to be accurately portrayed. But they actually are.
On history and the movie, this film is set in the rapid advance stage of the war in France and rapid advancement is depicted in this film nearly as well as it is in the movie Patton, save for the fact that the material details of this film are much better. Combat scenes are fairly realistic, including scenes with armor.
In material details, this movie really shines, which has made it sort of an obsessed over classic in the military history community. Almost every item depicted in the film is depicted correctly. American vehicles, including armor, are correct. German armor appears correct, the moviemakers having retrofitted Yugoslavian T-34s to appear like German Tiger tanks. The small arms depicted in the film are largely correct. Submachineguns appear again, but not to the exclusion of other arms, and submachineguns would actually be correct for the type of unit that's portrayed. This film shows the correct use of the M1919 machinegun as well as a Browning Automatic Rifle. Uniforms are also largely correct.
Indeed, things are so accurate that it's the small inaccuracies, some intentionally inserted in the film, that stand out. The Oddball character wears an A2 flight jacket, which a tanker would not, but then a tanker wouldn't have had a beard or fairly long hair either. Given his role in the film, however, the departure makes sense.
The BAR depicted in one scene is an FN made variant with a pistol grip. That's incorrect for the U.S. Army, but you have to be paying very close attention to notice it. Kelly wears black postwar combat boots, which are not correct for the period depicted, but that's difficult to notice in a film in which the uniforms are otherwise very correct.
About the only real noticeable oddity is that one of the soldiers carries a Mosin Nagant sniper rifle, which makes no sense at all. The movie makers seemingly wanted this individual to carry a captured rifle and may simply not have had access to a German rifle, but its very difficult to rationalize if you know what it is.
Otherwise, the film is surprisingly accurate in every detail, something we wouldn't expect from a film of this type. As note, that's why this film is well liked by the World War Two history community, and its well worth watching.
Inglourious Basterds
Every movie in this list, up until the last one, has been either a British production, or a British American one. And up until this one, the most recent of them was made in 1976. Inglourious Basterds was made in 2009, some thirty years later. Both of those facts may be worth noting.
This film is awful.
As in, really bad.
Because this is a Quentin Tarantino movie, it has a following. That is, as far as I can tell, the only reason that anyone has ever watched it.
This film is basically Tarantino coming to the World War Two adventure film in the same manner that he came to the Western. A Tarantino film, at least after Pulp Fiction, tends to be a caricature of itself, and this film is no exception. It has the Tarantino hallmarks of extreme violence and weirdness, which is what Tarantino has become known for.
The basic plot of this movie is that a group of American commandos, made up of Jewish soldiers, is assigned, after a lot of pre event weirdness, to assassinate Hitler at a movie theater in Paris. The details leading up to this are weird and strained and not worth going into. Think apartment shoot 'em up in Pulp Fiction. Hitler is killed, giving us a different ending to the war.
History? Well the Nazis were really bad. Commando unit of all Jewish soldiers? Well the British, who really were the champs on commando units and special operatives, did have a group of Jewish special operatives. So there's something, albeit very little, to the plot.
On material details, by 2009 there's really little excuse for major material detail errors, and this one, given the oddity of the plot, doesn't really have any.
It's just a really bad movie.
Don't bother.
Some final thoughts.
World War Two was almost the dawn of the special troop unit, so perhaps it's not too surprising that it gave us the military adventure movie. There are some pre-WWII examples of very special units, but they're relatively rare. Quite a few of them are subjects of movies, it might be noted.
But commandos are really a British invention, and the war was uniquely suited to them. By the wars end the British had at least four special operation groups of a military or quasi military nature, all of which conducted special missions. The US followed suit with the Rangers and the Marine Corps Raiders.
The Second World War was a huge war, and that meant, by extension, that it gave rise and license to any number of wild military projects, sometimes by wild men. Naturally, that reflected itself in film, and probably naturally, it reflected itself first in British literature and film first. The British originated the special group, during the period during which they were on the desperate defensive, making a virtue out of necessity.
Oddly, perhaps because of their British origin, none of these films involves the war in the Pacific.
Such units carried on after the war, of course, and therefore, perhaps also not surprisingly, the military adventure movie and book also finds expression in wars after World War Two, but nowhere to the same extent. And notably, the heyday of these movies, in so far as the Second World War is concerned, lingered into the 70s, but it was really wrapping up by 1970s. We really only have three post 1970 examples, and they're all a little problematic. Only one, The Eagle Has Landed, is worth watching. And very notably, the last one, filmed in 2009, is total junk.
This genre may have ended. Or not. Any time a film genre is declared over, something comes along. But nothing has come along worth watching in over forty years now.
Which leaves you with the better examples of these films, which in fact remain nearly as good as they ever were.
