User:Cromulent Word/sandbox

'''Anti-War Films ''' The anti-war genre as it is recognized began with films about the First World War. Lewis Milestone's All Quiet on the Western Front (1930) was unquestionably powerful, and an early anti-war film, portraying a German point of view; it was the first film (in any genre) to win two Oscars, best picture and best director. Andrew Kelly, analysing All Quiet on the Western Front, defined the genre as showing: the brutality of war; the amount of human suffering; the betrayal of men's trust by incompetent officers. War and anti-war films often prove difficult to categorize as they contain many generic ambiguities. While many anti-war films criticize war obliquely through depictions of grizzly combat in past wars, some films such as Altman's M.A.S.H. and Penn's Alice's Restaurant criticize war without depicting combat. The number of anti-war films produced in America dipped sharply during the 1950's because of McCarthyism and the Hollywood Blacklist. Robert Eberwein names two films as anti-war classics: Jean Renoir's prisoner of war masterpiece La Grande Illusion (The Grand Illusion, 1937), and Stanley Kubrick's Paths of Glory (1957). The critic David Ehrenstein notes that Paths of Glory established Kubrick as the "leading commercial filmmaker of his generation" and a world-class talent. Ehrenstein describes the film as an "outwardly cool/inwardly passionate protest drama about a disastrous French army maneuver and the courtmartial held in its wake", contrasting it with the "classic" All Quiet on the Western Front's story of an innocent "unstrung by the horrors of war". While anti-war films may seem necessarily aimed at a specific national audience, many receive worldwide regard. Kan Ichikawa's Fires on the Plain (1959), Jean Renoir's "La Grand Illusion", and Kwang-Hyun Park's fanastical "Welcome To Dongmakgol" (2005) are all internationally acclaimed anti-war films.