CAIRO – Vietnam War films - ‘The Plethora of Popular War Novels' (iv) –Another large group of films emerged from the plethora of popular war novels penned after the war. Their quality was largely dependent on their faithfulness to the plot or theme of the original, casting, direction, and production values. Much of their appeal for the American public was that they covered virtually every branch of the service involved in the war. These include: The Young Lions (1958), The Naked and the Dead (1958), Battle Cry (1955), Run Silent, Run Deep (1958), Captain Newman, M.D. (1963), The Caine Mutiny (1954), Away All Boats (1956), From Here to Eternity (1953), Kings Go Forth (1958), Never So Few (1959), The Mountain Road (1960), and In Harm's Way (1965). A popular sub-genre war films in the 1950s and '60s was the prisoner of war film. This was a form popularised in Britain and recounted stories of real escapes from (usually German) P.O.W. camps in World War II. Examples include The Wooden Horse (1950), Albert R.N. (1953) and The Colditz Story (1955). Hollywood also made its own contribution to the genre with The Great Escape (1963) and the fictional Stalag 17 (1953). Other fictional P.O.W. films include The Captive Heart (1947), Bridge on the River Kwai (1957), King Rat (1965), Danger Within (1958), The Secret War of Harry Frigg (1968). Unusually, the British industry also produced a film based on German escaper Franz von Werra, The One That Got Away in (1957). By the early 1960s films based on commando missions like The Gift Horse (1952) based on the St. Nazaire Raid, and Ill Met by Moonlight (1956) had begun to inspire fictional adventure films such as The Guns of Navarone (1961), The Train (1964), The Dirty Dozen (1967) and Where Eagles Dare (1968), which used the war as the backdrop for spectacular action films. The latter films had American producers, stars and financing but were filmed in England or on location with British film crews, supporting actors, and expertise. The late 1950s and 1960s also brought some more thoughtful big war films like Andrei Tarkovsky's Ivan's Childhood (1962), David Lean's Bridge on the River Kwai (1957), and Lawrence of Arabia (1962) as well as a fashion for all-star epics based on battles which were often quasi-documentary in style and filmed in Europe where extras and production costs were cheaper. This trend was started by Darryl F. Zanuck's production The Longest Day in (1962), based on the first day of the 1944 D-Day landings. Other examples included Battle of the Bulge (1965), Anzio (1968), Battle of Britain (1969), The Battle of Neretva (1969), Waterloo (1970), Tora! Tora! Tora! (1970) (based on the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor), Midway (1976) and A Bridge Too Far (1977). In Japan, war films from the Japanese perspective were popular, such as Japan's Longest Day, Submarine I-57 Will Not Surrender (1959) and Battle of Okinawa (1971). The war was not all about the prowess of the outfit shown in a film, the comedy genre used as well the war time as a background like in La Grande Vadrouille (1966) and Kelly's Heroes (1970).
