Patriotism is a funny thing. We’re not knocking it, but overwhelming dedication to the country you just happen to have been born in comes with its own bullshit meter, an outwardly visible graph that shows when you’re going overboard with national pride or merely emphasizing the finer qualities of your particular society. The original Captain America: The First Avenger was a nostalgic trip back to a time when The Greatest Generation fought a war that just about everyone could agree was just, and placed their hopes in a hero who symbolized his country to such a heightened degree that he wore the whole damned flag on his uniform.
But the sequel, Captain America: The Winter Soldier, embraces a different kind of patriotism, one that celebrates the ideals of a nation while taking it to task for losing its way. It’s a bold statement for a blockbuster to make, a direct challenge to the audience’s ideals, and a strong representation of the various forms nationalism can take at the multiplex. With this kind of gamut, run by many filmmakers over the history of the medium, preoccupying our minds this week, Best Movie Ever decided to ask the CraveOnline film critics – William Bibbiani, Witney Seibold, Fred Topel and Brian Formo – to single out which film really is The Best Patriotic Movie Ever.
Read their arguments for why they picked the films they picked, then vote for yourself below. What film fills you with national pride?
Witney Seibold:
Movie patriotism – perhaps unfortunately – often goes hand-in-hand with combat. What more dramatic way to depict one’s love of country than by showing young men dying heroically to defend it? And while great war films can be exhilarating, I’m having trouble thinking of a few that boldly sell any one country as an ideal place, with war being the height of said nation’s achievements. A good patriotic film, then, needs to have a powerful undercurrent of positivity and optimism; a faith that the system works, and that the nation in question (whatever it is) is capable of producing truth, justice, liberty, etc. And, more than that, the film needs to capture the nation’s character – what Hegel called the zeitgeist – and display it as stirring and unique.
While I’m sorely tempted to pick Krzysztof Kieślowski’s excellent Three Colors trilogy here, just so I can skew arty (and seriously, Blue, White, and Red are exemplars of national character), I have to – in my heart of American hearts – admit that Frank Capra’s 1939 film Mr. Smith Goes to Washington is the correct answer. No film is more positive about corny American ideals than Mr. Smith. It’s about how the system attracts graft, but, more importantly, how the honesty and intelligence written into those great old yellowed documents in the 1770s will always have out in the end, producing peace and honesty and a good government. Mr. Smith does skew very sentimental, but with Capra, you forgive him because it works so well and feels so genuine. Jimmy Stewart is the world’s ultimate Boy Scout.
William Bibbiani:
Fucking Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, that brilliant piece of Americana, really is the only choice here. Pissin’ me off. Young Mr. Lincoln deserves more credit. We still can’t say enough about Yankee Doodle Dandy. Team America: World Police still has its finger on the pros and cons of contemporary American foreign policy and Air Force One speaks volumes about how we want our presidents behave (as opposed to how they really should). But Frank Capra nailed the whole genre way back in 1939, meaning my choice – accurate though it may be – has been decided for me, decades before I was even born. God damn it.
Wholesome James Stewart winds up a U.S. Senator after a literal coin toss (made even more random, it landed on its side), bucking the entire political campaign system that typically leads to corruption in the first place. His gee whiz patriotism is infectious but makes him an easy patsy for the crooked Senator Joseph Paine (Claude Rains), who reels Smith into a potential scandal and leaves him drifting in the wind when the scheme is uncovered. It’s a little astounding that back in 1939, Capra – hit machine though he may have been – was allowed to portray the contemporary American political climate as being this rife with criminality. But the contrast between realistic governmental malfeasance and the dream of a more perfect union makes the film’s inevitable victory that much harder to earn, and infinitely more satisfying to watch. It’s easy to say that your country is great. It’s more meaningful to say that it’s great in spite of itself.
Mr. Smith Goes to Washington made James Stewart a star but Claude Rains is the actor to watch here, personifying apathy and greed and Machiavellian machinations but succumbing in the end to a damn near nervous breakdown when confronted with the very ideals he dedicated his life to subverting. Capra’s film would have been a perfectly enjoyable drama if the title character merely made his point at the end, but the fact that the embodiment of true villainy is forced to look inward and actually question themselves in the face of their polar opposite makes the hero’s journey worth saluting.
Steven Spielberg’s Lincoln was pretty good too by the way.
Brian Formo:
Patriotism is difficult. It goes hand in hand with nationalism and superiority. It easily shifts to a statue business, or halftime show. I know that there are lots of noble soldiers – past, present and future – but nationalism breeds a type of hero worship that is essentially identified not by deeds, but by uniform. It’s great to love one’s country, but the best way to show that is to ask questions.
“I’ve been a hero for 25 years, no one ever asked me what I did,” says Sergeant Heppelfinger (William Demarest) in Preston Sturges’ 1944, wartime satire Hail the Conquering Hero.
I’ve chosen Sturges’ film for the best film about American patriotism, not just because it ridicules blank patriotism (and numerous other ‘isms), but because – like all good satire – it isn’t mean spirited. Sturges says, hey, before you make a statue in a park “for birds to sit on” why not ask some questions first? That’s the process to find real heroic qualities.
In Hail the Conquering Hero the heroically named Woodrow Lafayette Pershing Truesmith (Eddie Bracken) buys a round of drinks for some marines after the maître d’ scoffs at their request for free drinks because they have uniforms, and a tooth in Heppelfinger’s pocket he says belongs to a Japanese general. Truesmith’s father was a highly decorated marine, who died before he was born. He’s heard of his heroism and has gone hometown AWOL because he’s ashamed of getting a health discharge. The marines, now drinking buddies, give him a medal and tell him to go home a hero. The town throws a parade, erects a statue of him and throws him into the race for mayor – hoping that a “hero” can snap the townsfolk out of their selfish behavior.
In 1944 Conquering Hero was closely watched by the Hollywood Production Code, but in watching the film now it’s quite amazing how far Sturges took it (a cash register ka-chings after discussion of soldiers returning home; a councilman flip flops on the importance of civilians during war) but perhaps that’s because Sturges doesn’t just de-pant, point and laugh – he also helps you pick out a new outfit.
Fred Topel:
When I was a kid, I was already a Stallone fan, but I was not quite sophisticated enough to realize what Rambo II was really about. I just thought it was an interior sequel to a great movie. First Blood is a tragedy about our Vietnam War veterans. Rambo II is in many ways a bigger, badder sequel with lots more explosions, but it wasn’t until the last time I revisited it that I realized what Stallone was really doing.
In First Blood Part II, Stallone sends Rambo back to Vietnam, and he wins it for us. That is so insane, so ballsy, and so exactly what this country needed in 1985 that I now believe it is brilliant. Stallone saw the tragedy of Rambo in First Blood and realized, not only should Rambo live for potential sequels, but he could be a vehicle for America to work out all its unresolved feelings about our recent history. First Blood II is the fantasy that we can still win this thing, because even in defeat, America always wins. America, fuck yeah, indeed!
I cannot endorse Stallone’s other political franchise sequel, Rocky IV. I reviewed the entire Rocky series on Blu-ray, and I thought Rocky IV was bullshit. Still, what a double feature, winning both Vietnam and The Cold War in film.
