Feeling patriotic? Salute American sacrifice by watching the best Memorial Day movies honoring the military.
War is hell, but it’s also where heroes are made. The best Memorial Day movies tell both stories. Some are serious-minded Oscar winners, others are considered action classics. Some amplify the horror, others crank up the heroism, but in their own way, each movie on this list honors those who’ve made the ultimate sacrifice. Here are 20 movies all Americans should consider watching this Memorial Day – or any day.
RECOMMENDED: The 50 best World War II movies.
If you’ve seen Jimmy Cagney only as a tough-talkin’ gangster, you may be surprised by how fancy his footwork is in this biopic of beloved song-and-dance man George M. Cohan. He's the Broadway legend who composed the patriotic anthems "Over There," "You're a Grand Old Flag" and "The Yankee Doodle Boy."
A slow-building and unlikely blockbuster (the biggest film of 84-year-old director Clint Eastwood’s career), this electrifying PTSD war drama became a political football for its questionable handling of the real-life Chris Kyle. But between a nervy performance by Bradley Cooper and some daring ambiguities on the matter of valor, you have a movie that only Eastwood could make.
Kathryn Bigelow made history with this depiction of an American bomb diffusal unit in Iraq, becoming the first woman to win an Academy Award for directing. The film itself won Best Picture, and for good reason: few war movies mix intimacy and intensity quite so potently.
Like The Longest Day a decade earlier, Richard Attenborough’s epic is based on a book by historian Cornelius Ryan, features a huge ensemble cast and depicts a specific military operation from World War II: Operation Market Garden, a failed Allied attempt to end the war by entering Germany through Holland. By nature of its subject, it is a much less triumphalist film than its predecessor, but it’s a better one: impressively lensed by cinematographer Geoffrey Unsworth and spectacularly acted by its international cast, including James Caan, Michael Caine, Anthony Hopkins, Robert Redford, Laurence Olivier and Sean Connery, who appears in both movies.
No, it’s not about Clifford. Samuel Fuller tapped into his own combat experiences in World War II and came away with what some consider his masterpiece. Told through a series of vignettes, it follows a rifle squad through North Africa and Europe, exploring their growing bond, and features several haunting scenes, including the bombing of an insane asylum and the liberation of a Nazi concentration camp. Roger Ebert called it ‘one of the most expensive B-pictures ever made’ – and he meant it as a compliment.
Coming from Navyman John Ford, this story of PT boats defending the Philippines in the aftermath of Pearl Harbor is among the more accurate representations of naval combat from its era. John Wayne and Robert Montgomery star as outmanned lieutenants fighting for survival against a powerful Japanese fleet.
A silent-era blockbuster, King Vidor’s World War I epic established the template many other war movies would follow over the ensuing decades: the realistic battle sequences; the two-part structure transitioning from basic training to the battlefield; and the personal story of a directionless rich kid who enlists to please his parents and comes home a changed man. It’s still a masterpiece of its kind and in its touching ending, a blueprint for the coming-home-type dramas that would follow.
A throwback to the Howard Hawks era of war films, Memphis Belle is a well-executed piece of flag-waving nostalgia. It’s 1943, and the elite crew of a famed World War II bomber is nearing its final campaign – but its last mission turns out to be its most dangerous. The historical accuracy basically ends at the name of the aircraft, but the upstart ensemble cast (Matthew Modine, Eric Stoltz, Billy Zane) indulges the movie’s clichés with such zeal that they manage to elevate the film above them.
‘Written by and starring Tom Hanks’ doesn’t always indicate a classic, but it’s usually a dependable sign of watchability, particularly if it’s about the Greatest Generation. In the case of Greyhound, it’s a seafaring thriller based on the true story of an Allied submarine convoy under German attack in the early days of America’s entry into World War II. It’s a dad movie from the King of Dad Movies, and it delivers.
A precursor to Saving Private Ryan, this all-star dramatisation of the invasion of Normandy is a decidedly 1960s interpretation of the battle – a little too clean, a bit too triumphant – but lord, the cast: John Wayne, Henry Fonda, Sean Connery, Richard Burton, Rod Steiger… and on and on. It might not have lived up to producer Darryl F Zanuck’s desire to make the most important war movie of all time, but it’s a masterclass in stoic machismo.
Jeff Chandler, in what would be his final screen appearance, steps into the title role of Frank Merrill, a real-life brigadier general who led a successful campaign through the jungles of Burma during World War II to capture the capital, Myitkyina. Director Samuel Fuller would have bigger, better and bloodier war movies, but this is among his grittiest.
A crew of NAVY Seals (Mark Wahlberg, Taylor Kitsch, Ben Foster, Emile Hirsch) on a mission in Afghanistan end up in a firefight with the Taliban, and… well, the title is a bit of a spoiler. Lone Survivor doesn’t have much to say about the War on Terror specifically, but director Peter Berg does an admirable job putting you directly in the center of the action, allowing the audience to make up its own mind about how much it’s all worth.
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