Saving the Good War.

• Author: Sharrett, Christopher

The phenomenal success of Steven Spielberg's "Saving Private Ryan" would seem to be something of an anomaly in recent motion picture history. After all, it has been some time since the World War II combat film has been a popular genre. Nevertheless, the success of "Saving Private Ryan" is precisely about resuscitating that genre and the sentimentality it evokes. For all of the gory, graphic images of D-Day that caught the media's collective eye and gave this film credibility in the jaded 1990s, its appeal is to an image of a bygone era in American life that Spielberg often has relied upon to draw his audience.

World War II movies frequently have been Hollywood's response to social travails of the postwar epoch. There seems to be a standing cultural assumption that it was the last "good" war, bestowing on the U.S. the sobriquet of the American Century. This conflict made America the leading industrial power, and the nation's involvement in the war appeared morally uncomplicated. European and Japanese fascism seemed an obvious, bold-faced evil, although our filmic representation of it, especially in regard to Japan, relied more on racial stereotypes than an understanding of a rapacious ideology.

During the Cold War, images of World War II could have a powerful effect in restoring a sense of collective purpose. Darryl Zanuck's "The Longest Day" (1962)--to which "Saving Private Ryan" is compared with regularity--actually was preceded by a playing of the national anthem when it was released in major movie palaces. Franklin Schaffner's "Patton" (1970) was an unmistakable reactionary blast at the 1960s counterculture and its failure to support the Vietnam incursion.

The nerve-wracking grittiness of "Saving Private Ryan," with its much-discussed opening and closing combat scenes, legitimizes the picture's agenda. It provides a touch of post-Vietnam critical awareness to an otherwise conventional film that refuses to interrogate the dynamics of warfare beyond its tired GI-in-the-foxhole focus. Spielberg instead prefers to evoke a pastoral America when he takes us back to the home front. Here is an image of 1940s America a la Norman Rockwell, with waving grain in an Iowa field replete with a windmill. While the mother of several dead soldiers is traumatized by the news of her sons' passing, there is no sense that her grief, or that of any other character, is grounded in outrage at those who make war. Nor is there anyone else in the narrative who...