Hollywood has a type. A man alone against impossible odds, a single decision, made in seconds, that changes the outcome of a battle and then a war and a body that should not have survived and refused to quit. It’s the shape nearly every war movie follows.
You’re probably familiar with it. But no screenwriter had to invent this archetype. It’s the kind of story that recurs, over and over, in Medal of Honor citations. And so, it should come as no surprise that Medal of Honor stories sit at the center of Hollywood’s best-known war sagas.
The first medal recipients, the Andrews’ Raiders, had their dramatic Confederate train heist immortalized in 1956’s The Great Locomotive Chase. Medal of Honor recipient Audie Murphy played himself in To Hell and Back (1955), reenacting his single-handed defense against German forces in France in 1945, then went on to star in 40 more films.
More recently, Ridley Scott’s Black Hawk Down (2001) depicts the single, brutal day in Mogadishu, Somalia, in 1993 when Delta Force snipers Gary Gordon and Randy Shughart held a position they knew couldn’t be held in order to defend a downed helicopter pilot.
Not every one of these stories sticks to the Hollywood template. Desmond Doss, the medic who refused to carry a weapon and saved 75 soldiers under fire on Okinawa, is the hero of 2016’s Hacksaw Ridge, starring Andrew Garfield, which inverts almost everything the genre is built on and went on to win two Academy Awards.
Hollywood didn’t fall in love with the Medal of Honor because the stories are action-adventure (though they are that, too). It fell in love with them because they’re true, and the men who lived them are real.
Medal of Honor Stories in Cinema
Through archival footage, reenactments, first-person interviews and star-studded performances, the courageous actions of these recipients have been illustrated in countless movies and TV series.
These are some of the places where audiences have seen Medal of Honor recipients on screen:
The General (1926)
The Fighting 69th (1940)
Sergeant York (1941)
Buffalo Bill (1944)
Thirty Seconds Over Tokyo (1944)
Captain Eddie (1945)
The Court-Martial of Billy Mitchell (1955)
To Hell and Back (1955)
The Great Locomotive Chase (1956)
The Spirit of St. Louis (1957)
The Longest Day (1962)
The November Plan (1976)
MacArthur (1977)
In Love and War (1987)
Glory (1989)
Gettysburg (1993)
Rough Riders (1997)
Black Hawk Down (2001)
The Lost Battalion (2001)
Pearl Harbor (2001)
We Were Soldiers (2002)
Medal of Honor, documentary (2008)
The Pacific (2010)
Lone Survivor (2013)
Hacksaw Ridge (2016)
Medal of Honor, Netflix documentary (2018)
The Last Full Measure (2019)
Midway (2019)
Devotion (2022)
Read more in ourcover story about the Medal of Honor, our stories on theliving Medal of Honor recipients and the history of discrimination that delayed Medal of Honor recognition; and see our gallery of 250 recipients
Credit: Source link