An example of that now nearly extinct oxymoron- the quiet war movie. These were inevitably adaptations of plays. The theatre, in the olden days before television, 24/7 news cycles etc., once prided itself on being able to respond to current events and the significance of contemporary history. The WPA Theatre Project produced the Living Newspaper during the New Deal. After every war there were plays dealing with that war but unrecognizable from war movies because of the confined spaces of a theatre. The post WW1 period was particularly rich in war plays. This was the height of theatre and I guess the masterpiece of this genre was R. C. Sheriff's Journey's End.
American Lawrence Stallings (What Price Glory?) and others also wrote plays in the genre. Playwrights responded to ww2 in much the same way. Again the restrictions usually dictated a one set play, with maybe some change of scene in act two and perhaps a small adjunct set to play out some subsidiary action. These were later translated into films. EIGHT IRON MEN was adapted from a play and reduces the agonies of fighting a war to something like real time and a single human life. The classical unities of time and space are nearly totally observed. Remarkable for a war film. A eight man squad led by Lee Marvin Sgt. Mooney) is quartered in the basement of a ruined house. A three man patrol comes back minus one man who is trapped in a bomb crater being swept by a fearsomely placed machine gun.
The squad is due to be pulled back after 17 days on the line but are under orders not to go and rescue the pinned man. Captain Trelawny (Barney Phillips), aware of the heavy casualties of his unit, doesn't want three men killed trying to save one ("I came up here with a company and I'll be lucky to leave with a platoon"). The tension builds as it becomes closer to the time to move out and leave one of their buddies behind. That's it.
Basically one set with brief forays into another set depicting a rubble strewn street being periodically swept by machine gun fire. There was some attempt at opening out by literally visualizing the sub-erotic sex fantasies of the men particularly Bonar Colleano (Collucci) ("Tonight I'll be whistling at every dame in the country. You can't keep a healthy guy like me stuck away like this for too long - I go crazy - I get hair on the palms of my hands - the beast rises in me.") but almost all of the tension is provided in the dialogue between the men.' The conclusions reached reflect the hard bitten cynicism of men at war, of being used by fate, and of the connecting sinews which build between men at their extreme.
EIGHT IRON MEN is no masterpiece but it is very effective drama, just don't expect any of the usual visceral thrills which accompany most action oriented war films. There are no villains. The German's are never seen. The Captain is neither a sniveling coward nor a vain martinet who gets his men killed for his greater glory. Though he is aware his 'efficiency' is being scrutinized by higher ups, he shows some repressed satisfaction at the recovery of the missing man. This is not the kind of film where the more knowledgeable in the audience can guffaw "Aw, real people don't act that way."
This is merely a crumb in the vast shitcake of the continuing cruelty of a mankind which seems eternally waging war with itself. Its unfortunate that not only is there no more theatre like this but there are no more films like this, nor even TV like this (not since the 50s actually). It has all been replaced by 24/7 news and a whole host of too highly paid self advertising jackanapes entertainers under the guise of political pundits.
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