1950s

The years after World War II brought a large number of mostly patriotic war films, which used the war as a backdrop for dramas and adventure stories. Many films made in Britain drew on true stories, such as The Dam Busters (1954), Dunkirk (1958), Reach for the Sky (1956) and Sink the Bismarck! (1960). The immediate aftermath of the war in Hollywood avoided the action film and delved into problems experienced by the returning veterans, turning out a number of high quality movies that included The Best Years of Our Lives (1946), Battleground (1949), Home of the Brave (1949), Command Decision (1948), and Twelve O'Clock High (1949). The latter two examined the psychological effects of combat and the stresses of command.

Hollywood films in the 1950s and 1960s were often inclined towards spectacular heroics or self-sacrifice in films like Sands of Iwo Jima (1949), Halls of Montezuma (1950) or D-Day the Sixth of June (1956). They also tended to toward stereotyping: typically, a small group of ethnically diverse men would come together but would not be developed much beyond their ethnicity; the senior officer would often be unreasonable and unyielding; almost anyone sharing personal information - especially plans for returning home - would die shortly thereafter and anyone acting in a cowardly or unpatriotic manner would convert to heroism or die (or both, in quick succession). Twentieth-Century Fox made a succession of war movies realistically-filmed in black-and-white in the early 1950s that highlighted little-known aspects of World War II, among them The Frogmen, Go For Broke!, You're in the Navy Now, and Decision Before Dawn.

Another large group of films emerged from the plethora of popular war novels penned after the war. Their quality was largely dependent on their faithfulness to the plot or theme of the original, casting, direction,and production values. Much of their appeal for the American public was that they covered virtually every branch of the service involved in the war. These include: The Young Lions (1958), The Naked and the Dead (1958), Battle Cry (1955), Run Silent, Run Deep (1958), Captain Newman, M.D. (1963), The Caine Mutiny (1954), Away All Boats (1956), From Here to Eternity (1953), Kings Go Forth (1958), Never So Few (1959), The Mountain Road (1960), and In Harm's Way (1965).