April 5 1999

ARTICLE TOOLS

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Render therefore unto Caesar the things which are Caesar's; and unto God the things that are God's" (Matt. 22:21). The concept is simple enough, but Christians have applied it in different ways, particularly where warfare is concerned.

To some, God is the author of life, the one whose image dwells in every person, and no human, not even Caesar, has the right to kill another. But in Sergeant York (1941), Gary Cooper played a real-life pacifist who, on reading this verse, came to believe that he owed it to the government ("unto Caesar") to kill German troops during the First World War.

That film came out just as the United States was about to enter the Second World War, and it was clearly meant to prepare Americans for the conflict. Many more films were to come; Hollywood was at the peak of its mythmaking powers, and the line between good and evil had never seemed so clear. Images from the war have since influenced moviemaking from Shakespeare (check out Ian McKellen's 1995 adaptation of Richard III) to science fiction (note the "stormtroopers" in Star Wars). "World War II is my favorite war," declares an entertainment junkie in Small Soldiers, Joe Dante's uneven satire of pop-culture jingoism; and who can blame him?

Now, for the first time since the 1940s, three films set during World War II are competing for the best-picture prize at the Academy Awards.

Life Is Beautiful is a tragicomic send-up of fascism set partly in a Nazi concentration camp during the last days of the war. It shines a light on the reason why many feel the fighting in that war was necessary: without the deaths of many Allied and Axis soldiers, more Jews would have met their own deaths in the gas chambers or worse.

Saving Private Ryan—the unlikely blockbuster ...