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Source: The GuardianIt's a war that never ends – cinematically speaking, that is. The second world war may have ceased hostilities on 2 September 1945, with the formal surrender of Japan in a ceremony on the USS Missouri, but the film world has never stopped fighting. Nearly 70 years on, the demand for second world war movies appears unstoppable, the supply inexhaustible. Last year saw the release of films about Germany during the war (The Book Thief), British soldiers imprisoned by the Japanese (The Railway Man), and the confrontation between Nazi and Soviet forces at Stalingrad (Stalingrad). By the end of 2014 we will have had films about the race to recover stolen artworks (The Monuments Men), a US tank crew fighting their way across Germany (Fury), a US soldier who survived shipwreck and a PoW camp (Unbroken), a biopic of pioneering codebreaker Alan Turing (The Imitation Game) and a fictional account of the German occupation of France (Suite Française).
Some movie wars – Vietnam, the cold war, Iraq – come and go, but 1939-45 just won't fade away. It's impossible to come up with a definitive list but, for comparison, Wikipedia's list of films about the 1914-18 war totals a little more than 130, while the same source's compilation of second world war films comes to more than 1,300, and still counting. A decade-by-decade breakdown tells a slightly more nuanced story: there were more than 250 made before the war even finished, reaching over 300 by the end of the 1940s; there were more than 200 each in the 1950s and 60s, before numbers started to decline in the 1970s (130-plus) and 80s (120-plus). The 1990s saw a relatively paltry 86 before a resurgence in the 2000s (180). The 2010s have seen more than 50 so far, suggesting we are on course for a similar figure this decade.
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