These People Directed Influential American War Movies
by majfoalbkeopaza | created - 22 Jan 2020 | updated - 16 Dec 2021 | Public(As recognized by the National Film Preservation Board)
1. Buster Keaton
Actor | The General
Joseph Frank Keaton was born on October 4, 1895 in Piqua, Kansas, to Joe Keaton and Myra Keaton. Joe and Myra were Vaudevillian comedians with a popular, ever-changing variety act, giving Keaton an eclectic and interesting upbringing. In the earliest days on stage, they traveled with a medicine ...
2. Stanley Kubrick
Director | 2001: A Space Odyssey
Stanley Kubrick was born in Manhattan, New York City, to Sadie Gertrude (Perveler) and Jacob Leonard Kubrick, a physician. His family were Jewish immigrants (from Austria, Romania, and Russia). Stanley was considered intelligent, despite poor grades at school. Hoping that a change of scenery would ...
3. Charles Chaplin
Writer | The Great Dictator
Considered to be one of the most pivotal stars of the early days of Hollywood, Charlie Chaplin lived an interesting life both in his films and behind the camera. He is most recognized as an icon of the silent film era, often associated with his popular character, the Little Tramp; the man with the ...
4. David Lean
Director | Lawrence of Arabia
An important British filmmaker, David Lean was born in Croydon on March 25, 1908 and brought up in a strict Quaker family (ironically, as a child he wasn't allowed to go to the movies). During the 1920s, he briefly considered the possibility of becoming an accountant like his father before finding ...
5. Steven Spielberg
Producer | Schindler's List
One of the most influential personalities in the history of cinema, Steven Spielberg is Hollywood's best known director and one of the wealthiest filmmakers in the world. He has an extraordinary number of commercially successful and critically acclaimed credits to his name, either as a director, ...
6. Oliver Stone
Director | JFK
Oliver Stone has become known as a master of controversial subjects and a legendary film maker. His films are filled with a variety of film angles and styles, he pushes his actors to give Oscar-worthy performances, and despite his failures, has always returned to success.
William Oliver Stone was ...
7. Robert Altman
Director | Gosford Park
Robert Altman was born on February 20th, 1925 in Kansas City, Missouri, to B.C. (an insurance salesman) and Helen Altman. He entered St. Peters Catholic school at the age six, and spent a short time at a Catholic high school. From there, he went to Rockhurst High School. It was then that he started...
8. Francis Ford Coppola
Producer | Apocalypse Now
Francis Ford Coppola was born in 1939 in Detroit, Michigan, but grew up in a New York suburb in a creative, supportive Italian-American family. His father, Carmine Coppola, was a composer and musician. His mother, Italia Coppola (née Pennino), had been an actress. Francis Ford Coppola graduated ...
9. D.W. Griffith
Director | The Birth of a Nation
David Wark Griffith was born in rural Kentucky to Jacob "Roaring Jake" Griffith, a former Confederate Army colonel and Civil War veteran. Young Griffith grew up with his father's romantic war stories and melodramatic nineteenth-century literature that were to eventually shape his movies. In 1897 ...
The Guerrilla (1908), The Hessian Renegades (1909), In Old Kentucky (1909), In the Border States (1910), The House with Closed Shutters (1910), The Fugitive (1910), His Trust: The Faithful Devotion and Self-Sacrifice of an Old Negro Servant (1911), Swords and Hearts (1911), The Battle (1911), The Massacre (1912), The Birth of a Nation (1915), Hearts of the World (1918), The Great Love (1918), The Greatest Thing in Life (1918), The Girl Who Stayed at Home (1919), America (1924), Abraham Lincoln (1930)
10. Kathryn Bigelow
Director | Zero Dark Thirty
A very talented painter, Kathryn spent two years at the San Francisco Art Institute. At 20, she won a scholarship to the Whitney Museum's Independent Study Program. She was given a studio in a former Offtrack Betting building, literally in an old bank vault, where she made art and waited to be ...
11. Frank Capra
Director | It's a Wonderful Life
One of seven children, Frank Capra was born on May 18, 1897, in Bisacquino, Sicily. On May 10, 1903, his family left for America aboard the ship Germania, arriving in New York on May 23rd. "There's no ventilation, and it stinks like hell. They're all miserable. It's the most degrading place you ...
The Bitter Tea of General Yen (1932), Prelude to War (1942), The Battle of Russia (1943), Divide and Conquer (1943), The Battle of Britain (1943), The Nazis Strike (1943), Tunisian Victory (1944), The Battle of China (1944), Two Down and One to Go (1945), War Comes to America (1945), Know Your Enemy - Japan (1945), Here Is Germany (1945), Your Job in Germany (1945)
12. Michael Cimino
Director | The Deer Hunter
Michael Cimino studied architecture and dramatic arts; later he filmed advertisements and documentaries and also wrote scripts until the actor, producer and director Clint Eastwood gave him the opportunity to direct the thriller Thunderbolt and Lightfoot (1974). But his biggest success was The Deer...
13. Howard Hawks
Director | Red River
What do the classic films Scarface (1932), Twentieth Century (1934), Bringing Up Baby (1938), Only Angels Have Wings (1939), His Girl Friday (1940), Sergeant York (1941), To Have and Have Not (1944), The Big Sleep (1946), Red River (1948) Gentlemen Prefer Blondes (1953) and Rio Bravo (1959) have in...
14. John Huston
Director | The Treasure of the Sierra Madre
An eccentric rebel of epic proportions, this Hollywood titan reigned supreme as director, screenwriter and character actor in a career that endured over five decades. The ten-time Oscar-nominated legend was born John Marcellus Huston in Nevada, Missouri, on August 5, 1906. His ancestry was English,...
Winning Your Wings (1942), Across the Pacific (1942), Report from the Aleutians (1943), Tunisian Victory (1944), San Pietro (1945), Let There Be Light (1980), The Red Badge of Courage (1951), The African Queen (1951), Heaven Knows, Mr. Allison (1957), A Farewell to Arms (1957), A Walk with Love and Death (1969), The Man Who Would Be King (1975), Victory (1981)
15. Errol Morris
Director | The Fog of War: Eleven Lessons from the Life of Robert S. McNamara
His documentaries helped spur a rebirth of non-fiction film in the 80s & garnered wide critical success. But until 2003's "The Fog of War," Morris was shunned by the Academy Awards.
Morris' first two films won much acclaim (Gates of Heaven (1978) and Vernon, Florida (1981)). In the second movie, ...
16. George Cukor
Director | My Fair Lady
George Cukor was an American film director of Hungarian-Jewish descent, better known for directing comedies and literary adaptations. He once won the Academy Award for Best Director, and was nominated other four times for the same Award.
In 1899, George Dewey Cukor was born on the Lower East Side of...
17. Michael Curtiz
Director | Casablanca
Curtiz began acting in and then directing films in his native Hungary in 1912. After WWI, he continued his filmmaking career in Austria and Germany and into the early 1920s when he directed films in other countries in Europe. Moving to the US in 1926, he started making films in Hollywood for Warner...
A magyar föld ereje (1917), A béke útja (1917), The Desired Woman (1927), Noah's Ark (1928), A Soldier's Plaything (1930), British Agent (1934), The Charge of the Light Brigade (1936), Santa Fe Trail (1940), Dive Bomber (1941), Captains of the Clouds (1942), Casablanca (1942), Mission to Moscow (1943), This Is the Army (1943), Passage to Marseille (1944), Janie (1944), Force of Arms (1951)
18. Rex Ingram
Director | The Great Problem
Renowned director Rex Ingram started his film career as a set designer and painter. His directorial debut was The Great Problem (1916). A true master of the medium, Ingram despised the business haggling required in the Hollywood system. He was also unhappy with the level of writing he found in ...
19. Preston Sturges
Writer | Sullivan's Travels
Preston Sturges' own life is as unlikely as some of the plots of his best work. He was born into a wealthy family. As a boy he helped out on stage productions for his mother's friend, Isadora Duncan (the scarf that strangled her was made by his mother's company, Maison Desti). He served in the U.S....
20. Fred Zinnemann
Director | A Man for All Seasons
Initially grew up wanting to be a violinist, but while at the University of Vienna decided to study law. While doing so, he became increasingly interested in American film and decided that was what he wanted to do. He became involved in European filmaking for a short time before going to America to...
21. Stanley Kramer
Producer | Judgment at Nuremberg
Stanley Kramer was born on September 29, 1913 in Hell's Kitchen [now Clinton], Manhattan, New York City, New York, USA. He was a producer and director, known for Judgment at Nuremberg (1961), Guess Who's Coming to Dinner (1967) and Inherit the Wind (1960). He was married to Karen Sharpe, Anne P. ...
22. Clarence G. Badger
Director | Rangle River
A graduate of the Boston Polytechnic Institute, Clarence Badger had a varied early career as an artist, stage actor, editor and journalist with several newspapers and magazines (including "The Youth's Companion"), before entering the film business with Mack Sennett in 1915. At Sennett's ...
23. Clyde Bruckman
Writer | The General
Had been out of work and was pretty much broke when he killed himself. He borrowed Buster Keaton's gun and after eating a meal that he could not pay for, shot himself. There are two stories; One says it was in the restroom of the cafe on Santa Monica Blvd, and the other story states he did it in ...
24. Julien Bryan
Producer | Israel: The Story of the Jewish People
Julien Bryan was born on May 23, 1899 in Titusville, Pennsylvania, USA. He was a producer and cinematographer, known for Israel: The Story of the Jewish People (1965), Rural Women (1950) and Paraguay (1943). He died on October 20, 1974 in Bronxville, New York, USA.
25. Harry d'Abbadie d'Arrast
Director | Laughter
Harry d'Arrast's entry into the movie industry was somewhat unusual--he was wounded while serving in the French army during WW I, and while recuperating in a military hospital met French-born American film director George Fitzmaurice, who invited him to come to Hollywood after he had recovered. He ...
26. Peter Davis
Producer | Hearts and Minds
Peter Davis was born on January 2, 1937 in Los Angeles, California. His parents were the screenwriters Frank Davis and Tess Slesinger (who was also a short story writer and novelist). Davis is a producer and director, known for Hearts and Minds (1974), The Selling of the Pentagon (1971) and "JACK" ...
27. Connie Field
Producer | Freedom on My Mind
Academy Award nominated and Emmy winning director Connie Field is a pioneering social documentary filmmaker. Before getting involved in film she worked as an organizer in many social and human rights organizations where she established her commitment to progressive social change which she has ...
28. Victor Fleming
Director | Gone with the Wind
Victor Fleming entered the film business as a stuntman in 1910, mainly doing stunt driving - which came easy to him, as he had been a mechanic and professional race-car driver. He became interested in working on the other side of the camera, and eventually got a job as a cameraman on many of the ...
29. Jack Glenn
Director | The House of the Seven Gables
Jack Glenn was born on September 17, 1904 in Terrell, Texas, USA. He was a director and actor, known for The House of the Seven Gables (1967), Cry Murder (1950) and Crusade in Europe (1949). He died on February 12, 1981 in New York City, New York, USA.
30. Mark Jonathan Harris
Writer | The Long Way Home
Mark Jonathan Harris was born on October 28, 1941 in Scranton, Pennsylvania, USA. He is a producer and writer, known for The Long Way Home (1997), Into the Arms of Strangers: Stories of the Kindertransport (2000) and Breaking Point: The War for Democracy in Ukraine (2017).
31. Stuart Heisler
Director | Saturday Island
Director Stuart Heisler began his film-industry career as a prop man in 1913, joining Mack Sennett at Keystone the following year. He worked as an editor for Samuel Goldwyn at United Artists from 1924-25 and again from 1929-34 and at Paramount from 1935-36. He graduated to second-unit director with ...
32. George W. Hill
Director | The Midnight Express
Beginning his career at age 13 as a stagehand for D.W. Griffith, George W. Hill worked his way up through cinematography and screenwriting to finally begin directing films in the early 1920s. His later films took on a stark, brutally realistic atmosphere and were renowned for their effective use of...
33. Henry King
Director | The Song of Bernadette
For more than three decades, Henry King was the most versatile and reliable (not to mention hard-working) contract director on the 20th Century-Fox lot. His tenure lasted from 1930 to 1961, spanning most of Hollywood's "golden" era. King was renowned as a specialist in literary adaptations (A Bell ...
34. Anatole Litvak
Director | The Snake Pit
The distinguished film director Anatole Litvak was born in the Ukrainian city of Kiev, the son of Jewish parents. His very first job was as a stage hand. In 1915, he became an actor, performing at a little-known experimental theater in St. Petersburg, Russia. As a teenager, he witnessed the 1917 ...
Confessions of a Nazi Spy (1939), This Above All (1942), Prelude to War (1942), The Battle of Russia (1943), Divide and Conquer (1943), The Nazis Strike (1943), The Battle of China (1944), War Comes to America (1945), Decision Before Dawn (1951), Un acte d'amour (1953), The Journey (1959), The Night of the Generals (1967)
35. Ernst Lubitsch
Director | To Be or Not to Be
From Ernst Lubitsch's experiences in Sophien Gymnasium (high school) theater, he decided to leave school at the age of 16 and pursue a career on the stage. He had to compromise with his father and keep the account books for the family tailor business while he acted in cabarets and music halls at ...
36. Rouben Mamoulian
Director | Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde
Rouben Mamoulian was born on October 8, 1897 in Tiflis, Russian Empire [now Tbilisi, Republic of Georgia]. He was a director and writer, known for Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1931), Applause (1929) and Becky Sharp (1935). He was married to Catharine Azadia Newman. He died on December 4, 1987 in ...
37. Leo McCarey
Director | An Affair to Remember
Leo McCarey was born on October 3, 1896 in Los Angeles, California, USA. He was a director and writer, known for An Affair to Remember (1957), Going My Way (1944) and Love Affair (1939). He was married to Virginia Stella Martin. He died on July 5, 1969 in Santa Monica, California, USA.
38. Winsor McCay
Writer | Gertie the Dinosaur
Like many pioneers, the work of 'Winsor McCay' has been largely superseded by successors such as Walt Disney and Max Fleischer but he more than earns a place in film history for being the American cinema's first great cartoon animator. He started out as a newspaper cartoonist, achieving a national ...
39. Lewis Milestone
Director | All Quiet on the Western Front
Lewis Milestone, a clothing manufacturer's son, was born in Bessarabia (now Moldova), raised in Odessa (Ukraine) and educated in Belgium and Berlin (where he studied engineering). He was fluent in both German and Russian and an avid reader. Milestone had an affinity for the theatre from an early ...
40. Denis Sanders
Director | A Time Out of War
Filmmaker Denis Sanders was born on January 21, 1929, in New York City. Denis studied film at the University of California. In 1954 he won an Academy Award for Best Short Subject for his masters' thesis student project A Time Out of War (1954). He and his brother Terry Sanders collaborated on the ...
41. Franklin J. Schaffner
Director | Planet of the Apes
Franklin J. Schaffner was one of the most innovative creative minds in the early days of American network television, utilizing a moving camera in the days when most television directors kept the camera static. His eye for visuals was developed in the dozens of live television programs he directed ...
42. Lowell Sherman
Actor | Bachelor Apartment
Lowell Sherman was one of the early cinema's first major stars who successfully made the transition from actor to director. Born in either 1885 or 1888, his parents were John Wm. Sherman, a theatrical producer (1855-1924), and Julia Gray Sherman, an actress and daughter of actress Kate Gray.
In 1905...
43. George Stevens
Director | Giant
George Stevens, a filmmaker known as a meticulous craftsman with a brilliant eye for composition and a sensitive touch with actors, is one of the great American filmmakers, ranking with John Ford, William Wyler and Howard Hawks as a creator of classic Hollywood cinema, bringing to the screen ...
44. Anthony Veiller
Writer | The Killers
Anthony Veiller was born on June 23, 1903 in New York City, New York, USA. He was a producer and writer, known for The Killers (1946), The Stranger (1946) and The List of Adrian Messenger (1963). He was married to Ethel Grace (Rowley) Mellon Rose Hornburg, Laura Kerr and Elise LaRose. He died on ...
45. King Vidor
Director | War and Peace
King Vidor was an American film director, film producer, and screenwriter of Hungarian descent. He was born in Galveston, Texas to lumberman Charles Shelton Vidor and his wife Kate Wallis. King's paternal grandfather Károly (Charles) Vidor had fled Hungary as a refugee following the failed ...
46. Josef von Sternberg
Director | The Devil Is a Woman
Josef von Sternberg split his childhood between Vienna and New York City. His father, a former soldier in the Austro-Hungarian army, could not support his family in either city; Sternberg remembered him only as "an enormously strong man who often used his strength on me." Forced by poverty to drop ...
47. William A. Wellman
Director | A Star Is Born
William Wellman, the Oscar-winning screenwriter-director of the original A Star Is Born (1937), was called "Wild Bill" during his World War I service as an aviator, a nickname that persisted in Hollywood due to his larger-than-life personality and lifestyle.
A leap-year baby born in 1896 on the 29th...
48. Sam Wood
Director | A Night at the Opera
Following a two-year apprenticeship under Cecil B. DeMille as assistant director, Samuel Grosvenor Wood had the good fortune to have assigned to him two of the biggest stars at Paramount during their heyday: Wallace Reid (between 1919 and 1920) and Gloria Swanson (from 1921 to 1923). By the time ...
49. William Wyler
Director | The Best Years of Our Lives
William Wyler was an American filmmaker who, at the time of his death in 1981, was considered by his peers as second only to John Ford as a master craftsman of cinema. The winner of three Best Director Academy Awards, second again only to Ford's four, Wyler's reputation has unfairly suffered as the...
50. Richard E. Norman
Director | The Flying Ace
Richard E. Norman was born on July 13, 1891 in Middleburg, Florida, USA. He was a director and writer, known for The Flying Ace (1926), Regeneration (1923) and The Crimson Skull (1922). He was married to Gloria Marie Desjardin. He died on November 7, 1960 in Jacksonville, Florida, USA.
52. Edmundo Padilla
Director | The Revenge of Pancho Villa
Edmundo Padilla is known for The Revenge of Pancho Villa (1932).
53. Félix Padilla
Director | The Revenge of Pancho Villa
Félix Padilla is known for The Revenge of Pancho Villa (1932).
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