The Red Ball Express: What did you do in the War?

The end of World War Two didn't mean the end of movies about the war. Far from it – the next decade or so would see what began as propaganda films transform into their own subgenre. First of all, though, American audiences – which included returning veterans – had to find a way to deal with the return to civilian life and peacetime. They had a film like The Best Years of Our Lives to cloak the immediate challenges with the appropriate amount of grit and optimism (along with lesser-known pictures like Edward Dmytryk's Till the End of Time, also...