Sands of Iwo Jima

As classics go, you could do a lot worse than this John Wayne movie, made only four years after the war ended. Wayne — arguably better as a marine sergeant than a cowboy — plays John Stryker, who leads his men into the bloody Battle of Iwo Jima in the Pacific campaign. The battle scenes are pretty sanitized by today’s standards — especially considering how bloody Iwo Jima really was — but it’s old-fashioned manly patriotism at its best.