We Stand Alone Together: The Men of Easy Company

Movies to See Right Now

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This image has an empty alt attribute; its file name is undine-1024x614.jpg
Photo caption: Paula Beer in UNDINE. Courtesy of MVFF.

This week, a mythical tragic romance, a preacher becomes an institution and the most eclectic watch-at-home recommendations you’ll find ANYWHERE.

IN THEATERS

Undine: Christian Petzold takes a mythical story and sets it in contemporary Germany. resulting in a romance that is operatic and supernatural and finally very tragic. But too slowly paced for me.

ON VIDEO

Billy Graham: This insightful biodoc explores how Billy Graham took evangelism out of backwoods revival tents and brought it to big city stadiums and television, becoming an institution in the process. And his fatal flaw – the need to pray with Presidents. Streaming at American Experience.

Drunk Bus: In this light and appealing coming of age comedy, a lovelorn slacker wallows in malaise until he meets a 300-pound Samoan security guy with facial tattoos. Laemmle.

My Memorial Day pick was We Stand Alone Together: The Men of Easy Company, the oral histories of regular men plunged into the most traumatic experiences of WW II and what they endured. Streaming on HBO Max.

Ed Harris and Annette Bening in THE FACE OF LOVE

The most eclectic watch-at-home recommendations you’ll find ANYWHERE:

  • The Dry: a mystery as psychological as it is procedural. In theaters and also streaming on AppleTV, YouTube and Google Play
  • Brewmance: barley, hops, yeast and underdogs. Amazon (included with Prime), AppleTV, Vudu, YouTube and Google Play .
  • Hamlet/Horatio: More tragedy, less angst. Streaming widely.
  • Louder Than Bombs: An intricately constructed family drama. Amazon (included with Prime), Vudu and YouTube.
  • That Guy Dick Miller: Putting the “character” in “character actor:” Amazon (included with Prime).
  • Sword of Trust: comedy and so, so much more. Amazon, AppleTV, Vudu, YouTube and Google Play.
  • Run Lola Run: you’ll never see a more kinetic movie. Amazon, AppleTV, Vudu, YouTube and Google Play.
  • The Times of Harvey Milk: my favorite political documentary. Amazon, AppleTV, Vudu, YouTube, Google Play, HBO Max and Criterion Channel..
  • Tab Hunter Confidential: heartthrob in the closet. Amazon.
  • Street Gang: How We Got to Sesame Street: the origin story of an institution. Amazon, AppleTV, Vudu, YouTube, Google Play.
  • The Face of Love: Who is she really in love with? Amazon.
  • Augustine: obsession, passion and the birth of a science. Amazon (included with Prime), AppleTV, Vudu, YouTube and Google Play.
  • The Brainwashing of My Dad: some insight into our national madness. Amazon, AppleTV, Vudu, YouTube and Google Play.

ON TV

This is not a great week for Turner Classic Movies, so I have no television recommendations.

WE STAND ALONE TOGETHER: THE MEN OF EASY COMPANY – what they endured

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There’s no better movie choice for Memorial Day than the documentary We Stand Alone Together: The Men of Easy Company.  A companion to the fine 2001 miniseries Band of Brothers, this oral history gives voice to soldiers as they revisit what they endured.

The Easy Company of the title was part of the 101st Airborne, a storied WW II unit of regular guys who became elite paratroopers. We meet a bunch of those guys as they recount their journey of 55 years before – their basic training, their first combat – on D-Day. Easy Company went on to play a part in WW II’s most pivotal moments: the Normandy invasion, the liberation of the Netherlands, beating back Germany’s last offensive at the brutal Battle of the Bulge and conquering Hitler’s own private getaway, the Eagle’s Nest.

These are men of The Greatest Generation, a term coined four decades later by Tom Brokaw. For those most part, they didn’t share their war experiences with their families and friends. We are hearing many of them tell their stories for the first time.

I’m a Baby Boomer, and my Dad and all of my friends’ dads were WW II vets – basically every dad-aged adult male. We knew them as grocery clerks, science teachers, factory workers, insurance agents and mechanics like my Dad. All of us kids, growing up on a steady diet of WW II movies and TV, asked them, but they would never talk about the war. I now realize that I knew men who had served as infantry in Europe and Marines in the Pacific.

One family member did tell me about getting shot down over New Guinea and spending time with an indigenous tribe before his rescue. What he didn’t relate was in a journal that I found long after his death – that the repeated terror of over twenty bombing missions finally became more than he could bear.

Above all, We Stand Alone Together: The Men of Easy Company is the story of men who experienced one trauma after another. The unit suffered over 50% casualties on D-Day. Their eleven months of combat missions must have seemed endless. They deserve, finally, to be heard.

We Stand Alone Together: The Men of Easy Company can be streamed from HBO Max.