Apart from the 70s movie Waterloo, Hornblower series, the John Adams series, The Patriot, what movies or documentaries out there do you know with battles that can serve as inspiration making armies of the 18th century, AWI, napoleonic or 19th century? Any suggestions of movies/documentaries that just makes you wanna build great tin armies? Thanks! / Cornwallis
Off the top of my head:
Sharpe
Last of the Mohicans
Zulu
Gettysburg
Gods & Generals
18th Century stuff is thin on the ground. You are probably aware of it but Barry Lyndon has a couple of nice SYW battles. Revolution with Al Pacino has an OK battle.
Very hard to find, but April Morning deals with Lexington and Concord nicely.
Last of the Mohicans is great for the FIW
Der Grosse Koenig about Frederick the Great has some battles that start nicely enough, but disolve into everyone running hither and yon. Plus the overall discomfort of knowing the Nazis made it! The Napoleonic Kolberg is a similar sort of experience.
The Russian Voyna i Mir is specatular (if a bit muddled) in its battles. There's also a Russian movie made under Stalin about Peter the Great, I've seen in the background of a few Discovery Channel documentaries, but otherwise its probably impossible to see. The 80's mini series Peter the Great had a version of Poltava which I vaguely remember as being good (I was only 9 when I saw it though!). Sluga Gosudarev has a passable Poltava scene. You don't get many so its hard to complain!
Theres an old BBC documentary about Culloden that is pretty good - dont know if they do it on DVD but they showed it again on BBC4 recently and they have it on a loop on a monitor at the Royal Armouries in Leeds. Also on display in the Royal Armouries is a video showing AWI British drill manouevres.
I remember a series on Channel 4 in the 1980s called Year of the French which was about the French landing in Ireland in the 1790s.
Sharpe series)
Hornblower (series)
Gettysburg
The Duellist
War and Peace
North and South (series)
.... oooer, golly, there really aren`t many are there :-(
the full battle scene from Revolution is on YouTube by the way as is the one from the Patriot. However i refuse to watch anything from the Patriot on principle.