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TANKS FOR THE MEMORIES – LIked FURY? Some Less-Obvious Movies With Tanks in Them

Brad Pitt’s new WWII tank drama Fury has arrived, and reminded us all of other films featuring tanks.  Most enthusiasts agree such films as The Battle of the Bulge, Patton and the original Sahara with Humphrey Bogart are the standard-bearers of the subgenre, the tank movies against which all subsequent works like the WWII drama Kelly’s Heroes, the father/son ’80s comedy Tank and the Matthew McConaughey remake of Sahara are compared.

While I decide if Fury warrants a big-screen theatrical viewing versus a wait-for-the-Blu-ray approach, here are some other suggestions–some lesser known and others less obvious–that offer some terrific tank moments.

The Beast (a/k/a The Beast of War) (1988)

This gritty and tension fraught wartime tale is the Das Boot of tank dramas, following the dangerous days of a Russian tank crew during the Soviet-Afghan war. Starring Jason Patric and directed by the guy would eventually go on to make Waterworld, Kevin Reynolds.

Rambo III (1988)

Vietnam veteran John Rambo somehow winds up in Afghanistan fighting for the Mujahidin against the Reds at the tail end of the Soviet-Afghan war. The climax is an impressive set piece combining scores of stuntmen on horses and practical pyrotechnic effects with real vehicles and swooping aircraft. The battle whittles down to the inevitable mano a mano chicken fight between our hero and the chief Russkie bad guy as Rambo drives an impossibly fast tank into the path of his adversary’s oncoming low-flying helicopter.

GoldenEye (1995)

James Bond gives chase in a handy Russian tank, demolishing a sizeable chunk of downtown St. Petersburg in the process. Collateral damage: a fleet of flattened and crushed police cars, a block or two of canal-front property, one displaced winged horse statue and, in a shameless moment of gratuitous product placement, a pulverized Perrier truck. The tank later loses a game of chicken versus the villain’s armored bullet train, but through it all our man never musses up a single hair on his head.

1941 (1979)

Dan Aykroyd pops up as a tank commander whose crew breaks up a riot on Hollywood Boulevard and ends up facing down a Japanese submarine lurking off a Pacific coast amusement park. A silly Technicolor sight gag has the tank plowing through a paint factory then, conveniently for editorial purposes, an adjacent turpentine warehouse.

Shortly after this, there’s a curiously flat racial bit featuring two crewmembers, one a white man (John Candy) in blackface and the other a black man (Frank McRae) in white face, having a laugh at each other. All of this is upstaged by the movie’s most memorable and delirious image: a dislocated Ferris wheel rolling off the Santa Monica pier.

Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade (1989)

In the last leg of the journey to the Canyon of the Crescent Moon, Indy must rescue his father and Marcus Brody from the belly of an enemy tank. Collateral damage: Sallah’s brother-in-law’s ride, a fleet of transport vehicles, one poor Nazi bastard caught underneath the moving tank tread, and one snarly SS officer who rides the plummeting tank off a tall cliff to his rocky and highly satisfying demise.

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