10 great court-martial dramas

King & Country (1964), about the turmoil and hypocrisy faced by British soldiers thrown into the nightmarish trenches of the First World War, is finally released on UK home entertainment this week, courtesy of a stunning new restoration by StudioCanal.

In the hands of the great American director Joseph Losey, best known for his class warfare classic The Servant (1963), it’s a film that arrives to reaffirm itself as an underseen gem. Based on a stage play by John Wilson, it offers up a bleakness of vision unusual for the time, Losey drawing the most out of the film’s grim, rat-infested setting, while the light and shadows of Denys Coop’s photography imbue the action with a strangely expressionistic quality.

Dirk Bogarde gives an uncharacteristically sympathetic performance as the officer tasked with defending a young Tom Courtenay (typically soulful) through his court-martial after he walks away from the battlefield. Is he a deserter, or merely shell-shocked?

This new, restored edition brings an elusive film back to the forefront, revealing it as not only a masterclass in claustrophobia but also a prescient exploration of mental health – key to a cinema subgenre primed to wrestle with the impossible contradictions of war.

It is not, however, the only film to grapple with the complexities of the court-martial. Here are 10 that pit comrade against comrade, where moral lines are made murky and loyalties are tested in a truly tense fashion…

Director: Anthony Asquith

The often paradoxical nature of the army turning against itself is brought into sharp focus in the little-seen – and incredibly British – legal drama Carrington V.C., in which David Niven plays a distinguished major (and recipient of the Victoria Cross) who takes £125 from his unit’s safety box after he’s refused his back pay.

Confident he will be able to justify his actions to his superiors, Carrington is court-martialled and opts to act in his own defence. But when his wife (Margaret Leighton) suspects him of extra-marital wrongdoing, she begins to make things harder for her husband during the trial.

Handsomely mounted, the movie deftly explores how personal grievances can inhibit the flow of justice, as unexpected issues arise and complicate matters for the once cool-headed Carrington – a man who is ultimately condemned by the institution he has dedicated his whole life to, for taking what was technically his.

Director: Otto Preminger

Before he made one of the finest ever courtroom dramas with Anatomy of a Murder (1959), Otto Preminger delivered the compelling warm-up that is The Court-Martial of Billy Mitchell, a late-career star vehicle for an aging Gary Cooper. 

No, not a film about the video-game-obsessed villain of The King of Kong (2007), but a dramatisation of the real-life court-martial of the US Army officer who faced trial for insubordination following attempts to highlight flaws in his own military’s aviation programme (he also famously predicted Pearl Harbour years before it happened).

Hoping a trial will bring public attention to his concerns, Billy invites his own court-martial, Cooper bringing a world-weary resilience to the role of a veteran ahead of his time. It’s a movie that really comes to life in the late courtroom sequences, especially after Rod Steiger turns up to bring Billy down and chew the scenery as though they were one and the same goal.

Director: Arnold Laven

In The Rack, a young Paul Newman, still wet behind the ears, plays US soldier Captain Hall, who returns from Korea only to face charges of collaboration with the enemy. At his court-martial, he admits wrongdoing, but his defence (Edmond O’Brien) sets out to prove he had no choice but to commit treason under the cruel circumstances of his imprisonment.

Unusual for a war movie of the time, The Rack is keen to probe notions of masculinity in a more sentimental vein: a pivotal scene has Hall’s father, a tightly wound veteran, breaking down, asking his son to show him some love. Later, the extended court-martial sequence climaxes in a moving monologue in which we can almost glimpse Newman’s star power coming into its own, the film drawing lines between the human capacity for suffering, the hypocrisy of war and generational trauma.

If The Rack can’t quite arrive on a definite statement, we might see its inconclusiveness as a strength rather than a weakness. At what point is a man made guilty by things that merely happen to him?

Director: Stanley Kubrick

This tightly controlled, gorgeously rendered meditation about the hypocrisy running through the ranks of the French army during the First World War (“If those little sweethearts won’t face German bullets, they’ll face French ones!”) is one of Stanley Kubrick’s most affecting films. Paths of Glory takes unflinching aim at the army’s so-called ‘middle management’, Kirk Douglas commanding every second of his screen time as the put-upon but resilient Colonel Dax, a former criminal defence lawyer given the impossible task of defending three of his men against a court-martial for cowardice during a failed offensive they could never have won.

From the mesmerising, opening trench-bound tracking shot to the final, haunting sing-song that marks the film’s morbid conclusion, it’s hard to picture a better cinematic case against the idea of capital punishment.

Director: John Ford

“Do you hear me? I’m a man!” sobs Woody Strode’s Sergeant Braxton Rutledge, a Black calvary officer accused of raping and killing a young woman in John Ford’s thrilling, underrated hybrid of courtroom drama and rousing western adventure. 

Viewed by many as something of an apology by Ford for his prior portrayals of Black and Indigenous characters on screen, Sergeant Rutledge throws the prejudice of its white characters into the spotlight as they’re called to give evidence at the officer’s subsequent court-martial.

Expertly staged in its traditional western sequences and packed with Fordian trademarks (the stunning vistas and doorway shots are in full flow), the film employs a non-linear flashback structure that seeks to expose the toxic attitudes of the townsfolk surrounding our hero. Though Rutledge’s innocence is never really in doubt, the tension never slackens because we know just how easy it is for the truth to be quashed by ingrained bigotry of this size.

Director: Michael Anderson

Strangeness and stuffiness unite for Conduct Unbecoming – gripping, if not a little dated in places. Michael Anderson reunites with his Logan’s Run (1976) star Michael York, cast here as the timid officer Drake, posted to late 19th-century British India, and who enters a world of rules and rituals in a regiment that occasionally resembles a frat house.

One evening, the widow of a deceased soldier is assaulted. She blames the drunken vagrant, officer Millington (James Faulkner), leading to his court-martial; Drake is assigned to defend him. Though it’s made clear by his superiors that Drake is to merely go through the motions, he is bound by a sense of duty and begins to dig deeper, disturbing the supposed systems of ‘honour’ keeping everyone in line.

Blending old-fashioned courtroom drama with an unexpected third-act sprinkle of Euro-inspired slasher cinema, Conduct Unbecoming also boasts a frankly ridiculous all-star cast that includes Stacy Keach, Christopher Plummer and Richard Attenborough.

Director: Bruce Beresford

We are never in doubt that a series of terrible crimes have taken place in the brilliant, morally complex ‘Breaker’ Morant. The film, which could have been called ‘Scapegoats of the Empire’, is more interested in who is ultimately responsible.

Edward Woodward gives perhaps his best performance as real life British lieutenant Harry ‘Breaker’ Morant, whose decision to execute Boer prisoners in 1902 South Africa has him facing a court-martial over orders he may or may not have received from his superiors.

The dense, clever flashback structure consistently enriches and flips the narrative, adding new layers of complicity and hypocrisy with every time jump. The picture painted is one of a military that has tied itself in knots, where men on the same side battle each other for the sake of things they do not believe, forced to defend positions and decisions they have no real allegiance to – and always at the mercy of an uncaring Empire.

Director: Rob Reiner

While it’s impossible to think about A Few Good Men without recalling Jack Nicholson’s declaration that we can’t handle the truth, there’s a lot more to this riveting legal drama than the now-legendary ad-lib. From a script by Oscar-winning scribe Aaron Sorkin, based on his own play, it concerns itself with the court-martial of two marines who are accused of murdering another marine, and who are slowly revealed to be involved in a wider conspiracy.

Nicholson’s scenery-chewing as the slippery Colonel Jessep might be what has stuck in the public consciousness, but it’s Tom Cruise – as an inexperienced but overly confident (or is that obnoxious?) defence lawyer – who steals the movie. As Rob Reiner’s assured but invisible hands allow Sorkin’s quick-fire dialogue to guide proceedings, the film builds to a thrilling climax of intensely thrown barbs, retorts and revelations, resulting in the kind of courtroom cross-examination made in cinema heaven.

Director: Mel Gibson

Hacksaw Ridge is notable for its subversive protagonist, real-life conscientious objector Desmond Doss, played by Andrew Garfield, who faces a court-martial after he enlists in the Second World War as a medic but refuses to carry a weapon into battle.

Director Mel Gibson lures us into a false sense of security with a first hour that is aggressively melodramatic, resulting in a rare filmic court-martial dismissal, before dropping Doss – and us – into a hellfire of flaming corpses and limbless bodies.

For a film about a conscientious objector, it might strike an odd note that the film goes so hard in its battle sequences, which land somewhere between the Omaha beach sequence from Steven Spielberg’s Saving Private Ryan (1998) and the brutal slaughter of the Gibson vehicle We Were Soldiers (2002). But ultimately the extreme violence serves to highlight Doss’s willingness to waylay a weapon in the face of seemingly impossible odds, thus showcasing his absolute heroism.

Director: William Friedkin

The late William Friedkin didn’t get a chance to see his final film released into the world. At first glance, it seems like an odd choice for the director of The Exorcist (1973); but then you recall his panache for adapting plays early on in his career, while his TV version of 12 Angry Men (1997) showcased further skill for small-room drama.

Based on Herman Wouk’s 1953 play, itself based on Wouk’s Pulitzer Prize-winning 1952 novel The Caine Mutiny, the film chronicles the aftermath of an alleged mutiny aboard the titular warship, transposing the action to the modern day and swapping in allusions to 9/11 and the Iraq war. It all looks cheap as chips, and there is a rickety, we-made-this-in-three days quality that the film never quite escapes. But for all its lo-fi aesthetic, it’s also oddly compelling: Friedkin puts his faith in the tried-and-tested script, and there are strong, dedicated turns from Keifer Sutherland and Jason Clarke that shine through the budget constraints. An apt bookend for Friedkin – and a valuable, stripped-back addition to the pantheon of court-martial cinema.