brickhistory wrote <<It's just a movie, fer Chris'sake.......>>
True.
It was Errol Flynn that got up the noses of British veteran's in the '50s. An Englishman who avoided the war by staying in Holywood and won the war in Burma in the US Army single-handed.
I studied Britsh film propaganda in the period 1933-1945 and that included Chaplin's Great Dictator and the political fallout it attracted. We are generally submitted to reasonably accurate war films with some as pure fiction such as Guns of Navaronne based on Alistar MacLean's novel. Where it is based on fact however but fact that is wholly distorted then it does create a stink.
The other films we looked at, briefly, were your Vietnam films from Green Beret to the Tom Hanks one. These are good examples of public attitude to one period of history from pro-war through to anti-war with the more recent Vietnam films tending toward the pro-war lobby again.