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The Most Patriotic Movie Scenes to Rewatch on Memorial Day

No Film School [Unofficial] May 25, 2026
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Happy Memorial Day! Today is about grief, sacrifice, and honor. Cinema has always been good at using these elements to tell compelling stories.

If you're celebrating, it's a good time to reflect on the sacrifices of American heroes, and one way to do it is to revisit some of the most patriotic movie scenes.

Here are six of our favorites.

__Patton

The opening monologue, which features George C. Scott standing in front of a massive American flag and addressing an unseen Army for six minutes straight, is one of the most audacious openings in film history.

The screenwriter was a young Francis Ford Coppola. He wrote the scene into his original 1966 script, was promptly let go from the production, and watched his draft get shelved.

In __Godfather: The Intimate Francis Ford Coppola by Gene D. Phillips, it is revealed that Coppola said it was Scott who brought it back. When offered the title role, Scott refused to take it unless the production used Coppola's script.

"Scott is the one who resurrected my version," Coppola said.

Patton reportedly gave a version of this speech in reality several times, but its profanity and vulgarity meant it couldn't be captured for the screen, per Military.com.

We've broken down why the scene works here.

Saving Private Ryan

The Normandy landing sequence opens with a ramp dropping and soldiers dying before they hit the beach in a chaotic, violent scene. Cinematographer Janusz Kamiński said of the film, via ASC:

“I think World War II is the most significant event of the last 100 years; the fate of the baby boomers and even Generation X was linked to the outcome. Beyond that, I’ve just always been interested in World War II. My earliest films, which I made when I was about 14 years old, were combat pictures that were set both on the ground and in the air. For years now, I’ve been looking for the right World War II story to shoot, and when Robert Rodat wrote Saving Private Ryan, I found it.”

Spielberg told Roger Ebert he wanted audiences to be participants in the landing. "It’s easy to point out a couple of shots that are obviously very graphic, but it’s the accumulation of the sequence on Omaha Beach that’s supposed to help the audience understand the physical experience of combat. I didn’t want to do something I’ve done with many of my other movies—allowing the audience to be spectators."

Veterans who screened the film said it was the most accurate depiction of D-Day they had ever seen. We broke down the craft of the scene here, and Spielberg goes behind the scenes here.

__Glory

The 54th Massachusetts Infantry Regiment, the first all-Black volunteer regiment in the Union Army, was ordered to lead a frontal assault on a heavily fortified Confederate position across an open beach at Fort Wagner. This is Glory 's devastating payoff.

Director Edward Zwick told Den of Geek that initially, the film had more of a focus on Matthew Broderick's character, but he retooled the story to focus more on the soldiers. He was willing to let the film evolve.

"Even in certain action scenes, if you can get to real time and real scale, the camera’s going to see things that you could never imagine. Things happen with the trick of real people and the X-factor of real life that totally then gives you that feeling that you want to have. So I’d like to think my process, even as writing but also as rehearsing, and then in shooting, and then again in the editing, is to try to be soulful to a certain degree and willing to allow something to emerge that wants to emerge."

The final charge carries all of that accumulated feeling into something close to unbearable.

__The Best Years of Our Lives

If you want to understand Memorial Day, watch the opening homecoming sequence in this one.

Three World War II veterans come home to their mid-American city and find that nobody quite knows what to do with them. Director William Wyler was a WWII veteran himself and suffered permanent hearing damage in service.

Per his biography, when he returned to Hollywood, he had one picture left on his contract and made this one. He cast real double amputee Harold Russell as Homer, a Navy vet learning to navigate life without his hands.

__Hacksaw Ridge

Desmond Doss was a combat medic who refused to carry a weapon. The rescue sequence, where he lowers wounded soldiers off a cliff one by one, repeating to himself, "Please, Lord, help me get one more," is the reason the film exists.

Director Mel Gibson told Variety he wanted to "juxtapose the crazy war images with the lyricism of the psalm." Cinematographer Simon Duggan told IndieWire the approach was deliberate containment and keeping the camera "really tight to the storytelling" rather than overwhelming the audience with chaos.

We covered the film's 16-year road to production here.

Lincoln __

The House floor vote on the 13th Amendment is the payoff for 12 years of Spielberg's research and six years of Tony Kushner's writing.

In a Deadline interview, Spielberg described Kushner's section focused on the struggle to pass the amendment as the most compelling part of the screenplay.

"This was going to be a story of his last three years, but the script was 550 pages long. For me, the most compelling part of that screenplay was a 65-page section, which was the struggle to pass the 13th Amendment that abolished slavery. And out of 550 pages, that 65-page section is where I stood up and said that’s it, that’s our story, that’s our film. Tony and I found that the more real estate of Lincoln’s life we covered, the more it diminished him as someone who understood politics, personalities and political theater."

Daniel Day-Lewis reportedly moved Spielberg to tears while filming, which is saying something coming from one of the most experienced directors living today. It's a reminder of what American democracy can look like when the stakes are at their highest.

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