My father, a Marine Corps veteran of World War II, was in charge of the 1964 Memorial Day observance in Wichita, Kan., and the main speaker -- a winner of two Academy Awards -- was our houseguest: Harold Russell. I was very nervous about meeting him and shaking hands with him the first time.

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That was because he had no hands. They had been blown off during combat. Instead of hands, two prosthetic metal claws protruded from his suitcoat sleeves and -- hard as I tried -- I couldn't take my eyes off them, and he, of course, noticed.

"There's only two things I can't do with these that everybody else can do with hands," he said. I asked what they were. "Open a car door and eat peanuts," Russell replied, with a casual smile.

We fell in love with him instantly -- as did millions of American moviegoers who saw and loved him as Homer Parrish in William Wyler's classic World War II film "The Best Years of Our Lives" (1946), the story of three American servicemen who come home to Boone City to pick up the pieces of their lives and come to grips with their physical and psychological war wounds.

In the wake of the greatest collective national and international trauma in world history, the most amazing thing about that movie (aside from Russell's powerfully fine performance, and how therapeutic audiences found it) was how soon after the war it was made -- barely a year.

In our own post-Sept. 11, 2001 world, with the recent releases of "United 93" and "World Trade Center," it raises the cinematic question: How soon is too soon?

The question must be narrowed: Too soon for whom? For the industry, the audience, the art or the history books?

Audience reaction

The industry in general -- Universal, in particular -- was understandably nervous in April when patrons in some venues were upset just by seeing previews of "United 93." The manager of AMC Loews Lincoln Square 12 theater in New York pulled the trailer after receiving complaints from tearful customers. ("I don't think people are ready for this," he told Newsweek.) In Los Angeles, some in the audience at the Grauman's Chinese Theatre shouted "Too soon!" when the trailer appeared.

Indeed, British writer-director Paul Greengrass, "93's" helmsman, said he was asked at every interview whether it was too soon to bring the 9/11 story to the screen. His answer: "Nonsense," noting that not a day has gone by over the past five years without the events of that disaster occupying the media and the public.

When it was released on April 28, "United 93" received almost unanimous critical acclaim: "Respectful, inspiring, in no way exploitative or emotionally manipulative," said the New York Post. The Post-Gazette and USA Today gave it four stars. David Denby in The New Yorker said it was "a tremendous experience of fear, bewilderment and resolution, and, when you replay the movie in your head afterward, you are likely to think that Greengrass made all the right choices."

But critics are hard-boiled. How would it play in Peoria? Aptly expressing Hollywood's fears about its commercial appeal, the headline for one Canadian review of the picture described it as "The Most Powerful Film No One Will Want to See."

The verdict, when it finally came in from Peoria, was favorable. Moviegoers turned out for "United 93" in respectable -- if not landslide -- numbers, taking in $11.5 million its first weekend, second only to the Robin Williams comedy "RV," which earned $16.4 million (and played on twice as many screens). It stayed in the top 10 box-office list for five weeks, grossing some $31 million to date, not bad at all for a movie that cost just about $15 million to make.

"The American public spoke out, and clearly what it was saying was that it was not too soon for this film," crowed Universal's marketing chief, Nikki Rocco.

Roughly the same experience awaited Oliver Stone's much bigger-budget "World Trade Center." Before its release, Stone was busy defending himself against charges of insensitivity and exploitation. The widow of one firefighter killed on 9/11 was especially hard on him. But many survivors and families of those who died in the tragedy were supportive.

"It's a healthy movie, a clean movie," Stone said when the movie was released. "It doesn't offend. It can hurt, it can be hard to go through, you can cry, but I think you'll come out cleaned and healed. There's something to be said about facing the fears, confronting them, demythologizing them."

"WTC" opened strong with a $26 million gross its first week and has earned more than $55.6 million total receipts to date, closing in on the break-even figure of its $63 million budget.

Learning from the past

European writers and filmmakers have been rather quicker and fiercer about creating movies based on bloody current events. Sergei Eisenstein's "Battleship Potemkin" (1925) and "Ten Days That Shook the World" (1928) celebrated the Russian revolutions of 1905 and 1917 -- and revolutionized the art of film -- with direct treatment of the conflicts, instead of sentimentalized depictions of their aftermath.

Erich Maria Remarque's definitive World War I novel, "All Quiet on the Western Front," was not filmed until 1930, 12 years after the war ended, and it was a devastating condemnation of that conflict, rather than a flag-waving victory celebration of it.

World War II and its clearer villains were a different matter, and potent pictures such as Charles Chaplin's "The Great Dictator" (1940) and "Guadalcanal Diary" (1943) began to appear while the battles were still raging. The former remains a brilliant historical milestone. The latter, though one of the best war films to come out of Hollywood, hasn't held up as well.

It would take two decades and three directors to get full perspective and fashion "The Longest Day" (1962), last and biggest of the World War II epics, with a cast of literally thousands in reenacting the Allied invasion of Normandy, and 36 more years for "Saving Private Ryan" (1998) to top it in terms of relentless realism and harrowing battle action.

In between those two came certain standouts, such as Franklin Schaffner's "Patton" (1970), the George C. Scott tour de force that won seven Oscars including Best Picture. But never before or after World War II would a cataclysmic event be so unanimously regarded as a "heroic" subject for the movies. Even the 1963 assassination of President John F. Kennedy remained largely unfilmed as a feature until Oliver Stone's controversial "JFK" (1991).

The reason for that, aside from the controversy, was Vietnam. Never before had an American war or national trauma so split the public, including filmmakers.

John Wayne's jingoistic "Green Berets" (1968) not only failed to rally people behind the Best & the Brightest U.S. warmakers but also stoked a new generation of anti-war directors, such as Brian DePalma, whose first film, "Greetings" (1968), viciously satirized the draft.

If you looked hard at "Greetings" and knew what you were looking for, you could catch the 25-year-old Robert De Niro in a bit part. Not for another decade could you catch him in another Vietnam-related film: "The Deer Hunter" (1978), one of the first serious theatrical examinations of that war's toll on the American soldiers who fought it.

A year later, Francis Ford Coppola's "Apocalypse Now" (1979) proved an even darker, more pessimistic vision. It would take the distance of another decade for the more focused, mainstream-oriented Vietnam films like Stone's "Platoon" (1986) and "Born on the Fourth of July" (1989), Stanley Kubrick's "Full Metal Jacket" (1987) and Spaulding Gray's not-so-mainstream monologue-film "Swimming to Cambodia" (1987), along with Roland Joffe's horrific "The Killing Fields," to address the dehumanizing holocaust of Southeast Asia in full.

The real deal

So much, briefly, for the industry and the art. What about history -- and audience interest in it?

Perhaps the most hard-hitting subsequent example of a successful "art" film based on a real-life disaster is Ridley Scott's "Black Hawk Down" (2001), the unfictionalized story of the disastrous 1993 U.S. mission in Somalia.

But, in fact, the most striking development in audience and historical film components in recent years has been produced not by feature films as much as the phenomenal rebirth and burgeoning of documentaries.

Michael Moore's bitter "Bowling for Columbine" (2002) pilloried the NRA for the school massacre in Colorado in 1999, winning the Best Documentary Oscar for its trouble and breaking box-office records for its genre. His "Fahrenheit 911" did the same for George W. Bush's handling of the terrorist attacks just two years after the event -- with even more polarizing results.

One thing for sure is that, thanks to new video technology, ad-hoc docs are being made and distributed faster than ever. Davis Guggenheim's Al Gore film, "An Inconvenient Truth," has been a smash hit, by documentary standards. The former Veep surely wishes he had attracted so many people to his 2000 campaign appearances.

In the 21st century, "disaster docs" often get their start (or a trial run) on television, where HBO, Showtime and a wide assortment of production companies are moved by the medium's carnivorous appetite to churn them out in quantity -- if in varying quality. Made-for-TV movies about the Oklahoma City Federal Building bombing and the Quecreek Mine disaster, for instance, seemed to materialize almost instantly after the events. So did a certain amount of 9/11 schlock.

But just when we're tempted to put down the small-screen's efforts, along comes Spike Lee's "When the Levees Broke" just last month, a superb documentary account of Hurricane Katrina and its mismanaged relief efforts.

Purdue University film professor William J. Palmer compares disaster-filming to the grieving process: "Just like a spouse mourning a death, there is a proper time to wait before one starts dating. The same is true for Hollywood. With past events, such as the Vietnam War and Watergate, there was a [longer] gap before films were produced. The trend is different for 9/11."

Financially, more and more, filmmakers are finding gold somewhere -- almost everywhere -- over the disaster rainbow. Artistically, at Oscar time, the makers of such movies are coming away with statuettes. The factual accuracy and credibility of those pictures is increasing (or, at least, increasingly easy to check).

And too soon for audiences?

Evidently, as far as fans are concerned, not soon enough.