The earlier review is accurate enough. This is a documentary of World War II in the west, from the D Day landings to the surrender of the German Armed Forces. It's all news footage and maps, without any talking heads. The narration is by dozens of people, mostly from the UK and the US, and is by turns folksy and formal. Some of the footage is brutal. On the whole, the film reflects the feelings of most of the Allies at the time, and the view of the Germans -- all Germans -- is pitiless.
Some of the voices in the narration sounded familiar and I kept trying to identify them. They're not the voices of major movie stars like Cary Grant but rather supporting actors and players from movies and radio. (Kids, radio came before television, see, and there were these radio plays, either funny or dramatic, with names like "The Whistler" and "Inner Sanctum", and they used to employ lots of popular actors. As you may or may not know, on radio you can only hear their voices.) I thought I heard Jean Louis Heydt, Deborah Kerr, Sam Levine, and Peter Lawford, but might have been mistaken.
From the script: "Through hedges and fields they carved their heavy way." "Down we cast the gauntlet, challenging (the enemy) to stand and fight!" To the extent that the narration is folksy -- or corny, if you like -- there's good reason for it. Among the writers were Harry Brown who specialized in Army banter and gave us the exceptional war film, "A Walk In The Sun." And the more florid dialog probably belongs to Paddy Chayevsky, the man who gave us, "I'm mad as hell and I'm not going to TAKE IT anymore!"
The message of the movie is spelled out "loud and clear." We won this by all pulling together. Let's keep on keeping on. One folksy GI voice says, "The ones who want to start World War III haven't seen this one -- or not enough of it." That was probably aimed at Stalin but the lesson still applies today.
Much of the footage will be familiar to today's viewers but it was fresh in 1945 -- the concentration camps, the burning jeep, The British soldier waiting to leap from his landing craft into the sea on D Day and being tapped on the shoulder by the guy behind him and being startled by it. But, in the spirit of internationalism, some battles are described, however briefly, that are unfamiliar to most Americans -- the clearing of the Antwerp estuaries, for instance, an essential but dirty job with no glamor attached to it, carried out chiefly by Canadians.
It's also a bit surprising to see Operation Market Garden described in such detail. It was, after all, an unmitigated Allied defeat, and from 1945 one expects only a flag-waving panorama of Allied victories.
Full credit is given to all the Allied nations involved, with the Czechs, Poles, and Free French being mentioned. All of the other Armed Forces are mentioned as well -- the air forces and the navies. No reference to the US Coast Guard, although some of its members show up on screen. One enlisted man in the USCG managed to win a posthumous Medal of Honor at Normandy.
Nobody should expect a history lesson from this documentary. It's impressionistic and segues insensibly from one battle to the next. The maps are no help. In the print I saw, they were all furry with details and had cartoon airplanes, flags, and soldiers drawn onto them, as if done by Walt Disney while drunk. Any more confusing and they'd look like a work by Jackson Pollack. Yet, the editors can't be blamed for that. They did a good job of stitching combat footage together. (Not a frame is interpolated from the Pacific theater.) And, showing the war's end, we see the flames of artillery firing, the images and sounds slowly receding from foreground to background, growing infrequent, until the last of the little white spots disappears. It's an imaginative touch.
Some of the voices in the narration sounded familiar and I kept trying to identify them. They're not the voices of major movie stars like Cary Grant but rather supporting actors and players from movies and radio. (Kids, radio came before television, see, and there were these radio plays, either funny or dramatic, with names like "The Whistler" and "Inner Sanctum", and they used to employ lots of popular actors. As you may or may not know, on radio you can only hear their voices.) I thought I heard Jean Louis Heydt, Deborah Kerr, Sam Levine, and Peter Lawford, but might have been mistaken.
From the script: "Through hedges and fields they carved their heavy way." "Down we cast the gauntlet, challenging (the enemy) to stand and fight!" To the extent that the narration is folksy -- or corny, if you like -- there's good reason for it. Among the writers were Harry Brown who specialized in Army banter and gave us the exceptional war film, "A Walk In The Sun." And the more florid dialog probably belongs to Paddy Chayevsky, the man who gave us, "I'm mad as hell and I'm not going to TAKE IT anymore!"
The message of the movie is spelled out "loud and clear." We won this by all pulling together. Let's keep on keeping on. One folksy GI voice says, "The ones who want to start World War III haven't seen this one -- or not enough of it." That was probably aimed at Stalin but the lesson still applies today.
Much of the footage will be familiar to today's viewers but it was fresh in 1945 -- the concentration camps, the burning jeep, The British soldier waiting to leap from his landing craft into the sea on D Day and being tapped on the shoulder by the guy behind him and being startled by it. But, in the spirit of internationalism, some battles are described, however briefly, that are unfamiliar to most Americans -- the clearing of the Antwerp estuaries, for instance, an essential but dirty job with no glamor attached to it, carried out chiefly by Canadians.
It's also a bit surprising to see Operation Market Garden described in such detail. It was, after all, an unmitigated Allied defeat, and from 1945 one expects only a flag-waving panorama of Allied victories.
Full credit is given to all the Allied nations involved, with the Czechs, Poles, and Free French being mentioned. All of the other Armed Forces are mentioned as well -- the air forces and the navies. No reference to the US Coast Guard, although some of its members show up on screen. One enlisted man in the USCG managed to win a posthumous Medal of Honor at Normandy.
Nobody should expect a history lesson from this documentary. It's impressionistic and segues insensibly from one battle to the next. The maps are no help. In the print I saw, they were all furry with details and had cartoon airplanes, flags, and soldiers drawn onto them, as if done by Walt Disney while drunk. Any more confusing and they'd look like a work by Jackson Pollack. Yet, the editors can't be blamed for that. They did a good job of stitching combat footage together. (Not a frame is interpolated from the Pacific theater.) And, showing the war's end, we see the flames of artillery firing, the images and sounds slowly receding from foreground to background, growing infrequent, until the last of the little white spots disappears. It's an imaginative touch.