Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #44634 in DVD
• Brand: Unknown
• Released on: 2007-06-05
• Rating: Unrated
• Aspect ratio: 1.33:1
• Formats: Box set, Black & White, Closed-captioned, Color, DVD, Widescreen, NTSC
• Original language: English
• Subtitled in: English, French
• Number of discs: 6
• Dimensions: 1.20 pounds
• Running time: 745 minutes

Features

• Six action-packed World War II-themed films feature on this collection. The titles included are: 36 HOURS, AIR FORCE, COMMAND DECISION, HELL TO ETERNITY, THE HILL, and THIRTY SECONDS OVER TOKYO. Please see individual titles for synopsis information. Format: DVD MOVIE Genre: DOCUMENTARIES Rating: NR Age: 085391142140 UPC: 085391142140 Manufacturer No: 114214

Studio description
Includes: 36 Hours (1965), Air Force (1943), Command Decision (1948), Hell to Eternity (1960), The Hill (1965), Thirty Seconds Over Tokyo (1944).

Amazon.com
If "Heroes Fight for Freedom" sounds like a rather hysterical label to slap on volume 2 of Warner Home Video's World War II Collection, take it as a hint that the six films in the set are wildly dissimilar in tone, style, reference, and origin, not to mention levels of quality. But don't worry, three of the six are classics, and each of their admittedly lesser companions rates a look. (The bonus features are quite perfunctory, with only a couple of contemporaneous cartoons being of note.)

Tops is Air Force (1943), which director Howard Hawks casually referred to as his "contribution to the war effort." It's also a masterpiece, standing with John Ford's They Were Expendable as the best WWII films Hollywood made while the war was still on. On the evening of December 6, 1941, a B-17 flies out of San Francisco on a routine peacetime training mission to Hickam Field in Hawaii. While en route, the officers and crew overhear radio traffic of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor ("Whatcha got there," somebody asks the radio operator, "Orson Welles?"). They touch down in a smoking world like a vision out of Dante, then hop from one Pacific outpost to the next as the clouds of war roil. The plane itself, the Mary Ann, is the movie's main character; the biggest star, John Garfield, actually gets last billing as her newly assigned tail gunner. Air Force is one of Hawks's supreme guys-doing-their-job movies, and the definitive war-movie portrait of America as a melting-pot of diverse individuals and types making common cause. The ensemble (Garfield, Gig Young, John Ridgely, Arthur Kennedy, the great Harry Carey, et al.) is superbly directed, there's a strong Dudley Nichols screenplay (with an uncredited contribution by William Faulkner) and breathtaking editing of the battle scenes (which won George Amy an Oscar), and the camerawork is by James Wong Howe in peak form.

Another must-see among WWII movies is Thirty Seconds over Tokyo (1944), about the preparation for and execution of a 400-mile bombing raid to carry the war to Japan itself mere months after Pearl Harbor. Spencer Tracy plays James H. Doolittle, architect of the raid, but the emotional core of the film is B-25 pilot Ted Lawson (Van Johnson) and his wife, Ellen (Phyllis Thaxter). Lawson's bestselling memoir (with Bob Considine) of his training for the secret mission, his group's launching from the aircraft carrier Hornet, and his crash landing and protracted ordeal in China--where he lost a leg--has been faithfully served by director Mervyn LeRoy & co. The film is long on homely detail and all-American decency (including remarkably outspoken regret over the unavoidability of civilian casualties) but achieves its greatest impact in the raid itself, realized with Oscar-winning special effects and mostly allowed to play in riveting silence.

The other topnotch item in the set is The Hill (1965), made by Sidney Lumet in that period when his name was synonymous with powerhouse drama guaranteed to leave audiences wrung out and limp (Fail-Safe, The Pawnbroker). Still, there was a bigger name involved: Sean Connery breaking with his James Bond image to portray a volcanically outraged inmate at a British Army prison camp in Libya. The titular Hill is a steep mound erected on the desert floor for him and other British soldiers who have violated the (often absurd) rules of the military game to buck sacks of sand up one side and down the other, like so many sons of Sisyphus. Ian Hendry is unforgettably loathsome as the sadistic noncom Williams; other captors include Harry Andrews, Ian Bannen, and Michael Redgrave, while Connery's fellow prisoners are played by Ossie Davis, Roy Kinnear, Jack Watson, and Alfred Lynch. In Oswald Morris's black-and-white cinematography, you can almost feel the desert sun like a hot brick.

Command Decision (1949) takes on the kind of questions that Hollywood could never have raised during the war--questions about the cruel responsibilities of command, including the responsibility to spend a great many lives to save thousands more in the future. In 1943, from an American airbase in the English countryside, a campaign of daylight bombardment is being waged against aircraft factories in Germany. For much of the way to their targets and back, the bombers are bereft of fighter escort and at the mercy of the Luftwaffe. The mortality rate is shocking--but perhaps, for reasons that are not widely known, necessary. Clark Gable (himself an air war veteran) plays the commandant who has to call the next day's target, and the film never leaves command HQ; the closest we get to combat is a scene of an untrained crewman trying to land a crippled plane. Command Decision is earnest but outshone by the similarly focused Twelve O'Clock High. The main problem is that it's based on--and essentially remains--a play, static in setting and schematic in its arguments. Still, those arguments should be heard.

Hell to Eternity (1962) sets out to tell the true story of Guy Gabaldon, a white Angeleno raised from boyhood by a family of Japanese-Americans. Following the attack on Pearl Harbor, his parents are interned, his brothers enlist to fight in Europe, and Guy (Jeffrey Hunter)--after clearing it with mama-san--offers the Marines his services in the Pacific as an interpreter. During the battle for Saipan (reenacted by director Phil Karlson on the island of Okinawa) he undergoes several transformations, from reluctant warrior to implacable avenger to, ultimately, a truce-seeker trying to save lives on both sides. That's a fine-sounding dramatic trajectory, but the two-hours-plus Allied Artists production is patchy, with some amateurish acting in the Los Angeles portion (including an early appearance by George Takei) and an excruciating, wishfully raunchy night of shore leave in Hawaii before shipping out to the war zone. Sessue Hayakawa of Bridge on the River Kwai fame dominates the final sequences as the Japanese commandant.

WWII films of the '60s were often half caper-movie, with ornate and muscular missions behind enemy lines dreamed up by the likes of Alistair MacLean. The caper in 36 Hours (1965)--which was dreamed up by Roald Dahl--reverses the dynamics. A U.S. diplomatic courier (James Garner) with knowledge of the plans for D-Day is kidnapped, drugged, and taken to a sanatorium surrounded by forest. He wakes up in the presence of solicitous doctors and staff who seem to be fellow Americans and ever so happy to have him back after all those years in a coma. War's long over, of course; we won--and isn't it a good thing the Allies scrapped that first, wacky invasion plan they almost used? The plan maybe he still remembers?... 36 Hours is an intriguing thriller up to a point--and the moment when Garner catches on to the trick is a grabber--but George Seaton's direction is pedestrian and the production has a soundstage-y look. Rod Taylor takes acting honors as the sympathetic German psychiatrist in charge of the plot, under the suspicious eyes of SS man Werner Peters. --Richard T. Jameson

Customer Reviews

One Hell of a collection...
The older ones were far better, than the more recent ones.

I could end my review here, but it would be unfair, considering the effort made to put this collection together.
So let's start at the beginning:

1. "Air Force" (1943) - B&W - 124 min.
starring John Garfield and Gig Young, is a simple tale of a crew of a Flying Fortress struggling their way from "The Day of Infamy" through the entire Pacific War. (Watch the B-17 closely, it was a true Flying Fortress and alas was lost in the process of fighting that war!);

2. "Thirty Seconds Over Tokyo" (1944) - B&W - 139 min.
Who doesn't remember Spencer Tracy in this one, together with Van Johnson and Robert Walker? This too, is based on a true story of WWII, but this time we're talking about a B-25 "Mitchell" crew and its deeds that led to the first bombing of the Capital of Japan.

3. "Command Decision" (1948) - B&W - 112 min.
with Clark Gable at the helm and based on a stage play, comes through from a different perspective. What do Commanders do, when it comes to gambling with people's lives (in this case Bomber Pilots and Crews), when the stakes are high and the mission is key for victory or defeat?
Assisting Mr. Gable (who himself was an Air Force Captain and flew real missions, hence knows what he's talking about...) are Walter Pidgeon, again Van Johnson, Brian Donlevy and Charles Bickford.

4. "Hell to Eternity" (1960) - B&W - 132 min.
The story of a man, raised in an American-Japanese family, confronted with the War in the Pacific. Based on a true story, this is the tale of a man facing prejudice from both sides and who manages to win his internal struggle by even capturing, single-handedly, hundreds of Japanese Soldiers. Incredible but true!

5. "36 Hours" (1964) - B&W - 115 min.
A "What If..." movie, starring a powerful James Garner. We are in 1950, the war is over and the lead Character wakes from a Coma in an American Military Hospital. He suffers from Amnesia, he can't recall anything.
Only that we are not in 1950, but rather in 1944, in a mock-up Hospital built by German Intelligence and the setting has carefully been prepared in order to find out where the Allies will finally land.
More than a true War Movie, this is far more a Spy Thriller, and tightly knit at that, so well told it is almost believable as a true story.
These are 36 Hours you won't easily forget.
Together with Mr. Garner appear actors of the caliber of Rod Taylor and Eva Marie Saint, together with Werner Peters as a Gestapo Man (an actor I love to hate).

All DVD transfers are clean and the sound although mostly in 2.0 channel Mono, is sharp and clear.
This is a very interesting Collection, even from a purely analytical standpoint. I must compliment the people at Warner's for having chosen 5 very significant movies out of dozens others and having offered them in this very reasonably priced set.
If more, of the same quality were produced, I am sure people would flock to buy them.

dvd availability
I'm not sure about THE HILL, but the other 5 titles in this collection have NOT been on DVD--at least legitimiate disk. AIR FORCE, THIRTY SECONDS OVER TOKYO, and COMMAND DECISION are all wonderful war or combat films (there's a difference between the two--see the books on the genre by Mike Mayo, Thomas Doherty and Jeanine Basinger). It's great that other classics such as THE PURPLE HEART and even the less stellar SO PROUDLY WE HAIL are finally being released this spring on DVD. Collectors and film historians should appreciate all of these titles that really reflected the country's mood between l94l and l945. Propaganda was such a vital component on the home front and these movies show us the nationalistic side of the American people at the time.

Good Collection
Some of these may have been available before now, but none in a WWII set that includes shorts and cartoons from the period. Pick any two you like and they are worth the price. "Command Decision" with Clark Gable as General Casey, a serious officer commanding a bomber group in England, is wonderfully realistic. "Thirty Seconds Over Tokyo" with Spencer Tracy as Jimmy Doolittle leading the first bomb raid on Japan is excellent. The others are just bonus as far as I'm concerned and a very good one at that. "The Hill" is a good English military prisoner movie with Sean Connery as a prisoner that must buck up under a tyranical Commander. "36 Hours" with James Garner is good espionage movie. Air Force is resonably decent account of a B-17 crew that witnessed Pearl Harbor starring John Ridgely. "Hell to Eternity" with Jeffrey Hunter and David Janssen is about Hispanic boy raised by Japanese-Americans and fought for United States. Fans of WWII movies should enjoy the set. I recommend it. Especially for a Fathers Day gift.