Search - The Big Lift on DVD

MPAA Rating: NR Content Advisory: Questionable for Children Movie Release: 1950 DVD Release: 01/25/2000 Format: DVD - Black and White Audio Tracks: English SwapaDVD Credits: 1 Number of Discs: 1 Run Time: 2 hrs 0 mins Studio: Roan Archival Group Total Copies: 2 Genres: Spy Film, Action, Drama, War, War Drama See Also: The Big Lift

Filmed on location, The Big Lift is a reenactment of the Berlin airlift of 1948. Flexing their postwar muscles, the Russians blockade the Western sector, refusing to allow the Allies to ship supplies to the starving Berliners. From their headquarters at Templehof Airport, a group of courageous American flyers risk their lives to transport supplies by air. Paul Douglas plays a ground operations sergeant with several scores to settle (he had a hard time of it as a POW during the war), while Montgomery Clift costars as a pilot who inaugurates a doomed love affair with German girl Cornell Borchers. ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide

Montgomery Clift - Danny MacCullough
Paul Douglas - Hank Kowalski
Cornell Borchers - Frederica Burkhardt
O.E. Hasse - Stieber
Bruni Loebel - Gerda

The Big Lift is one of a handful of postwar movies made under the aegis of Darryl F. Zanuck at 20th Century-Fox. Having served in uniform in the European war, Zanuck, as chief of production at Fox, felt that there were still important movies to be made about World War II, and with his unique access to actual Defense Department combat footage from the war, and to the various occupied zones in Berlin and other cities still being fought over by the contending victors, Zanuck and Fox could generate a special kind of film. The Big Lift was special, not just in its excellent direction and acting, but also for its verisimilitude, achieved through shooting at actual locations and through the extensive use of real military personnel for almost all of the non-starring roles. It also had the misfortune to fall out of copyright at the end of the '70s and has since been difficult to find in a decent edition.
Roan's DVD is better than decent, and has been treated even better than that. Not only are the film elements very clean, but they've been given a good transfer -- one can appreciate anew the bleakness and misery that characterized life in postwar Berlin, which we see in scenes both calm and frantic, most vividly in shots of AWOL U.S. airman Montgomery Clift trying to escape from the Russian zone. And the clean sound allows one to absorb the spectacle, almost Hitchcockian in its mix of suspense and humor, of Clift hiding from American MPs at a bar by joining a motley vocal group on stage singing "Chattanooga Choo-Choo" in German. The movie has been broken down into 18 chapters, which is just about adequate for a picture running exactly 120 minutes with a fair amount of plot. As with other Roan Group archival releases, there's a data file on the disc appended to the film as a supplement, and the menu is fairly easy to navigate, though one wishes that Roan had listed the chapter breakdown on a separate card in addition to breaking it down in the onscreen menu. ~ Bruce Eder, All Movie Guide