Search - War Movies: WWII Collection on DVD

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Zora Calder | USA | 06/17/2009

(3 out of 5 stars)

"The films, with stars for the ones I particularly liked:

A Walk in the Sun
Gung Ho
**Go for Broke
Corregidor
Ski Troop Attack
**Casablanca Express
The Steel Claw
Desert Commandos
Minesweeper
Bombs Over Burma
Commandos
Pacific Inferno
The Battle of the Eagles
Submarine Alert
The Dawn Express
Five for Hell
*Black Brigade (TV)
Heroes in Hell
Submarine Base
Aerial Gunner

Some of the films from 1943 are, while not at all good, interesting as a bit of history: propaganda films, apparently intending to get lowlifes to enlist, as they featured lowlifes who made their lives finally meaningful by dying nobly. The Italian films all seemed vaguely pro-Axis to me in subtle ways, but perhaps I was imagining that.

Go for Broke is a decent studio B movie about the Japanese-Americans who fought in WWII, Casablanca Express is a perfectly adequate film about trying to protect Winston Churchill on his way to a crucial meeting. The two films about black servicemen that dealt with racism they suffered might seem a bit dated, but I found them interesting.

I only found two films utterly unwatchable and one, The Steel Claw, maddening. In it, a disabled white alcoholic gets a band of guerillas to rescue a captured general on Luzon. Though they're well-armed and experienced fighters, as the white American he automatically orders them around. They're under fire, he yells "get down!", as if these guys wouldn't know that before the white American told them to. And his use of prostitutes is ugly and naive--the star/writer/director seems to think such women actually like their johns. It's Ugly Americanism to the nth degree. Within twenty minutes of the film, I wanted to frag him myself, which is certainly what the guerillas would have done in real life.

"