Rewinding World War II (October/november 1985 | Volume: 36, Issue: 6)

Rewinding World War II

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Authors: Geoffrey C. Ward

Historic Era:

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October/november 1985 | Volume 36, Issue 6

One of every four American homes is now said to house a video cassette recorder. Mine became one of them last winter. A VCR takes some getting used to. I still find myself watching a good program and muttering that somebody should invent a way to record such things, only to remember too late that all I have to do is push the right button; my jumble of homemade tapes—what the merchandisers hope I’ll call my video library—includes the last halves of a lot of shows. I have had better luck renting prerecorded tapes at my local store, though that has its hidden dangers too; revisiting favorite old movies can be disillusioning. Citizen Kane holds up, but have you seen La Dolce Vita lately? Or Abe Lincoln in Illinois? Or even She Wore a Yellow Ribbon, which I paid to see seven times on its first go-round in 1949?

Historical documentaries have largely been overlooked by the companies that package and sell cassettes, and rental stores rarely stock them, because the demand has been so small. The pickings are still slim for anyone seriously interested in history on film, but prospects have lately begun to brighten—provided you are willing to purchase rather than rent.

There are some 9,000 titles listed in the latest encyclopedic cassette catalog from Video Shack—not counting porno films, of the making of which there is evidently no end. Of that 9,000, just 222 are listed as “documentaries,” and a good many of those sound as if they’d been drawn from the table of contents of The National Enquirer : a full-color compilation of “the greatest car-racing accidents of all time”; Am I Normal? , a sex-education film meant to comfort pubescent boys; The Amazing World of Psychic Phenomena , including “actual footage of ghosts”; and Alien from Spaceship Earth , which “raises the question: Are we being invaded from outer space? And can we defend ourselves?”

 

Only seventy-odd of these documentaries can be said to have much to do with history. There are a few distinguished films here, including The Sorrow and the Pity, Marcel Ophuls’s shrewd dissection of France during the Occupation, but they are buried among cassettes that spin paranoid theories about the murders of Lincoln and the Kennedys and an alarming profusion of ghoulish treatments of the Nazis—including one simply called War Atrocities, which more than makes good on its promise to offend “more sensitive viewers.”

But World War II is also the subject of three serious documentary series now available for home use. None of them is cheap—$19.95 to $29.95 per cassette. All three were originally made for broadcast television and are worth seeing. One is a masterpiece.

I was twelve years old when Victory at Sea was first shown on NBC in 1952. My parents had only