by Allan Fish
(UK 1973 1,352m) DVD1
Remember
p Jeremy Isaacs d Peter Batty, David Elstein, Phillip Whitehead, Michael Darlow w Peter Batty, Neal Ascherson, Charles Bloomberg, Courtney Brown, Angus Calder, Charles Douglas Home, David Elstein, Stuart Hood, Jerome Kuehl, Jeremy Isaacs, J.P.W.Mallalieu, Laurence Thompson, David Wheeler, John Williams m Carl Davis narrated by Laurence Olivier
The title of the last of this monumental factual series’ twenty-six episodes is as good a tagline to use as any. Series such as this are all about remembering, acting as testimony. Testimony to what had happened, testimony to uncover the truth, testimony even to the talents of the people who made it. When the series finished its run, thirty years after the end of the conflict it covered, it was an astonishing coup. It was compared to the dimly recalled BBC masterpiece of a decade previously, The Great War. That somehow had needed to be done in the days of black and white, whereas Jeremy Isaacs’ baby used colour where possible. From every critical pulpit, praise was unanimous, but another three decades on, does it remain so?
In general, I’d reply in the affirmative. Even in this era of information overload of so many by-the-numbers documentaries on each individual incident of World War II on The History Channel that one almost sees it as The War Channel, it still has an inherent addictive, horrifying power. Its narrative and structure detailed enough to overcome familiarity with the subject, rather like learning history from a new teacher. Not until the BBC set about the marathon People’s Century a quarter of a century later was its scope and cost matched. It doesn’t try to be an all-encompassing master-class on the conflict, as the detail included in each episode could easily be expanded into a whole set of books the size of Encyclopaedia Britannica, but it does serve as the best introduction at a basic, scholarly level, to the conflict one could ask for. If one wants detail on specific events in the war, there are other places to go. For example, one episode on the Holocaust is meagre indeed, but we have Shoah and the Beeb’s recent Auschwitz for that. It more than deserves its place chronologically on the shelf alongside Ken Burns’ The Civil War and Tony Essex’s aforementioned The Great War.
The epic commences literally at the beginning of the rise to power of Nazism, through the early days under Hindenburg through to dictatorship that plunged Europe into a second nightmarish conflict less than a quarter century after the first armistice. Leslie Halliwell observed that, if he had a complaint, it was that the euphoria of the final victory wasn’t really related, and this is true, but perhaps a better accusation would be that for a series that detailed every aspect of the war, it didn’t really go into detail on the first embers of hatred that lead to the war – namely, the Versailles treaty. Even that most vilified butcher Douglas Haig had foretold that too harsh a treaty on Germany would sow the seeds of future hatred, and I think Isaacs’ and his team missed a trick here. Saying that Hitler was “delivering them to the promised land” was true enough, but sort of missed the bigger question, namely why he’d been allowed into power in the first place. There was much detail and personal testimony, but little analysis, little debate. It seems churlish to pick holes in such a splendid tapestry, but the holes are there, papered over by such accurate analogies as “the new Germany was a bundle of different interests and grievances held together by the strap of the National Socialist Party, and the buckle of the strap was Hitler.”
What maintains its great status, of course, is the superb narration of Olivier and its value as testimonial reportage, with interviews from such varied people as James Stewart, Hitler’s final secretary Traudl Junge and one time Spandau prison inmate Albert Speer magnificent coups. Not to devalue the testimonies of the less famous, such as one Hungarian Jew recounting his unenviable tasks at Auschwitz, despairingly murmuring that “each person is capable of doing the worst things to live another minute.” Take time to see it, without fail, and follow the eponymous warning of that last episode.
One of the first DVDs I bought, along with ‘The Great War’, and I still haven’t gotten around to watching it..
We had a photographic encyclopaedia of the Second World War when I was as a lad and I used to repeatedly pore over it to the extent that I was more familiar with battlefield locations than I was with most Irish towns.
I’ve also read Shirer’s monumental ‘The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich’, and other major conflict histories, so the interest is there.
I’d previously recorded it off the tv, and had looked in one or two episodes and Olivier’s narration has the kind of authority and power to match the images
It’s exceptional, Jim. The Great War is even greater and will be upcoming, but this is still the benchmark for WWII series.
One of television’s supreme masterpieces, a mini-series that remains (like the volume THE RISE AND FALL OF THE THIRD REICH) a lasting reference point for all-time. Olivier’s narration is justly celebrated.
One day I’ll have to nail you to the floor to watch the full The Great War.
My interest in history probably started with this series, and Carl Davis’s score is still the soundtrack of the war in my head. I’ve seen it numerous times over in nearly forty years, and a friend just sat through it for the first time on the Military Channel last year and was just as impressed.
I watched this with my husband a couple of years back (on the History Channel) and we were both very impressed – Olivier’s narration really makes it, as you say. A very great series.
On my Netflix – and now that Brideshead Revisited turns out to be out Instant, it can probably be bumped up in the series queue.
You raise an interesting point here – “If one wants detail on specific events in the war, there are other places to go. ” I think the biggest complaint launched against surveys like this (or, for that matter, Mark Cousins’ Story of Film) is that in sampling so much, they sink their teeth into very little. I think the best docs of this sort are able to move nimbly to summarize and cover a lot of ground yet also able to find the space to meditate here and there, stringing along moments whether they be enjoyable (as they mostly are in Story of Film) or sobering (as I assume they are here) like a series of pearls on a necklace.
I am generally a big fan/defender of the “big picture” approach. I look forward to watching this.
In my opinion, this is one of the best documentaries done on WWII. My husband bought the series on DVD a few years ago and we watched the whole thing in under a month. I’ve even used clips to show kids that I tutor, and they are fascinated by it. And Olivier’s narration could not be more perfect.
Thanks for reviewing this and drawing attention to it. 🙂
Oh I’ll definitely have to check this out. As standards for these types of programs go, I’m not sure how it compares, but a Canadian program was produced for the CBC a few years ago titled Love, Hate and Propaganda. It was really well done, so I highly recommend it. I’ve only seen the WWII one, but there were others produced for the Cold War and the current wars in the Middle East.
David
That title sounds as if it might be at least in part inspired by a book I read more than 30 years ago, ‘The First Casualty’, by Philip Knightley
(The title comes from the statement by American Senator Hiram Johnson in 1917 “The first casualty when war comes, is truth,” )