Reviews

Somebody spent a lot of someone's money on this gag-reflex inducing literal journey through fecal matter and snot.....this no more a sci-fi story than The Brady Bunch......as a vision of Hell, there would seem to be some purpose, albeit still not possible to sit through.....always thought Russians are psychotic as a group, their actors and artists beyond hope.....

Why Netfix put this on their list is mute testimony to the growing crap-factor of their entire catalog.....way too many horrid SciFi Channel movies, IFC garbage films and really bad independent productions financed by dad and mommy......this particular Russian film reflects the debauchery of Eurotrash art.

There is no doubt she is one of our finest young actresses, but Dakota succeeds in a very important area of film acting.....the camera eats her up. Her haunting eyes draw you in, and her characters are the better for it. She has grown into a beauty, and one hopes the often fatal hubris of Hollywood will pass her by. The fact that she and her co-star were in Spielberg movies is testament to their talent and validity. I wish them both great fortune and longevity in that sorry business. Yes, this plot has been done to death, but there is a realism in the details of dying that make this a great film. My only critique is not really a critique, but the mother's character, as played by the fine Olivia Williams, is very disconcerting.....a disturbing portrait of a very flawed person. I may buy the DVD, nonetheless.....highly recommended.

Quite possibly the worst community theater "actors" on the planet got together with a seriously deluded writer/director and made this piece of flotsam.....ghastly....hilariously bad acting......incomprehensible plot and script.......uncomfortably inferior writing and delivery of badly written dialogue......apparently, anybody that contributed money to this project was cast in a speaking role....so many characters that it was impossible for continuity......the only good work was the actual camera operation and special effects.....all wasted by community theatre-quality direction......somebody in that cast had big money, because Red Box got paid to put it in their machines....I turned it off after 15 minutes of gawping in wonder....

I'm halfway through this series on Netflix, and I am impressed. I never heard of the channel islands, and the fact that they were thoroughly English, and only 10 miles from Nazi French soil at the height of the Battle of Britain is a piece of history I have missed. This is a very unusual and interesting series.

I was pleased to see Joanna Froggart from "Downton Abbey". a very beautiful and talented actress, and the actress with the first name Saskia who plays Froggart's mother, is one of those heartbreakingly beautiful British actresses that eat cameras up.

Historically, the Nazis were SO bad, so incredibly evil and arrogant that it will never be politically incorrect to diss them anywhere, anytime, until, of course, American liberals decide to make it a sin to keep on dissing them. The Nazis in this series are chillingly demonic.

I liked the fact that CGI ME-109s and Stukas were shown in flybys, but as usual, the CGI boys know nothing of aircraft flight characteristics, and thus, the planes came in way too low and way too slow. Most of the explosions from the Stuka bombs were super chinzy, nowhere near as huge and destructive as a 500 lb bomb would be. This is a problem with CGI when they show combat flying and destruction---the planes look good--they just are not flying right---the flying parts are cartooney.

The Brits make great WWII movies---watch and enjoy---just admire the look of the aircraft depicted, and the look of the ladies in a great cast.

I am increasingly amazed that projects like "Dark Fall" and the people responsible for them somehow manage to get investors, and ultimately a distro house like Lionsgate to put it out.

This HAS to be a tax-write off scam, a "Spring Time For Hitler" scenario where the joke's on us, the viewers, and the IRS. No one viewing the rushes, or reading the script could not have missed the fact that this was SciFy Channel quality, low-rent drivel. Ergo, it had to be planned that way so investors could declare a loss on their income for 2012, thus taking the IRS bite and rendering it insignificant.

Everybody gets a REFUND!......a bunch of 20-somethings get a summer project, get stoned, drunk, have sex, all on the investors' dime, which will inevitably come right back to the investors' pockets. Also, how many times has that run-down hospital been used in films lately?

The plot summary on this website for this film is a bit off--a struggling rock musician does NOT head into a studio with his band--he heads into the studio with 2 hot blondes after scoring, in a non-musical way, with both of them.

Great showcase of pre-digital studio reverb processes, as the focus of the film was on a tiled room that was actually used very effectively back in the day to put reverberation on a track. The technical details of the tiled room, and the digital processes of recording shown in the film may have left an audience a bit in the lurch as far as understanding what was going on in the film. However, two hot, leggy blondes, gasping sex on a couch, gallons of blood and evil voices panned left and right on the soundtrack probably would carry the day.....

Very original filmstory, and I liked that....sadly, as is typical of much new millennium music, the "songs" featured in the film really sucked....

OK...I'm a bar-band musician, and I love the ladies....Kathy Bigelow is a heartbreakingly gorgeous woman who just happens to "get it" concerning soldiers and combat. The "hotness" of this combination is mesmerizing. The film actually tells the true story of a woman, we will never know her real name, who also got it---she wanted vengeance, and she understood the young men who would have to do that job.

As in the masterpiece "Ben Hur", the central character in the conflict is never shown full-on---UBL's bloodied nose and beard are seen briefly as he lay in his brand new body bag, courtesy of the United States Navy Seals.

This film doesn't fit the usual Hollywood scenario of gorgeous, eco-consumed, soldier-hating, clueless females portrayed in 99% of the films belched out from the New Hollywood.

I have no idea what Jennifer Chastain's politics are, but I loved the scene of her watching the SEALs goofing off, showing off----her endearing amusement showed the reality of real women, and how they feel about the men who have to do the wet work....

I get the feeling Kathy Bigelow feels the same way---with "Zero Dark Thirty' she has made another Oscar-worthy, stunningly realistic combat film.

With the advent of CGI, the story of the 8th Air Force in Europe during WWII is begging to be told. The visual effects in this film were very good--I just wish they had shown the B-17s over Germany instead. Over a hundred thousand young men were killed in B-17s and B-24s over the skies of the Third Reich. Spielberg needs to make this film.

"Fortress" is a great first step, and I thank the producers for doing what big-time Hollywood could not. They made a much better film than "Memphis Belle", which was so badly Hollywoodized that the story it told about a real airplane and its crew was in no way the real story.

In "Memphis Belle", six actual B-17s were used, along with large radio-controlled models. One B-17 was lost during the production.

With CGI, hundreds of 17s and 24s can fill the skies, and the look is incredibly realistic. "Fortress" is definitely worth seeing.

How did he get ANYBODY to give money for this phony crapfest? Answer that question, and apply the technique to saving the USA from the 15 trillion dollar catastrophe Osama Bin Laden caused us all here in the Country That Supports the Whole World.

Is Claudia Crawford the ULTIMATE WOMAN with her vaginal mouth? Whose idea was it to paint those lips fire-engine red? Does she call herself an actress? She does have great legs, but I don't think German nurses dressed like her and her BFF's in the film. Mini skirts for the Wehrmacht nurse brigades? Were there ANY actors, REAL actors, in this film?

My vote for best acting goes to the P-51 pilot in the cockpit during those fly-over scenes.

Why did I watch THE WHOLE FREAKIN' MOVIE?

I watched this movie on TCM, "The Essentials", and Robert Osborne expressed a poignant comment on the sadness and devastation in this movie, and how it was difficult for him to watch because of memories it brought back.....

That was a stunning and moving statement by a great man, and it was a bullseye declaration soundly echoing for anyone who has gone through the hurricane of a first love affair. "Splendor in the Grass" is discomforting, and does not leave one with any catharsis whatsoever--the look on Natalie Wood's face as she turns away from Bud in his kitchen, starting to head back to the car to leave, was exactly as Mr. Osborne described it--devastating. Deanie and Bud would never be out of love--the ache in their hearts would always be there. For them, staying together was not their destiny, and a more infuriating case of nonsense and chaos will never hit them like that again.

Love and sex between a man and a woman is the greatest gift given to humans, and it is the most lethal. Humans were created with the massive chemical drive toward procreation that the animal kingdom has. Animals simply do the deed when the pheromones explode. They have minuscule logic circuits, and no conscience or morals to douse the fires of sex. Humans unravel, sicken, and die in situations like Deanie and Bud's.....they have nervous breakdowns that they must live with the rest of their lives, all because uncontrollable physical desire fights and dies against social, financial and moral restraints. In the throes of a love affair, it is hard to believe that the same loving God who gave us sex, also supplied us with many antidotes. For my money, there is a loving God, but he had no control over whatever race of advanced, otherworldy beings landed on this planet and started playing games with the gene pool.....God can only watch the results, and hear the prayers, and teach humans how to live after the storm.

If we are lucky the storm hits when we are young, and time has a chance to erode the scars....if we are profoundly unlucky, the storm hits later, devastating entire families.

"Splendor in the Grass" has to be the greatest portrayal of this phenomenon ever created, and it owes this to William Inge, director Elia Kazan, and Natalie Wood, whose aching, profoundly haunting beauty in front of a movie camera is pretty much unmatched in history.

I think you have to be a musician/singer to appreciate and understand this movie. This is an atypical fictional star-is-born-star-falls story. The ending is a shock--it was to me, but then I feel that being an artist myself, it should not have been a surprise.

Artistic ability is the quintessential double bladed sword....the brain of a songwriter/composer/player works differently from regular folks---and not necessarily better.....it is a high-maintenance affliction, this ability to create something from nothing, whether it be with a guitar, a word processor, your voice, or paint brush and palette....a brain that can create also creates it's own horrors, fears and crises....an artist is like an open nerve, exposed to the wind....

Gwennie is one of our most talented and beautiful women on the planet....she lights up any movie she is in--God bless her. Tim McGraw was on fire---he is as good an actor as it gets....I am in awe of his acting chops....how many thousands have payed millions to go to acting schools, and come out short of Tim McGraw's natural talent and intelligence....that's gotta p--- off a lotta Actor's Studio wannabes....

A word about Nashville....popular country music is as enduring as dust on a moth's wings.....wonderful songs are being written and recorded, ....and forgotten weeks later....i believe it is because the general American fan has a short attention span, a trait that will be in our species DNA someday....There are a whole lot of stories like Kelly Cantor in country music, indeed in American show biz in general. It is more lucrative now to be a perverted, criminal politician.

Just saw this on Netflix...it looked strange, and I took a chance. I'm very glad I did....

First of all, the music is still haunting me....this is a musician's movie.....dreams...a very beautiful woman....magic and desire...the things a cat lives and plays for.....if you did not like this movie, you probably couldn't carry a tune with a handle...if you play an instrument, and aren't moved by this movie, you probably play in a church worship band.

Mickey Rourke may have been slightly miscast....my only reservation...he is swollen, bloated and has been rode hard....but perhaps that was perfect for a out and down jazz musician....I think he did a good job. His "The Wrestler" persona was a bit hard to get by...

I heard that he said some things about Megan Fox....maybe he wanted her and she didn't respond...who knows. He was dead wrong about her acting. It was luminous.....I admit her unearthly beauty carried the day, but there was light behind those eyes....everybody was home, and she was an angel named Lily.

I don't think Bill Murray would have signed on to a loser....this was a classic film.

I've got to watch this again---my opinion of Aaron Eckhart (SP?) may change. He looked uncomfortable in the skin of a jarhead sergeant...his interviews in the special features looked forced. Not sure he liked working this movie. Ms. Rodriguez was her usual excellent deadpan girl-soldier, and I enjoyed her presence in the film. Eckhart's performance was top-notch---he is a pro---and the entire cast did well. Remarkable cooperation given by the U.S. Military---weapons and aircraft all current and augmented very well by CGI.

This was a good film---there is a sense of wonder and dread at the beginning, the tension of discovery very well portrayed.

A word here about Roger Ebert's catty comments on the film. Gosh...what a surprise that Roger didn't like a military film showing real men and women doing their very dangerous duty. The list of his favorite films on his website looked like a PBS reject list for movies to be shown after 11pm on a Sunday night. He even commented about the "macho' military "cliches"....what the h*ll does he know about the military and anybody that is a part of the military? Most liberals DO intensely dislike the military....until they are threatened themselves.....

Well, that was more than a word.....Mr. Ebert...stick to what you know...review your little art house films that nobody sees.

This is a pilot's movie--better yet, a pilot with a sense of history and a love of European blondes.....

Even sexier than the redoubtable May Britt, the F-86 is given great coverage and detail in what is generally a good war film. The F-86 arrived just in time to save the U.S. Air Force and Naval Air Force from the Mig 15 and 17, probably the most dangerous aircraft faced by the U.S. up to that time.

The Migs were chewing up the old straight wing fighters the Navy and Air Force were using, and taking a huge, and strangely under-reported toll on the B-29s that were bombing North Korea. Their losses were so bad that the missions were ended until a viable U.S. jet could be mounted against the Mig. The F-86 was that jet.

I was amazed at the number of jet fighters arrayed in the skies above California for the battle sequences. A large contingent of Republic F-84Fs were painted green and sported the red star of the North Korean Air Force. Anybody who knew airplanes saw this inaccuracy, but it did little to detract from the generally very good combat scenes. That is the prime advantage of CGI, today.....they can create a squadron of Mig 15s for a fraction of the cost to attempt to field analog substitutes.

The only problem with CGI is the movement of the CGI generated airplanes---it is too stiff, and the turns they show these planes making, especially the prop fighters created in Michael Bay's "Pearl Harbor", the turns and the speeds are way too steep and fast, and have no liquidity of actual movement. Thus the analog dogfights in "The Hunters" were mesmerizing, and quite beautiful.

"The Hunters" is a fine piece of aviation history, of a little-known and understood war. It was the first all jet war of our time.....fast and very deadly. I continue to wonder, as Fredric March does at the end of a better Korean War movie, "The Bridges at Toko-Ri", ....Where do we get such men....?"

I had the good fortune to see the original film about a year ago, and I was mesmerized by its originality. The story is a masterwork---it approaches vampires unlike any movie or story seen before. It treated vampirism as a handicap.....a terrible illness that literally sucks the life out of mortals around the vampire, the victims and the caretakers.

The new film is superb---getting much more into the supernatural horror of vampirism, but staying so very real at the same time, due to an extraordinary cast.

Chloe is, indeed, like Dakota Fanning, and actress beyond her years, and I was very impressed by her fatalism, and the drive to live that she projected. She was a little girl, and a lethal monster living barefoot in the northern winter.....stunning performance.

The actor playing the boy, name escapes me, has a face the camera eats up.....and he was very very good in the role. Dylan Minnette is an actor I've seen before, and he, too, is well beyond his years in wisdom, emotion and professionalism. He was truly on fire in this film--full of hate and fear....veteran Elias Koteas was frosting on the cake.

The larger budget on make-up and CGI really brought this story forward--this is a true creepfest.....a dark, but lovely story of perpetual young love.

This movie has been on TV a lot lately, and just last night the excellent TCM channel showed it---I'm not sure if it was edited, because it was so engrossing and moving I would not have noticed an F-word or any other classless anomaly that sprung from the baby-boomer generation. "Forrest Gump" is a masterpiece, placing Robert Zemekis on the same deserved pedestal as Spielberg, Ford, Fleming or Minnelli.

The emotional similarity between "Gump" and "GWTW" is evident by the end of the movie. In GWTW we watched as the Old South died and passed into legend....in Gump, we watch the beginning of the death of our entire nation as drug-addled baby-boomers and minorities who never knew a day of slavery in their lives began the slow destruction one of the truly greatest nations in the history of the planet. At the end of Gump, the America that some of its citizens today still insist exists, is actually dead...it's long march into chaos marked by a black wall with over 50,000 names engraved on it. Ironic to realize that the greatest of all American generations, the WWII generation mistakenly pursued the path of war in Vietnam. They thought they were doing the right thing.

Tom Hanks and Gary Sinese were luminous in this film, and Robin Wright Penn was haunting as she mirrored almost every hippie girl encountered in the years from 1968 to 1978.....there is horror and humor and impossible coincidences as Zemekis' Everyman GI tries to get along in a post-American world. In the end it is the white feather of love and life that is blown into the blue skies of Alabama as Forrest watches his little boy get on the school bus.

I realize I have now written of this movie, but I really sit and watch it speechless. When Forrest punches out the yippie freak who manhandles his beloved Jenny, and the lush jangle of Jim McGuinn's Rickenbacker 12-string announces the song "Turn, Turn, Turn", tears fill my eyes every time. One of the greatest match-ups of screen and music I've ever seen.

Ecclesiastics, Pete Seeger and The Byrd's were right....to everything there is a season.... and in 1968, the season began to wane for the American Camelot. "Forrest Gump" should be preserved in a time capsule.

I have to believe that Spielberg was thinking of this film when he storyboarded the masterpiece, "Saving Private Ryan". Old soldiers returning to the exact spot on earth where they probably suffered and lost the most in all their lives is almost unbearably haunting and certainly moving to anyone with with a fully functioning brain.

This movie is a psychological study of command, and dealing with unimaginable fear and stress.

Try to imagine getting up at 4:00am, if you could sleep at all, trying to eat breakfast when your stomach is in your throat. Imagine putting on a wool and leather flight suit when the outside temperature on the ground is 85 digress, knowing that you'll be at 20,000 feet in -40 degrees below zero temperatures for most of the day to come. Imagine firing a 50 caliber machine gun through an open hole in a fuselage moving at close to 200 mph, 40 degrees below zero at a spec in the sky, coming at your airplane, its own set of huge machine guns firing at you.....

When General Savage tells the assembled bomb group to accept the fact that "you are already dead", in order to cope with the fear...there can be no more devastating statement a leader could utter....yet the truth of it was all too real. Young men came and disappeared everyday at a bomber base in England. Entire maintenance crews were formed and reformed as the B-17s they worked on never came back, and the 10 man crews were lost.

Much has been filmed and written about the foot soldiers, and the sailors in WWII.....very little about the young men who were blown out of the sky at 200 mph, 4 miles up in a dead cold sky...these young men kept on coming...showing up at the airbases....flying missions and disappearing forever...they reduced Germany to rubble, flattened their factories, killing German people by the hundreds of thousands until the only country to have started 2 World Wars and lost both of them, shut itself down and surrendered to the rest of the world for the second time in the 20th century.

"12 O'Clock High" is a masterwork....but Steven Spielberg needs to do a remake using today's CGI tech, to show us what really happened to these boys when the cannon of a FW 190 raked the fuselage of a B-17 full of bombs and 10 very young men. Bodies come apart when hit by 50 caliber rounds, and the the cannon shells of the Luftwaffe were even larger, and exploded when they hit. Take us into the cockpit of a B-17 as it spirals toward the ground, the g-force so strong the pilots cannot get out of their seats.

Gregory Peck deserved an Academy Award for his performance....the rest of the cast was superb. I wonder how many actors we could find today to equal the quality of that cast.

The belly landing performed by stunt pilot Paul Mantz at the beginning is one of the greatest landings wheels up or down, ever filmed.

This is an A-List WWII movie.

James Stewart flew more than 26 combat missions in WWII as the commander of a B-24. The infamous Ploesti oil field raids were the most dangerous of the war, and he flew a B-24 50ft off the deck on several runs.

This was a great man, and a fine, fine actor. His commitment to the U.S. Air Force SAC command resonated in this film. His courage in WWII and the courage and sacrifice of that entire WWII generation has been forgotten in what is left of America---the remaining oldsters of that generation, and their baby-boomer offspring who did not sandblast their brains with pot and booze back in the 60s and 70s being the only group that would enjoy this film and remember what it was all like back then. The rest of the "citizens' of this country register nothing when WWI or II is talked about. They do not even remember the Cold War and the hammer of nukes we all lived under, and still are threatened by.

The massive 10-engined (6 props, 4 jets) B-36 was the iconic cornerstone of 50s bomber tech. A magnificent leviathan that could fly for days at very high altitudes, and carry massive amounts of dumb bombs, or, in one aircraft, enough H-bombs to end the world. Google the B-36 and gaze upon an almost surrealistic machine that broke plates, glasses and windows when it flew over with a basso profundo propeller sound unlike anything ever heard before or since.

I remember my father pointing them out, very high in the sky, white contrails feathering back for miles behind them....and that roar.....distant and discordant...you could hear a B-36 fly over even at 40,000 feet.

"Strategic Air Command" was an extended showpiece for that airplane, and a beautiful piece of music, "Symphony of Flight" carries the film into the in-flight scenes that make the movie so transcending of an admittedly formulaic human drama. It is an amazing historical piece that actually shows the transition from props to full jets that the Air Force went through in the 50s. At the end, there is pristine footage of the B-47, the first U.S. jet bomber, and Stewart has an adventure with that.

The cockpit shots of the B-36 and B-47 probably drove Russian spies to a frenzy, but for an aviation buff they were the stuff of dreams.

The crash landing of Stewart's B-36 was done in miniature format, and actually was a weak point of the film. The model was too small to make the crash look realistic---Howard and Theodore Lydecker could have knocked that scene out of the park.....the bad weather landing of the B-47 at the end of the film was also done in miniature, and looked better, reminding me of how much fun special effects must have been in the pre-CGI days.

For an intimate look at a huge Cold warrior, and some beautiful music, plus a look at June Allyson's legs that could make the whole movie for you, I highly recommend "Strategic Air Command"

This film has haunted me since I was a boy. My father was an airline pilot for Eastern Airlines from 1951 - 1986, and I saw this when it came out at an actual theatre with ushers, red velvet seats and balcony seating. The main aspect was the beautiful theme music by Dimitri Tiomkin---I have known that melody and played it in my head all my life. It is the song of my youth---the song of a wonderful America that no longer exists, lost in time, moral and physical decay, as evidenced by the many mean spirited, brain-damaged reviews of this film present in this forum.

When videos first came out, I searched high and low for a video, but found out that Michael Wayne, Duke's eldest son, was holding the film away from video release. Having grown up in Chicagoland, there was a wonderful station, still going, WGN, and would once in a great while, show the movie on TV. Strangely, "The High and the Mighty" was the only film shown on one of the big 3 networks on the night of the day John Wayne died. Tears came at the famous last line of the book and the movie..."Goodnight.....goodnight you ancient pelican".....as Wayne's character Dan Roman walks into the night under the aluminum roof of the DC-4 just landed moments before running out of fuel.

This movie was finally released in DVD, and I have watched it every year, along with my Christmas viewing of "Ben Hur". This movie will always be about my dad, and all his departed pilot buddies from that incredible WWII generation.

The film is a historical piece highlighting the 50s as few other films do. The stewardesses of that day were, indeed, beautiful young women, and the pilots all veterans of an air war unlike the world has ever seen or will see, unless a war with China actually takes place in our future. Actress Jan Sterling was particularly excellent in a courageous performance showing an aging beauty coming to terms with loneliness and time passing. There is a bit of soap-opera in this film, as with any disaster film, but as one of the first, true disaster films, the interlocking stories are well played by Robert Newton, Claire Trevor, Phil Harris, et al., and the cockpit drama was top-notch with two of the finest male actors ever in film, John Wayne and Robert Stack. Each man played an airline pilot to the hilt.....Wayne the quiet, broodingly confident veteran, and Stack, the competent but overly human presence that is uncomfortable in his skin...

Honestly, the actress playing the stewardess, Doe Avedon, is worth the whole film....beautiful...just like the stews I remember, when I travelled with my Dad in the cockpit of a Martin 404 sitting on his lap, his feet on the rudders, and me with the yoke.....back before evil closed and locked all cockpit doors forever.

This is a magnificently done, beautifully photographed historical piece that debunks the romantic Knights of the Air ballyhoo that has been so common in any movie about WWI. The main character, Bruno Stachel, a fictional German Ace, is shown as an infantry soldier in the blood, mud and mire of ground combat. He stares up at the sky at the graceful biplane fighters killing each other, and figures that even dying in a burning airplane was better that the trenches.

The movie jumps ahead to his joining a squadron and seeing just how different their war in the air was from what he had experienced on the ground. There was a gentleman's chivalry applied to the combat---the enemy was honored, sometimes shown mercy, and George Peppard's Bruno did not buy any of that. He saw his job as shooting down enemy aircraft and killing the pilots and gunners. That, of course, is exactly what the truth of the air war was---the gentlemen, often from aristocratic German and Austrian families, played a mind game among themselves that they were Knights....above the fray, yet all important to the war effort.

Bruno did things like shoot the slats out of a British two-seater, kill the back facing gunner and while the plane was barely flying with a wounded pilot, directed the pilot to fly back to the German airbase. Thinking he was going to be allowed to land, and have his wounds dressed as a prisoner, the Brit pilot flies over the airfield where Bruno promptly machine guns the cockpit of the British plane, sending it diving into a fiery crash in front of Bruno's contemporaries. This done, because of a kill he was denied in an earlier mission because no one else saw it happen.

The commanding officer dressed him down severely, and Bruno lashed back telling the aristocrat that his job was to kill British pilots and planes. Bruno became an embarrassment, and an ace. He wins the coveted Blue Max medal, and is "dealt with" later by the German Air Command with the help of Ursula Andress, who was very good in her role.

This is a dark story, beautifully filmed---the aircraft all actual replicas and still-flying originals from that war. Special effects are top-notch for the time, and set decoration dead on.

The redoubtable Karl-Michael Vogler and James Mason round out a great cast. This film has the look and feel of an epic, and it is.

If the Brits had not stayed the course, launched hundreds of Spits and Hurricanes every time Heinkels crossed the channel, the British Isles would have fallen, and the war eventually would have crossed the Atlantic to spoil vacations in Nantucket....that is the entire truth of the Battle of Britain.

How those young men of that generation steeled themselves to suffer and die in the ice cold air over the channel will always be the great mystery and miracle of the Second World War....later, American boys somehow found the courage to do the same in B-17s, B-24s, 25s, P-51s and P-47s over the heart of the Klingon Empire, or, Germany as it was known then.

That courage, that "I'm already dead" attitude was born directly from the massive threat of the Nazis, and the Luftwaffe. War-fighting today, in so many arenas, is so very distant and different than back then.

An amazingly beautiful film, with scores of actual Heinkels, Spitfires, Hurricanes and ME-109s in what for many, was their last act on Earth, THE BATTLE OF Britain is one of the 5 greatest war films ever made. I won't list them, but "Saving Private Ryan" and "Platoon" are on that list....

The Christopher Plummer/Susanna York subplot had no value other than filler and spectacular views of Miss York's legs...there are great scenes back at the Luftwaffe bases as a fighter ace tells Goring that they need Spitfires to beat the Brits.....while they sit and eat in high style in dining rooms with more empty chairs every day.

The use of radio-controlled miniatures in this film was groundbreaking, and could be a gateway to more WWII films in this day of augmentation with CGI.....we need a Spielberg-directed movie about the 8th Air Force in England...a remake of "12 O'Clock High"......

Yes, my children, there was a time when movies knew nothing of CGI, and very difficult scenes of violence and destruction were given over to names like Buddy Gillespie, Wally Veevers, and Warren Newcombe, Howard and Teddy Lydecker. These men looked deep inside their childhoods, and started using miniatures, filmed at slow motion camera speeds to proportionately smooth out the movement of model ships, water, model airplanes, collapsing and exploding buildings, even crash model cars.

The most difficult miniature work was with water and the look of the water in relation to a miniature ship.

It was found that the larger the model ship, the more realistic the water looked, and in Columbia's "Sink the Bismarck", the ships were anywhere from 40-60 feet in length. The water body was an indoor pool over 300 ft. in diameter, surrounded by wind machines and under the floor of the tank, large hydraulic pistons created waves.

Can you imagine what fun that was? Blowing up and sinking these huge models.....it was a dream of mine for years.

Today, a scruffy kid sits in front of a computer and creates sea battles and catastrophes that are astoundingly realistic. He uses 1's and 0's.....nothing of the physical world.

Still, the destruction of the Bismarck, and the capstone piece, the massive explosion of the H.M.S. Hood amaze and awe anyone who watches this film today.

This is a WWII film for the ages, and a centerpiece of a very fun special-effects era.