The Good

Six interesting films that celebrate honor, integrity and moxie.

The Bad

Paltry extras for a release of this nature.

WWII Collection, Vol. 2: Heroes Fight for Freedom is an assortment of 6 films featuring various looks at World War II. The most interesting thing about this collection is the myriad of angles and places they have chosen to cover the War from. The films in this set are:

  • Air Force

  • Command Decision

  • Hell to Eternity

  • The Hill

  • Thirty Seconds Over Tokyo

  • 36 Hours

The Howard Hawk’s directed Air Force sees a B-17 fly directly into World War II in this look at men thrown into an impossible situation. Command Decision gives us a look at the “top brass” and the decisions that they must make during wartime. Hell to Eternity sees a Japanese-American cope with his role during the war especially when he faces his “enemies.” Sean Connery stars in The Hill which examines life inside a military prison and a subsequent mutiny. In Thirty Seconds Over Tokyo, we get a glimpse of the War’s early days as we are taken up close and personal with the Doolittle Raid. Lastly, 36 Hours is a tense expose on enemy tactics and the Nazi’s hope to jog the memory of an American soldier (James Garner) in the hopes of being able to head off D-Day.

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Features

The Hill

The Sun… The Sand… The Hill

Shot in black and white and on film (a rarity for featurettes nowadays), this short look at this movie is narrated by many of the people who created it. We hear from the director, the writer and others as this movie begins at its Cannes Film Festival screening, and then dives backward into the day to day grind of production. There is military music backing all of this up and the main narrator of this piece declares that the motto on set everyday is “Lets give it the good try.” Little more than a puff piece, this does have some interesting moments.

Air Force

Audio-Only Bonus: Radio Adaptation with George Raft and Harry Carey

Video

Air Force, Thirty Seconds Over Tokyo and Command Decision are in their Standard Version. They are presented in a format preserving the aspect ratio of their original theatrical exhibition. Hell to Eternity, The Hill and 36 Hours are in Widescreen Versions. They are presented in a “matted” widescreen format preserving the aspect ratio of their original theatrical exhibition. Enhanced for widescreen TVs. All of these films are in black and white and, I’m not 100% positive on this, it seems like Warner Bros. cleaned up a lot of these movies before they were transferred to DVD. I didn’t notice any aspect of the picture being shaky or any dirt specks creeping up. Overall, the movies in this release looked quite solid.

Audio

Dolby Digital - English Mono. The audio on these movies was good but I didn’t find that it stayed leveled all the way through this release. I didn’t notice any problems once I adjusted it for each disc, but I could see it being annoying to some users if they were going to watch all these movies back to back. At the end of the day, all of these films were made completely separate from one another so we really can’t expect equal sound levels across the board.

Package

In red across the front cover of this slipcase it says Heroes Fight for Freedom. Circling it is an amalgamation of all the DVD covers. The back shows thumbnail images of all the covers for each movie and even offers up a tiny description for the film in question. All the movies are stored in separate amaray cases (Warner Bros. goes back and forth between this style of release and the digipack), and each one contains information on it that is specific to each film.

Final Word

While this set seems to be little more than Warner Bros. attempt to maximize money on movies in their vault, I loved the perspective that WWII Collection, Vol. 2: Heroes Fight for Freedom had. We aren’t just seeing the American side of this war. So many people seem to believe that until recently U.S. filmmakers only looked at one aspect of war. In fact, films like Hell to Eternity cover similar ground to Clint Eastwood’s recent World War II opus, Letters From Iwo Jima. While Eastwood’s film obviously goes a bit deeper into the Japanese culture and thought process, it is still interesting seeing a movie from 1960 showcase thoughts, ideas and images that many people think didn’t came on screen until the 21st Century.

Truthfully, something like WWII Collection, Vol. 2: Heroes Fight for Freedom is probably more for the World War II buffs than it is for casual movie fans. That said, the films in this collection are certainly worth owning if you fall into the former category.

The Hill was released June 17, 1965.