World War II Collection Vol. 2 - Heroes Fight for Freedom

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Air Force (1943) - full review!

Command Decision (1948)

Hell to Eternity (1960) - The true story of Guy Gabaldon starts rather slowly, then features an overlong "Marines partying in Hawaii" sequence, before it gets to the heart of the story in Saipan. Never heard of Gabaldon? Neither had I until I saw this fictionalized biographical drama about him and his heroics during World War II. Gil Doud's story was directed by Phil Karlson; Walter Roeber Schmidt and Ted Sherdeman wrote the screenplay. Jeffrey Hunter plays Gabaldon as an adult, Richard Eyer as a boy. David Janssen plays Gabaldon’s sergeant, Vic Damone a Marine buddy of both. Patricia Owens plays an ice queen journalist that Saipan-bound Gabaldon helps to melt in the middle third of the movie, which could have been cut without consequence to the overall story. Sessue Hayakawa plays the Japanese General Matsui; the actor's wife Tsuru Aoki (appearing in her only sound film) plays Gabaldon's surrogate Mother Une, who raised the boy (after his mother, never seen, had died) along with her own sons George (George Takei; George Matsui as a boy) and Kaz (George Shibata). Miiko Taka, a veteran of Sayonara (1957) along with Owens, plays George's girlfriend Ester. John Larch plays the Marine specialists’ Captain Schwabe. Because Gabaldon had grown up in a Japanese American home and neighborhood, he knew the enemy's language well enough to contribute greatly to the rescue of starving families on the island; he also singlehandedly captured over 1,000 enemy combatants on Saipan after the Allied siege of the island, earning him the moniker "the Pied Piper of Saipan".

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The Hill (1965) - British soldiers who commit crimes such as desertion are send, appropriately, to a desert stockade in North Africa. Harry Andrews plays their sadistic keeper, who frequently makes them run up a steep hill as punishment; Ian Bannen plays a more sympathetic guard, Michael Redgrave the prison's medical officer. Some new prisoners, including Sean Connery and Ossie Davis, arrive that must deal with these circumstances, each in their own way. Directed by Sidney Lumet, based on Ray Rigby’s play and screenplay.

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Thirty Seconds Over Tokyo (1944) - full review!

36 Hours (1965) - Roald Dahl's "Beware of the Dog" inspired this intriguing story by Carl K. Hittleman and Luis H. Vance which screenwriter-director George Seaton (The Country Girl (1954)) turned into a pre-D-Day World War II psychological thriller starring James Garner, Eva Marie Saint, Rod Taylor, Werner Peters, and John Banner (among others). Garner plays Major Pike, a strategist who knows every detail of the Allies' pending invasion, which the Germans believe will take place at Pas de Calais (e.g. the shortest distance between two points, England and France). But the Nazi hierarchy is wrong because (as everyone should know by now) Normandy is the destination. To keep the Nazis off balance, Colonel MacLean (Alan Napier) insists that Pike keep his regular meeting with a double agent in Portugal just days before the planned event. But the Major is captured and taken to an elaborate phony U.S. military hospital in Germany near the Swiss border where the enemy hopes to learn the details of the Allied invasion in time to prepare a defense. A German doctor named Gerber (Taylor) has found that fooling a soldier into thinking that the war is over loosens their tongue and hopes to prove his theory for the nineteenth consecutive time on Pike with assistance from a nurse and concentration camp refugee Anna Hedler (Saint). But given the eminent threat of the invasion, the Nazi Secret Service has sent their agent Otto Schack (Peters) to oversee the proceedings. Schack gives Gerber thirty-six hours to learn what he can before the SS will use its own methods of interrogation (including sleep deprivation). Everything in the hospital has been setup to resemble an actual U.S. installation, everyone speaks American English etc., six years in the future to 1950; Pike's hair is grayed and his skin is treated. Additionally, drops are put in the Major's eyes such that his vision is limited and he must use glasses. When he comes out of the drug induced sleep, Gerber (posing as a U.S. Major himself) and Anna do everything they can to convince the Major that he's been suffering from amnesia, that he's just "come out of it" again, and that during an earlier period of clarity he'd even married the nurse. The plan works initially but, as history would show, obviously Pike comes to realize the truth. An intellectual game of cat and mouse is briefly played out and, naturally, Schack interferes before the inevitable escape is attempted. In this sequence, Banner appears playing a variation of his TV Hogan's Heroes (1965) character, an eccentric German Sergeant who's an opportunist rather than a fool.

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