WWII: The Lost Color Archives (2000)

Alastair Laurence and Lucy Carter (producers)

USA

171 mins, color, English

We are all used to seeing World War II documentaries in black and white. In fact, we are all used to thinking about this war in black and white, in slightly jarring, unstable images at speeds that are a bit too fast. Hitler, Churchill, Stalin, and FDR, all march around in slightly comical ways and it's hard to understand the heat of combat when all the colors have been drained. In the 1980s, however, researchers began discovering a lot of footage, all in color and amazingly well-preserved, in various archives around the world. This is a selection of what the editors thought to be the best and/or most representative material.

The program is divided into three episodes, each roughly one hour in length, covering the entire war and a little bit of the pre-war run up. Home movies by Eva Braun show Hitler playing with children and musing on world problems at his mountain retreat. Footage from Nazi rallies makes clear just how dangerously adored the Party and the Fuehrer were. The spectacle is astounding as columns march by in parade uniforms. Even the Soviet parade is slightly unreal with Stalin ogling from the Kremlin. The other two episodes cover the years of actual fighting, with understandable emphasis on film shot by Americans (who simply seem to have had the best equipment). There are many startling images of soldiers interacting with civilians, of death and destruction, and combat on a gigantic scale. Curiously, such scenes recall images from Vietnam or even more recent wars, perhaps because we are used to seeing these in color.

The narrative consists mostly of excerpts from letters, diaries, and memoirs of various participants in the events, for some reason read by speakers with "appropriate" accents. I doubt that this adds much to the immediacy of the often fascinating words and it detracts quite a bit because it sounds so artificial. A cheap trick that the History Channel should not be pulling on its viewers. The brief introductions by Roger Mudd are laughably empty and could have easily been omitted. The ponderous musical score is very nice even if it starts getting on one's nerves due to endless recycling of the same theme.

Overall, a package that must be had by any serious student of the war, if for nothing else than as a corrective to our B&W lenses through which we have seen this conflict. Curiously, some of the immediacy may be a bit too realistic in the sense that it may appear as well-shot, but staged, narrative film, not a documentary. The quality of the material varies and the colors are slightly washed out, especially on the first disc. Still, it is surprising that these materials are in such good shape after all those years. Let's hope there's more where that came from.

October 14, 2003