Customer Reviews: A StealApril 24, 2010 jt-3d 1 out of 1 found this review helpful
I rated it five stars because I like those unfamiliar WWII movies you find on
Turner Classics when they run a war movie session. This baby has 20 of them
for less than $10. That's a great deal in my book and that's what I give 5
stars to.
These are not great movies. Some aren't even very good movies. Very few rate
more than 5 stars at IMDB. But some are fairly decent films, made during the
war and later on. It's a grab bag. I enjoyed every one, even the Roger Corman
one, Ski Troop Attack. But then I like old war movies. Go for Broke, about the
442nd Infantry regiment, made up of Japanese Americans or Nisei or Budda
Heads, as they call themselves in the movie, is worth the price alone. I
concider it the best of the batch. Add in a few more movies I concider pretty
good, like Minesweeper and Gung Ho and it's a steal. The rest are just gravy.
If you like old WWII movies like I do, this is for you, or maybe get the one
with 50 movies for now less than $20. It has some of these. But if you want high
quality movies this is not the place to find it. It's like having the
keys to TCM's war movie vault or at least part of it.
But before you get this set, have a look at the 50 movie pack. There are at least 11 that overlap.
Combat Classics 50 MoviePack
For the price, you can't go wrongJune 17, 2009 Zora Calder(USA) 6 out of 7 found this review helpful
The films, with stars for the ones I particularly liked:
A Walk in the Sun
Gung Ho
**Go for Broke
Corregidor
Ski Troop Attack
**Casablanca Express
The Steel Claw
Desert Commandos
Minesweeper
Bombs Over Burma
Commandos
Pacific Inferno
The Battle of the Eagles
Submarine Alert
The Dawn Express
Five for Hell
*Black Brigade (TV)
Heroes in Hell
Submarine Base
Aerial Gunner
Some of the films from 1943 are, while not at all good, interesting as a bit of history: propaganda films, apparently intending to get lowlifes to enlist, as they featured lowlifes who made their lives finally meaningful by dying nobly. The Italian films all seemed vaguely pro-Axis to me in subtle ways, but perhaps I was imagining that.
Go for Broke is a decent studio B movie about the Japanese-Americans who fought in WWII, Casablanca Express is a perfectly adequate film about trying to protect Winston Churchill on his way to a crucial meeting. The two films about black servicemen that dealt with racism they suffered might seem a bit dated, but I found them interesting.
I only found two films utterly unwatchable and one, The Steel Claw, maddening. In it, a disabled white alcoholic gets a band of guerillas to rescue a captured general on Luzon. Though they're well-armed and experienced fighters, as the white American he automatically orders them around. They're under fire, he yells "get down!", as if these guys wouldn't know that before the white American told them to. And his use of prostitutes is ugly and naive--the star/writer/director seems to think such women actually like their johns. It's Ugly Americanism to the nth degree. Within twenty minutes of the film, I wanted to frag him myself, which is certainly what the guerillas would have done in real life.
