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Review Warner Home Video / Sergeant York [1941]
Actors & Directors
  • Joan Leslie
  • Howard Hawks
  • Stanley Ridges
  • Walter Brennan
  • Gary Cooper
  • George Tobias
Release date: 2000-02-14
Run time: 129 min.
RRP: £9.99
Price: £17.49

Review Sergeant York [1941] / Warner Home Video:


Review 20th Century Fox Home Entertainment / The Undefeated [1969]
Actors & Directors
  • John Wayne
  • Antonio Aguilar
  • Marian McCargo
  • Roman Gabriel
  • Andrew V. McLaglen
  • Rock Hudson
Release date: 1999-10-01
Run time: 114 min.
RRP: £5.99
Price: £3.00

Review The Undefeated [1969] / 20th Century Fox Home Entertainment:


Review 4 Front Video / Back To Bataan [1950]
Actors & Directors
  • Beulah Bondi
  • Anthony Quinn
  • Fely Franquelli
  • John Wayne
  • Richard Loo
  • Edward Dmytryk
Release date: 1997-08-18
Run time: 87 min.
Price: £5.99

Review Back To Bataan [1950] / 4 Front Video:


Review MGM Entertainment / Battle Of Britain [1969]
Actors & Directors
  • Harry Andrews
  • Guy Hamilton
  • Michael Caine
  • Curd Jürgens
  • Ian McShane
  • Trevor Howard
Release date: 2001-09-10
Run time: 127 min.
RRP: £7.99
Price: £1.29

Review Battle Of Britain [1969] / MGM Entertainment:

Despite its manipulative grandiosity, this film is completely irresistible, for several reasons: it recounts the greatest air battle in history, creating the greatest aerial battle scenes in film history; it has a terrific cast (Harry Andrews, Michael Caine, Trevor Howard, Curt Jurgens, Laurence Olivier, Nigel Patrick, Christopher Plummer, Michael Redgrave, Ralph Richardson, Robert Shaw, Patrick Wymark and Edward Fox); and it's technically very well made, thanks to the Bond team of producer Harry Saltzman and director Guy Hamilton and the great cinematographer Freddie Young. -Bill Desowitz.

Review Warner Home Video / Dawn Patrol [1938]
Actors & Directors
  • Edmund Goulding|Errol Flynn|Basil Rathbone|David Niven
Release date: 1998-07-13
Run time: 98 min.
RRP: £5.99
Price: £17.95

Review Dawn Patrol [1938] / Warner Home Video:


Review Paramount Home Entertainment / Ace High [1968]
Actors & Directors
  • Brock Peters
  • Bud Spencer
  • Eli Wallach
  • Kevin McCarthy
  • Terence Hill
  • Giuseppe Colizzi
Release date: 1993-09-20
Run time: 116 min.
Price: £5.99

Review Ace High [1968] / Paramount Home Entertainment:


Review Warner Home Video / Destination Tokyo [1944]
Actors & Directors
  • Alan Hale
  • Cary Grant
  • Dane Clark
  • Delmer Daves
  • John Ridgely
  • John Garfield
Run time: 129 min.
RRP: £10.99
Price: £12.50

Review Destination Tokyo [1944] / Warner Home Video:


Review Warner Home Video / Where Eagles Dare [1968]
Actors & Directors
  • Brian G. Hutton
  • Michael Hordern
  • Clint Eastwood
  • Patrick Wymark
  • Mary Ure
  • Richard Burton
Release date: 2000-06-19
Run time: 148 min.
Price: £9.99

Review Where Eagles Dare [1968] / Warner Home Video:

Scorned by reviewers when it came out, Where Eagles Dare has acquired a cult following over the years for its unashamed and highly concentrated dose of commando death-dealing to legions of Nazi machine-gun fodder. In 1968 Clint Eastwood was just getting used to the notion that he might be a world-class movie star; Richard Burton, whose image had been shaped equally by classical theatre and his headline-making romance with Elizabeth Taylor, was eager to try his hand at the action genre. Author Alistair MacLean's novel The Guns of Navarone had inspired the film that started the 1960s vogue for World War II military capers, so he was prevailed upon to write the screenplay (his first). The central location, an impregnable Alpine stronghold locked in ice and snow, is surpassing cool, but the plot and action are ultra-mechanical, and the switcheroo gamesmanship of just who is the undercover double (triple?) agent on the mission becomes aggressively silly. -Richard T Jameson.

Review Warner Home Video / The Dirty Dozen [1967]
Actors & Directors
  • John Cassavetes
  • Ernest Borgnine
  • Charles Bronson
  • Jim Brown
  • Robert Aldrich
  • Lee Marvin
Release date: 2000-06-19
Run time: 143 min.
RRP: £9.99
Price: £0.49

Review The Dirty Dozen [1967] / Warner Home Video:

A model for dozens of action films to follow, this box-office hit from 1967 refined a die-hard formula that has become overly familiar, but it's rarely been handled better than it was in this action-packed World War II thriller. Lee Marvin is perfectly cast as a down-but-not-out army major who is offered a shot at personal and professional redemption. If he can successfully train and discipline a squad of army rejects, misfits, killers, prisoners, and psychopaths into a first-rate unit of specialised soldiers, they'll earn a second chance to make up for their woeful misdeeds. Of course, there's a catch: to obtain their pardons, Marvin's band of badmen must agree to a suicide mission that will parachute them into the danger zone of Nazi-occupied France. It's a hazardous path to glory, but the men have no other choice than to accept and regain their lost honor. What makes The Dirty Dozen special is its phenomenal cast including Charles Bronson, Donald Sutherland, Telly Savalas, George Kennedy, Ernest Borgnine, John Cassavetes, Richard Jaeckel, Jim Brown, Clint Walker, Trini Lopez, Robert Ryan, and others. Cassavetes is the Oscar-nominated standout as one of Marvin's most rebellious yet heroic men, but it's the whole ensemble-combined with the hard-as-nails direction of Robert Aldrich-that makes this such a high-velocity crowd pleaser. The script by Nunnally Johnson and Lukas Heller (from the novel by E. M. Nathanson) is strong enough to support the all-star lineup with ample humour and military grit, so if you're in need of a mainline jolt of testosterone, The Dirty Dozen is the movie for you. [+]
-Jeff Shannon.

Review MGM Entertainment / A Fistful Of Dollars (Video And Film Guide) (1964) [1967]
Actors & Directors
  • Monte Hellman
  • Sieghardt Rupp
  • Marianne Koch
  • Gian Maria Volontè
  • Wolfgang Lukschy
  • Clint Eastwood
  • Sergio Leone
Release date: 2000-02-01
Run time: 96 min.
RRP: £13.99
Price: £7.99

Review A Fistful Of Dollars (Video And Film Guide) (1964) [1967] / MGM Entertainment:

This is the movie that launched the spaghetti Western and catapulted Clint Eastwood to stardom. Before director Sergio Leone picked him out, Clint had played only a few bit parts in features plus his role as Rowdy Yates in the TV Western series Rawhide. Leone cast him for his stillness and physical presence, famously remarking that when Michelangelo was asked what he had seen in a particular block of marble, he said Moses, but that what he, Leone, saw in Eastwood was just that, a block of marble. Leone also claimed that it was he who gave the character his trademark cigar and poncho, though Eastwood has said he brought his own wardrobe to Italy. Whoever takes credit, A Fistful of Dollars (Per un pugno di dollari in Italian) was an extraordinary success when launched in Italy in 1964. Eastwood had to wait longer for it to be a hit in the USA. The film was based on Kurosawa's 1961 samurai picture Yojimbo, but Leone had forgotten to clear the copyright. Eventually a deal was done, but A Fistful of Dollars was not released in the USA until 1967. It scored an equally resounding success, as did its sequels in the Dollar Trilogy, For a Few Dollars More and The Good, the Bad and the Ugly. The advertising campaign promoted Eastwood's character, laconic, amoral, dangerous, as The Man with No Name (though in the film he's clearly referred to as Joe), and audiences loved the film's refreshing new take on the Western genre. [+]
Gone are the pieties about making the streets safe for women and children (women are virtually absent from the Trilogy). Instead it's every man for himself. Striking too was a new emphasis on violence, with stylised, almost balletic gunfights and baroque touches such as Eastwood's armoured breastplate. The popularity of the Dollars films had a marked influence on the Hollywood Western, for example Sam Peckinpah's The Wild Bunch, but its most enduring legacy is Clint Eastwood himself, still in action at the age of 70. -Edward Buscombe.

Review Warner Home Video / Air Force [1943]
Actors & Directors
  • Howard Hawks
  • Arthur Kennedy
  • Gig Young
  • Harry Carey
  • George Tobias
  • John Garfield
Release date: 1998-07-13
Run time: 120 min.
Price: £5.99

Review Air Force [1943] / Warner Home Video:


Review Sony Pictures Home Entertainment / The Bridge On The River Kwai [1957]
Actors & Directors
  • David Lean
  • Sessue Hayakawa
  • Alec Guinness
  • Jack Hawkins
  • William Holden
  • James Donald
Release date: 1996-10-28
Run time: 155 min.
Price: £14.99

Review The Bridge On The River Kwai [1957] / Sony Pictures Home Entertainment:

Based on the true story of the building of a bridge on the Burma railway by British prisoners-of-war held under a savage Japanese regime in World War II, The Bridge on the River Kwai (1957) is one of the greatest war films ever made. The film received seven Oscars, including Best Picture, Director, Performance (Alex Guinness), for Sir Malcolm Arnold's superb music, and for the screenplay from the novel by Pierre Boulle (who also wrote Monkey Planet, the inspiration for Planet of the Apes). The story does take considerable liberties with history, including the addition of an American saboteur played by William Holden, and an entirely fictitious but superbly constructed and thrilling finale. Made on a vast scale, the film reinvented the war movie as something truly epic, establishing the cinematic beachhead for The Longest Day (1962), Patton (1970) and A Bridge Too Far (1977). It also proved a turning-point in director David Lean's career. Before he made such classic but conventionally scaled films as In Which We Serve (1942) and Hobson's Choice (1953). Afterwards there would only be four more films, but their names are Lawrence of Arabia (1962), Dr Zhivago (1965), Ryan's Daughter (1970) and A Passage to India (1984). On the DVD: Too often the best extras come attached to films that don't really warrant them. Not so here, where a truly great film has been given the attention it deserves. The first disc presents the film in the original extra-wide CinemaScope ratio of 2. [+]
55:1, in an anamorphically enhanced transfer which does maximum justice to the film's superb cinematography. The sound has been transferred from the original six-track magnetic elements into 5. 1 Dolby Digital and far surpasses what many would expect from a 1950s' feature. The main bonus on the first disc is an isolated presentation of Malcolm Arnold's great Oscar-winning music score, in addition to which there is a trivia game, and maps and historical information linked to appropriate clips. The second disc contains a new, specially produced 53-minute "making of" documentary featuring many of those involved in the production of the movie. This gives a rich insight into the physical problems of making such a complex epic on location in Ceylon. Also included are the original trailer and two short promotional films from the time of release, one of which is narrated by star William Holden. Finally there is an "appreciation" by director John Milius, an extensive archive of movie posters and artwork, and a booklet that reproduces the text of the film's original 1957 brochure. -Gary S Dalkin.

Review ITV DVD / Reach For The Sky [1956]
Actors & Directors
  • Muriel Pavlow
  • Kenneth More
  • Alexander Knox
  • Lee Patterson
  • Lyndon Brook
  • Lewis Gilbert (II)
Release date: 2000-01-26
Run time: 130 min.
RRP: £5.99
Price: £3.89

Review Reach For The Sky [1956] / ITV DVD:

Reach for the Sky was a box-office hit in 1956 and rightly remains a fondly regarded classic of British cinema. Kenneth More is ideally cast as Douglas Bader, the gifted pilot who loses both legs in a pre-war air crash, only to play a major role in the Battle of Britain, rise to the rank of Group Captain and become a war hero. Based on Paul Brickhill's biography, this is an "official" history maybe, but Lewis Gilbert's screenplay and direction are historically accurate and informed by that very British humour, of which More was a natural. The film is graced by a decent supporting cast and a typically "widescreen" score from John Addison. On the DVD: Reach for the Sky is vividly reproduced in 16:9 anamorphic format and decent mono. There are subtitles for the hard of hearing and detailed biographies of More, Gilbert and Barder. The original theatrical trailer is included, but it would also have made sense to include an interview or documentary footage of Bader himself. -Richard Whitehouse.

Review Warner Home Video / The Left-Handed Gun [1958]
Actors & Directors
  • James Congdon
  • Lita Milan
  • Paul Newman
  • John Dehner
  • Arthur Penn
  • Hurd Hatfield
Release date: 1996-06-17
Run time: 99 min.
RRP: £5.99
Price: £4.99

Review The Left-Handed Gun [1958] / Warner Home Video:


Review 20th Century Fox Home Entertainment / Gunfighter [1950]
Actors & Directors
  • Gregory Peck
Release date: 1998-08-03
Run time: 81 min.
RRP: £5.99
Price: £6.49

Review Gunfighter [1950] / 20th Century Fox Home Entertainment:


Review MGM Entertainment / The Good Bad And The Ugly [1966]
Actors & Directors
  • Luigi Pistilli
  • Lee Van Cleef
  • Aldo Giuffrè
  • Eli Wallach
  • Clint Eastwood
  • Sergio Leone
Release date: 2000-02-01
Run time: 155 min.
RRP: £5.99
Price: £2.50

Review The Good Bad And The Ugly [1966] / MGM Entertainment:

This two-disc Special Edition presents the restored, extended English-language version of Leone's The Good, the Bad and the Ugly, now clocking in at almost three hours (actually 171 minutes on this Region 2 DVD as a result of the faster frames-per-second ratio of the PAL format). It includes some 14 minutes of previously cut scenes, with both Clint Eastwood and Eli Wallach returning to the editing suite in 2003 to add their voices to scenes that had never before been dubbed into English (Wallach's voice is noticeably that of a much older man in these additional sequences). The extra material contains nothing of vital importance, but it's good to have the movie returned to pretty much the way Leone originally wanted it. The anamorphic widescreen picture is now also accompanied by a handsome Dolby 5. 1 soundtrack, making this the most complete and satisfactory version so far released. Film historian Richard Schickel provides an authoritative and engaging commentary on Disc 1. On the second disc there are featurettes on Leone's West (20 mins), The Leone Style (24 mins), Reconstructing The Good, the Bad and the Ugly (11 mins) and a documentary about the historical background of the Sibley campaign, The Man Who Lost the Civil War (15 mins). In addition, there's a two-part appreciation of composer Ennio Morricone, Il Maestro, by film-music expert John Burlinghame. Tuco's extended torture scene can be found here, along with a reconstruction of the fragmentary "Socorro Sequence". In short, exemplary bonus features that will satisfy every Leone aficionado. [+]
-Mark Walker.

Actors & Directors
  • Stephen Berkoff
  • Sharon Stone
  • Dan Curtis
  • Robert Mitchum
  • Robert Morley
  • Jane Seymour
Run time: 751 min.

Review War And Remembrance - Box 1: 1941-1943 (Boxed Set - 4 Tapes) [1986] / Odyssey ODY732:

From the battered streets of Europe. To the hell of the Pacific. A War that would change the coursee of history. A masterly mini-series to equal the scope of the world's most turbulent era. 4-tape boxed set.

Review Warner Home Video / Where Eagles Dare [1968]
Actors & Directors
  • Brian G. Hutton
  • Mary Ure
  • Richard Burton
  • Patrick Wymark
  • Michael Hordern
  • Clint Eastwood
Release date: 2000-06-19
Run time: 148 min.
RRP: £10.99
Price: £2.75

Review Where Eagles Dare [1968] / Warner Home Video:

Scorned by reviewers when it came out, Where Eagles Dare has acquired a cult following over the years for its unashamed and highly concentrated dose of commando death-dealing to legions of Nazi machine-gun fodder. In 1968 Clint Eastwood was just getting used to the notion that he might be a world-class movie star; Richard Burton, whose image had been shaped equally by classical theatre and his headline-making romance with Elizabeth Taylor, was eager to try his hand at the action genre. Author Alistair MacLean's novel The Guns of Navarone had inspired the film that started the 1960s vogue for World War II military capers, so he was prevailed upon to write the screenplay (his first). The central location, an impregnable Alpine stronghold locked in ice and snow, is surpassing cool, but the plot and action are ultra-mechanical, and the switcheroo gamesmanship of just who is the undercover double (triple?) agent on the mission becomes aggressively silly. -Richard T Jameson.

Review MGM Entertainment / For A Few Dollars More [1965]
Actors & Directors
  • Sergio Leone|Clint Eastwood|Lee Van Cleef|Gian Maria Volonté
Release date: 2000-02-01
Run time: 127 min.
RRP: £13.99
Price: £13.99

Review For A Few Dollars More [1965] / MGM Entertainment:


Review 4 Front Video / Winchester 73 [1950]
Actors & Directors
  • Dan Duryea
  • Anthony Mann
  • Stephen McNally
  • Shelley Winters
  • James Stewart
  • Millard Mitchell
Release date: 1999-07-01
Run time: 82 min.
RRP: £5.99
Price: £5.95

Review Winchester 73 [1950] / 4 Front Video:


Browse War Films & Westerns:

Models & Brands:
Sergeant York [1941], The Undefeated [1969], Back To Bataan [1950], Battle Of Britain [1969], Dawn Patrol [1938], Ace High [1968], Destination Tokyo [1944], Where Eagles Dare [1968], The Dirty Dozen [1967], A Fistful Of Dollars (Video And Film Guide) (1964) [1967], Air Force [1943], The Bridge On The River Kwai [1957], Reach For The Sky [1956], The Left-Handed Gun [1958], Gunfighter [1950], The Good Bad And The Ugly [1966], War And Remembrance - Box 1: 1941-1943 (Boxed Set - 4 Tapes) [1986], Where Eagles Dare [1968], For A Few Dollars More [1965], Winchester 73 [1950]

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