Memories Of War: The Memphis Belle/Prelude To War

Last Minute Sales & Specials

2 Pack Includes: "The Memphis Belle" and "Prelude To War" "The Memphis Belle" - Filmed in color, "The Memphis Belle" has long been held up as a "model" wartime documentary. In a terse, exciting 43 minutes, the film assembles footage from several allied bombing missions into one single representative flight of the famed Flying Fortress known as The Memphis Belle. Though both the crewmen and the filmmakers take considerable pride in the fact that the Belle has completed 25 successful missions, there's no phony heroism, no grandstanding, no flagwaving. As calm-voiced narrator Ed Kern explains, the Belle has a job to do, and it does it, and that's all. The danger facing these Flying Fortresses is underlined, but never overemphasized, by brief glimpses of those doomed ships that didn't make it back. "Memphis Belle" was directed by William Wyler, who also flew several missions with the crew, manning the camera himself at considerable risk. The overall excellence of "The Memphis Belle" is even more obvious when compared to the hokey fictionalized 1990 movie version of the Belle's 25th mission. "Prelude To War" - "Prelude To War" was the first entry in the U.S. War Department's "Why We Fight" series, a group of seven morale-boosting documentaries supervised by Lt. Col. Frank Capra. As brilliantly assembled as any of Capra's "populist" Hollywood films, "Prelude" demonstrates how the diplomatic and political blunders made in the wake of WWI led inexorably to World War II. Especially culpable are those complacent citizens of the USA who were led to believe that the problems of the rest of the world had no bearing on their lives. While America sleeps, Japan and Germany slowly and methodically build their armies and launch their plans for global conquest. Throughout the film, the lies of fascism and totalitarianism are contrasted with the ideals Democracy.