War. What is it good for? (The World At War)

Name: hogsflesh

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Product:	The World At War
Date:	10/07/07 (173 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: It's a great documentary series

Disadvantages: It's a little old-fashioned and out of date

I have way too much to do at the moment – I need a job and, as a matter of urgency, I need to find somewhere to live. I obviously ought to be either paralysed with stress about the situation, or busily working to resolve it. Instead, I decided to forget it all and watch a 26-part documentary series from the early 70s. I have no regrets, even though homelessness looms. If nothing else, The World at War certainly makes you count your blessings.

It was first broadcast on ITV in late 1973. It’s been repeated a few times since then on terrestrial TV, but it’s too big and unwieldy to fit neatly into modern schedules. You can buy the whole lot on DVD, but that’ll set you back £100 (I’m not reviewing the DVDs because I don’t have them). I daresay one of the cable channels shows it, and failing that I’m sure you can borrow it from your local library.

It’s a documentary series that tells the story of the Second World War, from Hitler’s coming to power in Germany, to the start of the Cold War. Most episodes tell the story chronologically, although some focus on one aspect of the war and follow that from beginning to end (Atlantic convoys, for instance). Episodes are 50 minutes, and feature a mixture of footage from the war and talking head interviews.

Laurence Olivier narrates it, on the grounds that he was probably the most iconic ‘classy’ actor in the world at the time. His narration is very good – I don’t think I’ve ever seen anything that justifies Olivier’s monumental reputation (he was primarily a stage actor), but this is certainly better than most things he was putting his name to by the early 70s. That said, some of his pronunciations are just weird (‘strarfed’ for ‘strafed’, ‘feeted’ for ‘foetid’).

It has a classic 70s opening sequence, with nice sombre music, flames and rather haunting faces. There is some original incidental music, which is pretty good, but most music used in the series is from the era – marching bands, pop songs of the day etc. That works well. What works a bit less well is the fact that almost every bit of footage we see has sound. It’s highly unlikely that most of the clips were actually filmed with sound, which means it’s been dubbed in later. The ethics of this aren’t so much the problem (although putting the sound of gunfire onto footage of Jews being murdered in Russia – a piece of film that’s certainly silent – strikes me as a lapse of taste). It just makes it all seem a bit silly – especially since the most prominent sound that’s been added to the film clips seems to be footsteps. You’re left with the impression that people during World War Two all wore surprisingly noisy shoes.

Is it worth watching? Yes, certainly – if you know little or nothing about the Second World War, it will tell you a lot in an engaging fashion. If you know a lot about it you’ll enjoy the interviews and the footage. (‘Enjoy’ might not be the right word – some of the footage is absolutely horrible – there are a *lot* of dead bodies, some mutilated. Mercifully most of the clips are black and white, but I don’t think that documentaries made today focus quite so relentlessly on images of the dead.) It can be argued that you don’t get much depth – every episode’s subject matter could easily yield a six-part documentary in itself – but I think the series strikes the right balance between giving us enough information and giving us too much. It also manages to put across all sides of the war fairly well, although inevitably it’s a bit Anglo-centric.

The main criticism is that it’s out-of-date and has some odd gaps. Official files relating to British codebreaking hadn’t been released at the time, so no mention is made of something that would probably earn a whole episode to itself if the series was made today. It also quotes a number for deaths in the bombing of Dresden that’s considerably higher than that accepted by most historians today. It also, weirdly, doesn’t go much into resistance movements in occupied Europe – not the French, not the Greeks, not even the Yugoslavs.

Perhaps the biggest surprise is that, out of 26 episodes, only one is about the Holocaust. These days the rest of the war seems to have become almost a framing narrative for the Holocaust – the Imperial War Museum devotes about as much floor space to Hitler’s genocide as to all other World War Two topics put together. While I’m not arguing against this, it’s interesting to note that this is quite a recent development. For the majority of people who participated in the war the Holocaust wasn’t as important as it has become to their children and grandchildren. Six additional episodes were made for the programme’s 20th anniversary (never broadcast, but available on DVD), and they’re more representative of modern TV’s approach to the war years, almost all focusing either on Hitler or on the Holocaust. The additional episodes used a lot of interview footage that wasn’t included in the original series, and so are welcome for that reason.

That’s the thing this series has that modern series don’t: a massively impressive array of people talking about the war. Because it was only made 30 years after the war’s end, there were still an awful lot of survivors. The Soviets and Japanese are a little under-represented, but there are some amazing interviewees from Britain (including Eden, Mountbatten and Bomber Harris), Germany (including Speer and Doenitz) and America (including JK Galbraith, who wears a hilariously loud shirt and tie combo, James Stewart and even Alger Hiss, who I’d thought was executed, but I daresay I’m confusing him with someone else). It’s not all high-ranking politicians and warlords, though – there are plenty of soldiers and victims, including Primo Levi (although disappointingly he’s rather under-used). The way they’re shot is pretty unflattering – they all look particularly fleshy and almost all seem to have a thin sheen of sweat around their hairlines. It’s possible that all interview footage in the 70s was like that; whatever the reason, it looks weird.

It’s interesting to see how attitudes to the war have changed – although the last episode is about remembrance, with Olivier mournfully totting up the dead, you don’t really get the sense that the war was seen as quite such a tragedy in the 70s as it is now. There’s far more British pride about it than we typically get these days, and rather less German sorrow (Speer trots out his usual self-flagellation, but even he doesn’t seem to believe it by this point). And since Germany was still divided and the Cold War going strong, the Russia’s staggering losses don’t seem to be given the emphasis they perhaps deserve.

All in all, The World At War ranges from the amusing to the grim to the depressing. I don’t think there’s been a better general history of the Second World War on television, and it’s nice to have one that doesn’t just focus on the leading Nazis as most of them seem to these days. It’s of its time – no one would try and make a series this long these days, and ITV wouldn’t touch this kind of material with a bargepole unless they could stick a detective in it somewhere. But as a reminder of how good British TV used to be and as a great factual resource, I’d highly recommend it. It may have been more than 60 years ago now, but we should still learn about World War 2, and this is a good place to start.

Summary: One of those iconic series that they don't make any more