| It might be hard to think of the recently released 60th Anniversary of D-Day edition of Saving Private Ryan as anything but a chance to cash in on one of the most horrific military offensives of all time.
The originally sparse DVD is being reissued in a two-disc edition boasting interviews and behind-the-scenes footage. The making-of footage offers an interesting look at how the filmmakers built bombed-out French villages from scratch, but this new edition doesn’t offer much insight into director Steven Speilberg’s ambitious, but ultimately simplistic, Second World War epic.
However, the deluxe four-disc edition features the two Second World War documentaries The Price for Peace and Shooting War (also sold separately). The better of the two, Shooting War is an illuminating look at photographers and filmmakers who chronicled the Second World War at great personal risk. Writer-director Richard Schickel intercuts photographs and film footage from the war with interviews with the soldiers who collected it. Not confined to the European campaign – as the majority of Second World War films are – Shooting War gives equal time to the horrors of the South Pacific theatre of operations, as well as Southeast Asia.
Well-known filmmakers such as Russ Meyer and John Houston, who cut their teeth in the military’s motion picture division, are featured, but the stories of those who didn’t go on to Hollywood are much more interesting. Hearing photographers recount the famed Burmese mountain mission or the violent death of Mussolini lends a chilling resonance to their almost unimaginable tales. The footage they offer, which is an obvious reference point for Saving Private Ryan and Spielberg’s documentary style, is stunning and devastating, as you might expect, but the most interesting thing about Shooting War is the connective tissue it has that is lacking in so many other war documentaries. In other docs, interview footage is spliced with random combat footage. In Shooting War, the filmmakers are describing the footage they actually shot and the truth of their story is backed up by their camera work. As a result, the film is far more cohesive than most war documentaries.
In fact, the only element out of place in the film is the inclusion of narrator Tom Hanks. He is no doubt on board to add star power to the proceedings, but since this documentary was made at the same time as Cast Away, Hanks sports an awkwardly laughable beard. This choice is made even more odd by the fact that American historian Stephen Ambrose co-narrates the last half. His insight would seem to easily outweigh that offered by Hanks.
That, however, is a small criticism for a film that seems to have its head in the right place. As Hanks is quick to point out, as time moves on and those that lived through the Second World War die, the images provided by these combat photographers is quickly becoming the only remaining record of that war. Shooting War is a compelling homage to those men who went into battle armed with a different kind of weapon. |
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