The World at War (Imperial War Museum 1973)

If you REALLY want to get a clear understanding of World War II...

If you REALLY want to know what Hitler's Germany was like...

If you REALLY want to understand how an entire country could fall for the greatest lie the world will ever know...

If you REALLY want to see how our OWN COUNTRY foolishly overlooked an agressor gaining power by the second...

IF YOU REALLY WANT TO BE SCARED TO DEATH AND REALIZE THAT HISTORY MAY BE REPEATING ITSELF...BUT THIS TIME...

WE ARE THE GERMANS...

...you and your family need to buy or rent this entire series!

It's a long one now! A total of 26, 52 minute videos as a matter of fact! But folks, I highly recommend it to anyone who cares about their country! The parallels you will see from the political climate of 1930's Germany and today's Obama-America are so obvious a 3 year-old could see it!

From IMDb...

A multi-volumed documentary mini-series, "The World at War" covers the entire history of World War II from the causes of the 1920s to the aftermath of the Cold War in the 1950s. Emphasis is also placed on several inside story episodes, where events are covered which occurred inside Germany and Japan such as resistance to Hitler, life in general under a dictatorial regime, and particular emphasis is focused on the Jewish Holocaust.

Narrated by Laurence Olivier, here is a brief sample from the series...

The Christmas Truce

Sorry, I've been away from you my fellow bloggers. I've been doing some travelling and of course finally ended up at Ma' and Pa' Edge's house to celebrate the BIG DAY!

I truly hope this Christmas will be a special one for you and that you all have a happy and wonderful New Year! Though we've never met personally, I consider you all my friends!

I came across this story the other day and I thought I would add it to ECM! If you've never heard of this, it's a wonderful story! If you have heard of it, it's a great reminder of the power of this very special day!

God bless you all, and I promise to be back as soon as I can! Now, I have to go help Ma' Edge with the turkey...and now...

THE CHRISTMAS TRUCE

Battleground (MGM 1949)

If you guys really like a good ol' World War II movie this week (and maybe the first BEST WWII movie), then you need to take a look at MGM's 1949 classic Battleground starring Van Johnson. Here is the film synopsis from IMDb...

We follow a band of American soldiers as they engage the Germans in a snowy, foggy winter near Bastogne in World War II. They're low on fuel, rations, and ammunition; the Germans are constantly encouraging their surrender via radio and leaflets, and most importantly, the pervasive thick fog makes movement and identification difficult and prevents their relief by Allied air support.

It's a great conservative story about pursuing evil and defeating it...no matter what.

Here is the trailer...

The Most Important Olympics

Jesse gives ol' Adolph a tasty $&!#burger to eat at his Berlin Olympics.

Ronald Reagan Remembers D-Day

What is it about Reagan anyway? I mean really! His speeches seem to fit perfect today? Have you ever noticed? Have you? ;O)



Wanna 'nother good one? Check this out!

Oh God above, thank you, THANK YOU for allowing me to live in a country built by men braver than me! Thank you LORD! THANK YOU!

The Guns of Navarone (Columbia 1961)

I finally got a chance to sit down and watch for the first time the World War II classic The Guns of Navarone, starring Gregory Peck, Anthony Quinn, and David Niven. This is a great movie if you're a war buff or just like a good action/suspense movie! The Guns of Navarone is based on events during the The Battle of Lerosis the central event of the Dodecanese Campaign of WWII.

Here is the review from IMDb...

1943. With the battle of Stalingrad turning the war against them, the Germans are attempting to bully neutral Turkey into joining the Axis; to this end they have trapped 2,000 British soldiers on Kiros, an island in the Aegean, with only one sea route for evacuation, a sea route commanded by two gigantic German antiship batteries deployed in a massive cliffside bunker on the island of Navarone. Immune to air attack and too much for Allied battleships to suppress, the British muster Keith Mallory, a commando officer who has been working on occupied Crete for nearly two years and who is an expert mountaineer, to ferry a team of British commandos to the only area of Navarone that is not monitored by the Germans, a 400-foot cliff. Greek resistance is to meet the team inland and guide them around German patrols to the area of the German guns. However, the commanding officer of the British team suffers grave injury in the climb and Mallory must take control of the mission, despite clashes with explosives expert John Anthony Miller, who upon the arrival of the night of the raid finds his equipment has been sabotaged, thus exposing a traitor in the team's ranks.

Here is the trailer for the film.



Nobody slaps Anythony Quinn. Nobody.

Memphis Belle (1990 Warner Bros.)

If you're looking for a great blood and guts movie about WWII, look no further that the Memphis Belle! Occasionally, this film will be shown on cable or satellite, but if you have a chance RENT IT! You won't be dissappointed!

It's May 17, 1943; the day before the Memphis Belle's, a B-17 bomber, 25th and final mission. After their final mission, they crew of ten men get to go home. Since they would be the first crew to finish all 25 missions in the 8th Airforce, there were already plans to make the 10-man crew big stars back home for the war effort. But the mission hadn't been flown yet. With the target being Bremen (not Dresden), which was a target heavy in surface-to-air artillery, the flak wouldn't be easy to get through. With weather, nerves, and dreams all playing a part in the finishing of the mission, the crew has to become the lead plane in the squadron and get the job done of bombing a Nazi supply factory, if they get it wrong, many innocent people could be killed.

COOL LINK ABOUT THE MEMPHIS BELLE!!!

I can't blame a guy for wanting to turn back! These guys were heading into the jaws of Satan himself if you ask me!



Memphis Belle with a little Pirate spice! ARRRGH!

The Lives of Others (Sony Pictures 2006)

When William F. Buckley tells you to watch a film...folks you just plain do it! Here is Buck's review of the 2006 German Film The Lives of Others from National Review. Go see it! You will enjoy it!

I return from one week’s leave from my column, grateful for my old roost and in the mood to repay a favor by granting one, or attempting to do so. You must have the narrative of what happened one day last week.

I was at work, with an assistant, on a long project, a book about the Goldwater campaign and the events leading up to it. At noon I had an e-mail from my oldest friend, a historian-belletrist, a knighted Englishman, whose message was that I must interrupt whatever I was wasting time on in order to catch a particular movie. The title he gave me was The Lives of Others. My companion hadn’t heard of it either. Still, so urgent was my friend’s recommendation that we instructed Google to advise us where, within reasonable reach, we could find it.

We were given one theater 15 miles east of my study, at an odd hour of the evening. But west about the same distance was a matinee at 4:15. So we threw duty to the winds and arrived at the theater in Mamaroneck, New York, which like most modern theaters husbands five different movies, requiring you to specify which it is you are there to see.

We were ushered into a dark chamber entirely empty. The ticket seller told us that if we had arrived two minutes later, the theater would have been shut. “If there’s no one here, we don’t show the film.”

Two hours and twenty minutes later we came away. The house was still empty. I turned to my companion and said, “I think that is the best movie I ever saw.” He is only 23 years old, but he nodded his agreement.

The movie is German, and in German. There is a prejudice, perhaps understandable, against going to see a movie made in a foreign language. But good subtitle writers capture your mind and heart early in the engagement, and after ten minutes you are as if tuned into your native language. This is so of this German film, which depicts life in Berlin in 1984 under the famous Stasi, who were ten times as numerous as their brother Gestapo had been.

The watchword of the Stasi was information. They would use all their powers, which were plenary, to press their totalitarian thumb down on any expression of life in East Germany. In this case, they had their eye on a playwright who sought to write about the way he and his fellow East Germans lived. To effect their surveillance the Stasi used the most rudimentary tool of social highwaymanry, the listening device. The writer is away from his lair for a day, and no fewer than eight technicians swoop down on his apartment, from which moment there is not a private swallow in the life of the author and his lady and his friends.

Omnipresent in the film is the Stasi officer who is listening to it all, turning the device over to a coadjutor every eight hours, together with notes about the conversations he has overheard during his watch. And then, and then, there is a trickle of humanity, which quickly turns the drama into three parts, Stasi vs. German humankind vs. Stasi. The tension mounts to heart-stopping pitch and I felt the impulse to rush out into the street and drag passersby in to watch the story unfold.

The principal players are captivating, especially the main Stasi officer, who, without a change in aspect of his dour countenance, undergoes this convulsion of the soul, which permits the author life, though without his martyred lady. There is then the sublime vengeance of a published book’s dedication to the redemptive German functionary who briefly interrupted hell in East Germany, pending, finally, the eradication of the terrible Berlin Wall.

I looked at the record and was gratified to find, in the critics’ files, encomiums absolutely unconfined in their admiration of this movie, which in fact won the Academy Award for Best Foreign-Language Film. And I was unsurprised to find that what seems the whole of East Germany is riven by its impact. Since so many East Germans were complicit in the postwar reign of the German Democratic Republic, there is a corporate national shame at the betrayal of life, as so brazenly done by so many millions, but whose country, at least, has given the world this holy vessel of expiation.

Can you imagine Jesse Jackson having a face to face debate with Buckley? Folks, I'd spend hundreds of dollars to just listen to that on a small cruddy radio.

Here is the trailer from the film.



Knock! Knock! It's just you're friendly, all-caring, all-knowing guvment!!!