Britain At War In Colour

(Colour Of War - The British Story)

This review is sponsored by

Details At A Glance

General		Extras
Category	Documentary	Booklet Main Menu Audio and Animation Featurette - Extra Footage (5) Featurette - Diaries and Letters (5) Notes - Key Facts Gallery - Poster
Rating
Year Released	2000
Running Time	148:15 minutes (not 218 minutes as stated on packaging)
RSDL/Flipper	RSDL (117:34)	Cast & Crew
Start Up	Menu	Cast & Crew
Region	1,2,3,4,5,6	Director
Studio Distributor	Warner Vision Australia	Starring
Case	Transparent Amaray	Starring
RPI	$49.95	Music	Chris Elliott

Video		Audio
Pan & Scan/Full Frame	Full Frame	English (Dolby Digital 2.0, 192 Kb/s)
Widescreen Aspect Ratio	None
16x9 Enhancement	No
Original Aspect Ratio	1.33:1	Miscellaneous
Macrovision	Yes	Smoking	Yes
Subtitles	English	Annoying Product Placement	No
Subtitles	English	Action In or After Credits	No

Plot Synopsis

What exactly is one supposed to say about a DVD like this one? Basically the title says it all: this is a look at Britain and her people during World War II using rare colour film. It is important to remember that whilst colour film has been around for a fair old while, its general use did really not happen until the late 1940s and 1950s. Indeed, barring some rather notable exceptions, its use in film was relatively limited until the 1950s and 1960s. Accordingly, the fact that there even exists a large amount of colour footage taken during the immediate pre-war period and during the war is quite amazing. In many cases it is fortuitous indeed that footage of people preparing for war exists, as a lot of the footage included here is from amateur sources, which also partly explains why some of it is not the best film ever seen. Still, I'd rather some colour film than nothing at all.

This is actually a television series and comprises three episodes:

Darkest Hour - broadly covering the period from 1934 through to 1942 as Britain prepares for the worst and then endures the worst.
The Beginning Of The End - covering the period from 1942 through to V-E Day as an endless succession of Allied defeats finally ends and the tide turns against the Axis forces.
Unknown Warriors - wherein we actually get to meet some of the people whose diaries and letters were used as part of the narrative of the series. We also meet one of the people whose amateur film efforts are included in the series.

If you had not already guessed, the episode titles are taken from the speeches of Sir Winston Churchill, arguably one of the greatest politicians to ever hold office anywhere in the world. Basically he took over when the decidedly ineffectual Sir Neville Chamberlain quit in 1940 and led Britain through some of the toughest times in its history. Some of his truly great speeches are given some airplay during the episodes and they leave no doubt as to the contribution he personally made to the British war effort through his unstinting efforts to implore Britons to greater sacrifices for the common good.

A wonderful look at a period in Earth's history that should never be forgotten and should always serve as a reminder of the evil to which Man will descend for the sake of bullshit irrelevancies.

Transfer Quality

Video

Okay so we are talking about colour film dating from 1934 to 1945 during the very early days of the emergence of colour film in general usage. We are also talking about basically a whole bunch of home film footage taken mainly by amateurs. So are you really expecting something close to perfection here? What we get is precisely what we would expect to get: wildly varying quality film blessed with wildly varying degrees of transfer quality. Forget all that though, for its importance far outweighs the technical problems inherent in the source material. I mean how priceless is colour footage of Oswald Mosley's Blackshirts of the British Union of Fascists marching through the streets of London in 1940?

Since we are talking a whole bunch of home video footage in today's parlance, we are talking original material filmed in a normal 1.37:1 ratio. Accordingly, the transfer is presented in a Full Frame format and it is not 16x9 enhanced.

Since the source material is variously problematic in most respects, it is very important to remember that the source material has these inherent problems, often of a quite serious nature at times. Therefore, the transfer is going to look reasonably poor too at times, but that is no reflection on the quality of the mastering, just the quality of the source material. What we have here is an excellent transfer of some variable quality source material. The transfer varies from diffuse to quite sharp with detail varying between poorish and unexpectedly good. None of this is any worse than anticipated though and often is far better than expected. Shadow detail is at best only moderate and at times is pretty woeful - again nothing worse than expected. There is plenty of grain on offer but it is all inherent grain and the actual transfer itself would not seem to be introducing anything more than what was in the source material. There did not appear to be any really significant low level noise problems in the transfer.

Colours are naturally enough all over the place. At times quite decent with nice tonal depth, whilst at other times being quite poorish with a decidedly under saturated tone to it. There is unfortunately little that can be done with the inherent variability but at no time did I really find it that distracting. Some slight oversaturation is present in some of the transfer but again nothing that I found especially disruptive. Colour bleed was not a problem in the transfer.

There did not appear to be any MPEG artefacts in the transfer, other than some blockiness in the opening credit sequence - most especially the film shot from the top of St Paul's Cathedral (at least I think that was where it was shot from). There were a few minor instances of film-to-video artefacts in the form of aliasing in the transfer, but nothing that would really detract from the film. There were plenty of film artefacts in the source material as is expected, and some of them are pretty ugly. However, the rarity of the footage outweighs these problems with ease.

This is an RSDL formatted DVD, with the layer change coming at 18:56 during the third episode: this is 117:34 overall if my math is any good. This rather late change, whilst noticeable, is not really disruptive to the flow of the episode.

The English subtitles default to on, which is a bit annoying.

*Video Ratings Summary*
Sharpness
Shadow Detail
Colour
Grain
Film-to-Video Artefacts
Film Artefacts
Overall

Audio

There is just the one soundtrack on the DVD, being an English Dolby Digital 2.0 soundtrack.

There is not an awful lot going on in the soundtrack apart from the narration and therefore it is rather important that this comes up well in the overall mix. It does and you should have no problems hearing and understanding what is being said. Since this is predominantly voice-over narration, the question of audio sync is a tad moot, but there did not seem to be any misplaced sound here.

The original music in the episodes comes from Chris Elliott and is quite decent, even though it does need to borrow quite heavily from the style of British music included here from the likes of William Walton, Ralph Vaughan Williams and others who were far less recognizable. In addition there is some popular music from the time included here to good effect too, including some from some woman known as Vera Lynn.

I was not expecting much from the soundtrack and what we got is pretty much what I was expecting. No bells and whistles here, just a fairly solid Dolby Digital 2.0 soundtrack that does what it needs to do, without fuss and without problems. Certainly there is nothing in the way of surround channel and bass channel usage here to worry about.

*Audio Ratings Summary*
Dialogue
Audio Sync
Clicks/Pops/Dropouts
Surround Channel Use
Subwoofer
Overall

Extras

It would seem that some effort went into including a bit of additional material to really fill out the DVD. Well, it is nice to fill out the DVD but was there good purpose for doing so? Actually, yes, as I found this to be a nicely extending aspect to the main episodes.

Booklet

A reasonably decent little effort I suppose but I cannot help but feel that something more extensive could have been offered.

Featurette - Extra Footage

Pretty much a wolf in sheep's clothing here! Once you hit this section you understand why the running time on the DVD packaging is stated as it is (since this makes up the bulk of the difference). The five actual pieces are:

London and South East England 1940-45 (6:55) - mainly more footage to extend that seen in the main programme.
Battle Of Midway 1942 (8:05) - some interesting footage of this decisive Pacific battle, although I am not quite certain where the British connection is.
1st Battalion, 2nd Independent Parachute Brigade dropped on Megara, Greece 1944 (4:18) - some rather interesting footage of a parachute drop on Greece and the meeting up with the local resistance.
Paris and Berlin 1945 (6:12) - footage showing the starkly contrasting celebrations in these two cities at the conclusion of the War in Europe.
Memphis Belle (37:08) - the piece de resistance!!! So you thought that the film was just a piece of fiction did you? Well, this is the actual documentary made during the war about this famous B-17 Flying Fortress bomber that survived 25 sorties over Europe and earned herself and her crew the comparatively rare distinction of going home after a complete tour of duty.

The latter piece would be worth the price of acquiring this DVD alone for any World War II aviation buff. The presentation is identical to that of the main programming of the first four segments, albeit without any audio narration. The last item however is complete with the full audio soundtrack, and represents a priceless piece of war memorabilia in some ways. Great stuff!

Featurette - Diaries and Letters

Not so quite an essential inclusion but further short readings from the diaries and letters of David Green (0:31), Pamela Moore (0:36), John Mowlam (1:08), Maureen Bolster (0:37) and Charles Bratley (0:51) with further insights to the British people under the strain of war. Presented as readings over some film superimposed onto a waving Union Jack.

Notes - Key Facts

Very, very brief notes for each year from 1935 to 1945, with some hot links to the main programming where relevant footage exists. The only problem is that once you use the hot link to go to the salient footage, there does not seem to be any way of getting straight back to the key facts page. At least I could not find a way as the relevant episode kept on playing.

Gallery - Poster

With an almost unbelievable treasure trove of patriotic posters to choose from, I was quite looking forward to an extensive collection of stills here. Well, I suppose some might consider 10 unannotated posters as being an extensive look at such things, but I certainly don't.

Censorship

As far as we have been able to ascertain, there are no censorship issues with this title.

R4 vs R1

As far as can be ascertained this has not yet been released in Region 1. However, it is unlikely that any subsequent Region 1 release would be significantly better than the Region 4 release.

Summary

Britain At War In Colour is a quite fascinating look at a rather significant event in world history through rare colour footage. It is possible that some would have some difficulty relating to the experiences related here. I had no difficulty as amongst the footage was some depressing footage of the bombed out Coventry Cathedral - a place I visited numerous times in my childhood as it was not far from my home town. The immediacy of such ruins (kept as a monument to what Coventry went through during the war) and the recollections of my family who suffered through the Blitz certainly have a more profound effect upon me. Despite the rather variable nature of the source material, this is a quite engrossing documentary that serves its purpose very well indeed.

Ratings (out of 5)

Video
Audio
Extras
Plot
Overall

Review Equipment
DVD	Pioneer DV-515; S-video output
Display	Sony Trinitron Wega 80cm. Calibrated with the NTSC DVD version of Video Essentials.
Audio Decoder	Built in
Amplification	Yamaha RXV-795. Calibrated with the NTSC DVD version of Video Essentials.
Speakers	Energy Speakers: centre EXLC; left and right C-2; rears EXLR; and subwoofer ES-12XL