This is How Movies Should Be Made

Perfectly adorable

Excellent characters with emotional depth. My wife, daughter and granddaughter all enjoyed it...and me, too! Very good movie! You won't be disappointed.

If you're interested in the topic at hand, you should just watch it and judge yourself because the reviews have gone very biased by people that didn't even watch it and just hate (or love) the creator. I liked it, it was well written, narrated, and directed and it was about a topic that interests me.

Casting Mitchum was the worst possible choice the producers could have made. In each scene in which Mitchum appears, your eyes immediately notifier your brain that something is very wrong here, RM was 25 years too old to play the part. And with Mitchum and his sunken, hound dog face, age could not be erased through makeup or some other miracle the make up people dreamed up. Mitchum was regarded as "the worst pain in the ass, we have ever worked with" by many of his co-stars, his directors and producers. You might say that he paid the producers back double for handing him the role. I didn't find Polly Bergen convincing, her talent runs quite shallow when playing a character through such a long period of time and in so many changes. With so many 1 hour segments (44 minutes w/o ads) you have to be pretty disciplined to devote the time to see each in order. There is some review of the previous segment but not enough to catch you up if you missed one. It's very worth seeing, but be prepared to shake your head at Mitchum's miscasting.

Sequels are always looked upon with mistrust. Too often when something good and successful gets prolonged it turned out that the producer just wanted to milk a worthy cow dry. In this case we can easily say that this follow-up to "The Winds of War" is as good as the book is following its predecessor. (And I read both books.)Many but not all of the original cast repeated their roles. Most notable changes are the switch of Natalie Jastrow/Henry from Ali MacGraw to Jane Seymour and for Byron Henry played by Jan-Michael Vincent to Hart Bochner. While MacGraw and Vincent were arguably not the best choice in the first place, they both have strong personalities and this fits perfectly to the respective characters they played. In replacing them with Seymour and Bochner both lack the necessary headstrong appearance and consequently both performances seemed to be toned down.The other replacements are John Gielgud for John Houseman as Aaron Jastrow, somehow an improvement I must say, Gielgud plays the author more convincingly. The inimitable Robert Morley replaced Michael Logan as Alistair Tudsbury and is perfectly cast in that role.Another improvement is Steven Berkoff as Hitler. Berkoff is especially good and scary when he gets in one of Hitler's notorious fits! In „The Winds of War" the German dubbed version shown on TV in German speaking counties and on the DVD for that market had Hitler almost completely eliminated because Günter Meissner made him appear like a cartoon character. These cuts and some others are quite obvious and so severe that this version of "The Winds of War" consists of only five instead of seven episodes! I suppose that the TV station who payed for the dubbing eliminated some of the anti-German scenes in order to make the series more acceptable to the German audience. When I realized this I bought the original DVDs to see the whole thing.Sharon Stone came in to take over the role of Janice Henry but the role doesn't offer much for her.Most actors who stayed on from „The Winds of War" are great to see again and have been well chosen in the first place. Robert Mitchum does his best considering him being much too old for the role. But he has the right dignity and that makes him convincing. Except for his scenes with Victoria Tennant, who is great by the way, but one asks himself how she could fall in love with such an old and unromantic chap like Mitchum.But for one there would definitely be no good replacement imaginable, and that is Polly Bergen as Rhoda! She is perfect in the role, fits very good as Mitchum's good-natured but silly wife and is also convincing when unfaithful. You can feel how much she is torn between her role of wife, mother and lover.Overall WAR continues perfectly where WOW ended and as the story gets grimmer so does the series. Even compared with what is possible to show on TV nowadays the visual brutality and shocking images of the concentration camps is sometimes unbearable. How daring must theses scenes have been in the 80s? More than once I asked myself, how did they film this? I felt pity with the actors and extras for being in such gruesome scenes!One of the most surprising things about both WOW and WAR is that every now and then familiar faces pop up but they all fit well into the story rather than distract you. Today many international TV productions are squeezing actors of different nationalities into one show to please the involved production companies. The result is almost always disaster. Mainly because US actors play Brits while Germans play Austrians and British actors do French roles and so on. Everything looks and sounds fake and that is exactly what it is. In WOW and in WAR Germans play Germans, Americans play Americans and British play British subjects, only now and than one might have to make an amendment (think of Jeremy Kemp as Von Roon), but most of the time the actors know whom they are to portray.Of course many of the special effects in the battle scenes cannot deny their age, scenes involving ships and submarines do fare worse the aviation stuff. But the blending with obvious original material works very well and gives the whole series the necessary factual background.Definitely worth watching!!!

I was not at all happy with the replacement of Ali McGraw with Jane Seymour; Jan Michael Vincent with Hart Bochner and some of the other changes. Thank God they left Robert Mitchum alone despite his age. I really missed John Houseman in his role as Aaron Jastrow and while I consider the late Sir John Gielgud to have been a superb actor, I kept looking for Houseman. Unfortunately his health prevented his reprisal of that role. I have nothing personal against Ms. Seymour but I much preferred Ms. McGraw in the role of Natalie. I also preferred Mr. Vincent over Mr. Bochner as I believe he portrayed Byron much more convincingly. I gave War and Remembrance a seven (7) rating as opposed to the ten (10) for Winds of War. Why? Precisely because of the change in actors. While I could understand the change from Houseman to Geilgud, I think there were too many changes. I am thankful they left Jeremy Kemp in the role of Gen. Von Roon however I was more impressed with Gunter Meisner's portrayal of Adolf Hitler in Winds of War over Steven Berkoff's portrayal in War and Remembrance. Ralph Bellamy did a masterful job as FDR. As to the critics of historical accuracy, the author was not presenting his work as a non-fiction textbook; but rather a novel set against the background of events leading up to and including World War II. And yes, there were some changes from the novel to the screen, but again, this is a great work of fiction that remarkably included real life events!!!

After watching the Winds of War, I looked forward to War and Remembrance. I found the sequel far more depressing and less entertaining than the original. Perhaps that was its intent but it is difficult for the average viewer to sit through so many hours of endless anguish. Not for the faint hearted. That having been said, the acting is excellent and far superior to the original. I could not see the wise cracking Ali McGraw playing the holocaust scenes in the camps. Jane Seymour was superb and it is probably the finest thing she has ever done. John Gielgud demonstrates why he was one of the foremost actors of his century. Mitchum was effective in serious scenes involving war and politics but unconvincing and without passion in his scenes with the very desirable Victoria Tennant. I thought the portrayal of Hitler, as in the original was a characterture and clownish and difficult to take seriously. Hardy Krueger was more realistic as Rommel and a pleasant contrast to all the stereotypical German villains. While I recognize it is difficult to accurately portray military events of WWII in the 1980's, some obvious inaccuracies were evident to any WWII veterans or history buffs. A scene of Roosevelt aboard the cruiser Baltimore was obviously filmed on a battleship. As a former submariner, I found the interior submarine scenes accurate and realistic. However, the exterior scenes showing depth charges repeatedly exploding within feet of the submarine would have been unsurvivable. The final surface engagement between Bryan's submarine and a Japanese destroyer was totally ludicrous. No attempt was made to fire any torpedoes at the approaching destroyer and choosing to exchange broadsides under those circumstances would have been suicidal. The submarine did more damage with one shot from its deck gun than the destroyer was able to do with far more firepower. As the submarine blithely sailed away from the burning destroyer, it strains credulity as it ignores the considerable talent and élan demonstrated by the Japanese navy throughout the war. The death of Bryan's former skipper was an accurate portrayal of an actual incident as was the machine gunning of Japanese survivors which did occur during the war. War and Remembrance might be an informative narrative for a history student unfamiliar with that era, but it is not for the squeamish seeking television entertainment.