Battle of Neretva [DVD] [1969]

There's a very bold scope to this film which unfortunately the director and production don't achieve. Massive, if slightly unrealistic, battle scenes are mixed with lots of wide shots of huddled masses walking and singing. The abundance of singing really exposes the film for the propoganda-fuelled fest that it is. Apart from Hardy Krueger, the stars featured on the case aren't playing pivotal of frequently seen characters, but the most disappointing thing is that this re-telling of pivotal moments in a country's history are not explained. You can't beat maps in films like this periodically coming onto the screen to show the relative positions of the protagonists and their progress.
Another thing that upset me was the use of different tanks by the German army, some were made to look like Tigers, some were Shermans and some were T-34s. Still I would recommend it as a good WW2 romp which attempts to tell a fascinating story.

Bad news first: this is not a digitally remastered, crystal clear copy with clean sound. It has apparently been transferred from video, with some visible & audible noise. For a video transfer it is OK, but don't expect too much.
Then the good news: this really is the original, the first proper home video release of The Battle of Neretva since the Oscar winning film was made in 1970. Unedited in length, 16:9 widescreen, with the original musical score and dialogue: the Yugoslavians, the Germans and the Italians all speak their own languages, adding a lot to the realism. There are hardcoded English subtitles and no alternative soundtracks, which may annoy some, but this is OK with me. Only the subtitle font is a bit large and clumsy.
I give this one four stars, since we still have to wait for the ultimate DVD quality release. Still, this is the best and most complete version there is. All other versions, some of them technically superior, have been more or less chopped from the real thing. Strongly recommended for all friends of war spectacles, especially since the price is reasonable.
...and oh yes, the film itself is good!

The Battle of Neretva is way beyond a no expense spared epic - it's as if the whole of Yugoslavia's gross national product has been put into the film. It's so incredibly spectacular even in its various truncated versions with such huge numbers of extras, tanks, planes, horses and artillery tearing apart whole villages and towns built for the film just to be destroyed that the only adequate reaction is awe at the sheer immensity of it all. It dwarfs even the most spectacular American WW2 epics and is probably second only to the Russian War and Peace and Waterloo in the spectacle stakes, so its no surprise to see their director Sergei Bondarchuk in the film's cast. The actual direction is entrusted to Veljko Bulajic, and a fine job he does of staging too: almost every shot both impresses and convinces, the film avoiding some of the heavy-handness of many spot-the-star epics.

Intended as a showcase for Yugoslavian cinema, it's rather more subtle than the propaganda picture you might expect: Tito gets the first word and relentless praise, but generally the Yugoslavians are divided on just how they should be fighting the campaign, often confused by the contradictory orders the receive - so confused, in fact, that at one point they even find themselves following a madman who's taken command after escaping from his doctors.

It's not a perfect film by any means. Many of the international cast have little to do - Orson Welles' Chetnik leader, Yul Brynner's saboteur, Curt Jurgens' German strategist, Hardy Kruger's professional stormtrooper, Sylva Koscina's girl soldier - and of them only Franco Nero's Italian anti-fascist deserter who switches sides but still can't fire on his old comrades and Anthony Dawson's suicidal defeated general have much that's memorable to do. There's not much in the way of character development either, at least not in the two-and-a-half hour version on DVD in Spain. The extended family that become the film's main characters only gradually emerge to take center-stage, though they may have been better introduced in the original cut. And there's the rub: the film lost 73 minutes from its original 175-minute running time and gained a new score by Bernard Herrmann in the US, and the uncut version seems never to have been seen in the West.

The two-and-a-half hour version on the 2.35:1 widescreen Spanish DVD seems to have been put together from various sources - parts of the film have German, Italian or Slav soundtracks regardless of which nationality is speaking, the score is Vladimir Kraus-Rajteric's original while the English subtitles are tiny and rather over-literal ("Follow me, typhus people!" "Yes, Mr General"), but does have decent picture quality in the original ratio. Arrow's more recent UK PAL DVD release is the longest available version, running 13 minutes longer and having better sound quality, but unfortunately the picture quality isn't very good - not only is it clearly taken from a less than high-resolution video master but it's also been cropped (it apears to be 1.9:1 widescreen instead of 2.35:1). Both versions are less than the ideal way to view it, but it's still worth the effort: it's the kind of film that simply could never be made again.