The Victors

I saw The Victors on the big screen in 1964 and its impact has never left me. I saw a cut version on TV a few years ago, and while forty years of film watching and life experience made the movie seem a little heavy-handed and sentimental to me, it still packed a punch. It is not a perfect film - there is the occasional bad moment, and some techniques that were startling in 1963, particularly the newsreels and the hand-held camera used in the opening scene, are now familiar.

Nevertheless, The Victors should serve as a needed lesson to "kids today" that WWII was not fun, not easy, and not "an adventure." Beating the Nazis was a grinding, miserable task that was paid for in suffering and loss. (As for concentration camps, a previous reviewer missed the scene in which one is indeed liberated.) Unusually, the film shows the effect of war on women and children, as well as on the fighting men. It's also remarkable that the movie was released years before the "disillusionment" of the Vietnam War. Had more Americans seen The Victors they might have had a better idea of what the nation was getting itself into. Watch The Longest Day or Patton, then watch The Victors and then decide which seems the most "true to life." If you don't know what "symbolism" means, the final episode, filmed at the height of the Cold War, and its epigraph by World War I poet Wilfred Owen, will show you.

The opening credits suggest the historical relationship between World war II and World War I. They also should remind everyone that there were plenty of Black GIs in WWII, and that Uncle Sam didn't win the war all by himself.

There are moments of real humanity here. The Vince Edwards episode was considered "controversial" in 1963, and in today's film culture may actually seem banal, but it's about understanding as well as loneliness. The memorable sequence involving George Peppard and the English family is wonderfully understated.

Somebody should explain why this occasionally flawed but excellent and provocative film has never been released to home video.