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Objective Burma [1945] [1954]
![Objective Burma [1945] [1954]](http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/515MA8XTRNL._SL160_.jpg)
A paratroop captain (Errol Flynn) sets out with a platoon to attack a Japanese outpost in the jungle. The Americans reach their target, take out the enemy with almost balletic precision, then gear up to return home. This feels like the point when a conventional war movie would have reached its action-filled climax, but the journey has only begun. Ahead lies one of the most arduous and agonising adventures any World War II film ever offered, brilliantly directed by that underrated old master Raoul Walsh and photographed with almost tactile realism by the great James Wong Howe. Franz Waxman also contributes one of his finest music scores. Flynn is excellent (he had given his best performance ever in Walsh's Gentleman Jim three years earlier), and he's backed by a solid cast including Henry Hull (as an ageing war correspondent), James Brown, William Prince, George Tobias and Stephen Richards (soon to change his name to Mark Stevens). Incidentally, two of the writers, Alvah Bessie and Lester Cole, were later blacklisted; see if you can spot any Commie propaganda. --Richard T Jameson
RRP: £13.99
Our Price: £2.11 (subject to change)
Editorial
Amazon.co.uk Review
On its first release in 1945, just after VJ day, Objective Burma came under fire in the British press--much as Saving Private Ryan would do some 40 years later--for portraying the jungle war as a solely American operation. But the passage of time has allowed the movie's many merits to outshine its narrow remit. The movie's bone-chilling portrayal of pain, sacrifice and endurance is astonishing; the jungle atmosphere is so persuasive you'd swear it was shot on the actual locations; and you'll never forget the terrifying last dark night on a mountainside--or the crocodiles.
Editorial
Special Features
English
Region 2
Editorial
Synopsis
A group of paratroopers are dropped into the Burmese jungle to wipe out a Japanese radar station. At first, things seem to be going as planned but the team soon find themselves in a jungle full of Japanese soldiers. Stars Hollywood legend Errol Flynn.
Bad as it gets
Review date: 2008-01-11 Rating: 2 out of 10
This is typical of the American film type that insists that they always win ..everywhere... even when they weren't there.
The acting is the sort of "gung ho" trash we have to expect, with little showing of the true talent that director and star actually had. There are times during the movie you just want to cringe at the failure to come to grips with the truth of war.
Perhaps the thought that might come to the mind of any 14th Army man watching this film is that if the GI troops were as good as shown then things should have gone differently in Korea, Vietnam, Lebanon, Somalia, Iraq and Afganistan.
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Reviews
It's Rubbish
Review date: 2007-10-04 Rating: 2 out of 10
Typical Hollywood rubbish!
"Let's re-write history guys and pretend the Brits weren't in Burma. Let's say that the good 'ole USA did it all alone!"
Tell that to an ex 14th Army man, or an ex Chindit!
If you know anything about the War, avoid this like the plague.
There again, if you know nothing about the War, you might enjoy it.
I think it's rubbish. I score it minus 10 stars if I could.
Nothing under the sun is alien to Walsh
Review date: 2004-02-20 Rating: 10 out of 10
Raoul Walsh has to be the most agonizingly undervalued of all Hollywood maestros of yore. When the time came to do 'Objective Burma' he had a glorious career behind him spanning more than 30 years, with bona fide masterworks like 'Regeneration', ’Sadie Thompson’, ’Big Trail’, ’Roaring Twenties’, ’High Sierra’ and others, and yet every second of ’Burma’ is briskly paced and enthrallingly dynamic. In his day Walsh was best known for his action sequences, but everytime you revisit his films, not least this one, you are reminded that nothing human, absolutely nothing under the sun was alien to Walsh as a person and as a director. He succeeds where almost any other director of ensemble movies fails, that is in investing every single cast member with a character that is so precise, so wellrounded and unsentimental, so unlike all the others that you actually sit there with an ache in your heart for all the knowledge, all the feel for the medium, the innate sense of pacing that seems all but lost today where almost no director, certainly no one in Hollywood, dares to communicate this intelligently. Errol Flynn is subdued, pure in his acting and so matter-of-factly heroic that it would shatter it, were he to do do a deed that was actually heroic in the contemporary Hollywood sense. His heroism is a given, but so is his fear and his insecurity.
A masterpiece of moviemaking.
Nothing under the sun is alien to Walsh
Review date: 2004-02-16 Rating: 10 out of 10
Raoul Walsh has to be the most agonizingly undervalued of all Hollywood maestros of yore. When the time came to do 'Objective Burma' he had a glorious career behind him spanning more than 30 years, with bona fide masterworks like 'Regeneration', ’Sadie Thompson’, ’Big Trail’, ’Roaring Twenties’, ’High Sierra’ and others, and yet every second of ’Burma’ is briskly paced and enthrallingly dynamic. In his day Walsh was best known for his action sequences, but everytime you revisit his films, not least this one, you are reminded that nothing human, absolutely nothing under the sun was alien to Hawks as a person and as a director. He succeeds where almost any other director of ensemble movies fails, that is in investing every single cast member with a description that is so precise, so wellrounded and unsentimental, so unlike all the others that you actually sit there with an ache in your heart for all the knowledge, all the feel for the medium, the innate sense of pacing that seems all but lost today where almost no director, certainly no one in Hollywood, dares to communicate this intelligently. Errol Flynn is subdued, pure in his acting and so matter-of-factly heroic that it would shatter it, were he to do do a deed that was actually heroic in the contemporary Hollywood sense. His heroism is a given, but so is his fear and his insecurity.
A masterpiece of moviemaking.
Product Details/Specifications
Actor(s):
James Brown (II)
Errol Flynn
George Tobias
William Prince
Henry Hull
Creators:
Errol Flynn (Primary Contributor)
James Brown (II) (Primary Contributor)
Director(s):
Recording label: Warner Home Video
Manufacturer: Warner Home Video
EAN: 7321900652506
Binding: DVD
Number of items: 1
Format: Black & White, PAL,
Release date: 2003-07-21
Number of discs: 1
Aspect ratio: 1.33:1
Audience rating: Parental Guidance
Region code: 2
Running time: 135 minutes
Theatrical release date: 1945-02-17
Language: English (Original Language)
Language: Japanese (Original Language)
Language: Italian (Subtitles For The Hearing Impaired)
Language: English (Subtitles For The Hearing Impaired)
Language: English (Subtitled)
Language: French (Subtitled)
Language: Italian (Subtitled)
Language: Dutch (Subtitled)
Language: Arabic (Subtitled)
Language: Romanian (Subtitled)