World On Fire/ Winds of War
The last episode of World on Fire was a dreadful piece of TV drama.
The series lost all credibility as on one hand it was painstaking in its period detail – but on the other, because of BBC diversity policy, a significant number of parts were unrealistically created and cast to provide ethnic roles.
Poorly acted with too many plot lines, the weakness of the drama was immediately apparent in the final scene with a stock sequence of a lorry drawing up outside a house in the Polish countryside where the resistance was billeted and – guess what – the tarpaulin drops to reveal a German soldier with a machine gun (there is an identical scene at the end of The Great Escape).
The series sets up a second series which this reviewer will not be watching as it’s unclear whether Kasia the Polish Resistance fighter scampers to freedom or not (bet she does).
I was discussing the programme with a well-informed friend of mine recently.
He turned it off minutes into the first episode saying he remembered and much preferred Winds of War (1983).
I only vaguely recalled this and ordered the DVD from Amazon.
It’s an adaptation of Herman Wouk’s book. Although Saul Bellow and Philip Roth were better known Jewish writers, Wouk easily outsold them and I remember his fat volumes on my parents’ shelves alongside Leon Uris.
The series had a budget of $35 million and – according to Neil Rosen – is interesting as it’s made from the American perspective.
It has a notable if eclectic cast of Robert Mitchum, in his sixties by then, Ali McGraw, a Jewish free spirit anxious to visit her visit her boyfriend – a US diplomat stationed in Warsaw at the time of the German invasion – and Topol (her uncle).
In Winds of Remembrance John Gielgud and Robert Hardy appear.
The plot centres around the Henry Family. Pug (Robert Mitchum) is a career naval officer who becomes a diplomat, the son works alongside Ali MacGraw for her uncle, a Jewish art historian (possibly based on Bernard Berenson) and collector with a villa in Siena.
You see the start of the war and the Nazis through their eyes. There is one chilling scene when Topol drives Ali McGraw to visit her family in the Polish countryside. She passes a village she has once visited called Auschwitz.
On arrival at the village there is a wedding in progress – it’s very much a Fiddler on the Roof scene till you realise the kids from the village that greet the car so excitedly would all be wiped out in the camps by the end of the war.
The drama was much more gripping than World on Fire and only the number of the cast that smoked cigarettes and pipes, the lack of sex scenes and sadistic violence gave way that it was made nearly 40 years ago. ,
