“The Winds of War” is a mini-series that appeared on TV in 1983. It was based on the novel by Herman Wouk and he wrote the teleplay. Wouk was very hands on in bringing his work to the screen and even had a cameo in the series. It was directed by Dan Curtis. The series was very expensive and was filmed at numerous locations around the globe. It was a big ratings success and got several Emmy nominations. The story covers the period from March, 1939 through December, 1941. It basically places career naval officer “Pug” Henry (Robert Mitchum) and his family in the midst of events leading up to the war. The series mixes them in with historical characters including the major world leaders like Hitler, Mussolini, Roosevelt, and Churchill.
The series is so sprawling it is impossible to summarize, but here are some of the basics. Pug is available for globetrotting to wherever the political or military action is. Meanwhile his family is being personally effected by the war. Each of them gets a romance. His wife Rhoda (Polly Bergen) loves high society and rubbing shoulders with world leaders (she certainly married the right man for that!). Pug is gone a lot, what with being in the Navy plus having to be on the scene for any significant event, so she dallies with Fred Kirby (Peter Graves). Two can play that game. Pug has a British bird half his age named Pamela (Victoria Tennant) that has a crush on him. This is creepy not just because of the age difference, but because Pamela is vivacious and Pug is as uncharismatic as a slug. There is not enough chemistry here to get an ant high. Speaking of which. Their youngest son Byron (Jan Michael-Vincent) marries an older, feisty Jewish girl named Natalie Jastrow (Ali MacGraw) so we get a connection to the Holocaust. One of the themes of the series is the naivete of most European Jews when it came to reading the omens. A lot of time is spent on Natalie trying to get herself and her uncle (and her baby) off of the cliff. They keep backing away and then running up to the edge. It gets farcical after a while. Idiots, why not just knock on the concentration camp door and get it over with!
If you can put up with all the romantic shenanigans, the filler is quite good and informative. The series hits all the major events leading to war in Europe and then shifts toward getting the U.S. involved. We go behind closed doors to the inner circles to see the politics. It’s not quite “Game of Thrones”, but as close as the 20th Century got to it. The best acting is by the actors who portray the heavy weights like Hitler, Churchill, and Roosevelt (Ralph Bellamy). There is a lot of verbatim speechifying. If you don’t know how the world got in such a mess, you will have a pretty good idea after watching this. The series effectively uses a narrator to lead into the higher level scenes and to bridge to the next event. There is also effective use of archival footage.
As unrealistic as it is, the series manages to put Pug in some situations that provide quite a bit of excitement to balance the smoochy stuff. Besides being the only person in history to chat with Hitler, Mussolini, Stalin, Churchill, and FDR (sorry Hirohito, you’re not on his friends list), he also gets to see some action. For instance, he suits up for the first RAF bombing mission to Berlin. He’s on board an escort destroyer for convoy duty in the North Atlantic. He witnesses the blitzkrieg in Russia. He hops on a horse in Poland to join the lancers in a charge against German tanks. Okay, I made that last one up (although the movie has a reference to that incident). He is the Zelig of WWII. All this without using his facial muscles or showing any emotion.
The most impressive thing about the teleplay is the references to beyond WWII 001. The series throws in details that bring nods from people who are well-versed on the war. For instance, there is a scene where Churchill decides not to accede to French pleas of maximum RAF support to avoid conquest. Churchill consults with the RAF chief and makes the harsh decision to save his squadrons for the next battle. The infancy of radar is delved into. It is accurately called RDF by the British. There is a good scene where Pug visits an Operational Center (where Pamela coincidentally works) to see the vectoring of fighters to meet Luftwaffe bombers.
The money spent on the series is
most apparent in the location shooting.
The globe-trotting is truly impressive.
Curtis takes the time to throw in local color like some running of the
horses spectacle in Italy. Some of that
money might have been better spent on the effects. There is too much reliance on models for the
air combat and naval scenes. This
miniseries could have really used CGI. The use of actual footage helps and the series
also makes use of shots from earlier war movies. For instance, the Pearl Harbor attack inserts
footage from
“Tora! Tora! Tora!” and I swear I recognized a carrier landing from the obscure
“Dive Bomber” (which may have been borrowed itself).
Some of the money could also have been put toward higher quality actors. Robert Mitchum was a big star, but much too old for the role especially if you are going to pair him off with an actress 33 years younger. Not only that but there must have been some thought that the series would go on to a sequel. He was around age 70 when “War and Remembrance” was made! The rest of the cast is B-list and it shows. Polly Bergen does well as the scene chewing Mrs. Henry and John Houseman brings gravitas as the brilliant, but laughably naïve Aaron Jastrow. The biggest problems are MacGraw and Michael-Vincent who have virtually no chemistry as the separated lovers. Ben Murphy is not given enough to do as the other Henry boy. As already mentioned the acting accolades go to the actors who portray the world leaders. They are uniformly able.
GRADE = B-
Great review. I think I can understand the mistake in casting Mitchum - in the first series he can still pass for a younger man, and his portrayal fits the book character (and, I suspect, played to how some of the WWII generation wanted to look). But for second series he could no longer look like anything but an elderly man. They were right not to recast, but it is regrettable.
ReplyDeleteThe Pamela-Pug relationship is creepier in the series than in the book, and I think the reason why is that the actress portraying Pamela chose to play her love for Pug as unhealthily obsessive. I think it was a good choice, but it does make that part of the series a little less comfortable to watch.
A miniseries, especially one from the 80s, has to work against serious budget constraints. I think that Winds of War chose to focus its budget on locations and sets - probably a good decision, fitting with the books' focus on the global nature of the war.