by Adam Ferenz
When, following the success of Winds of War, Dan Curtis met with ABC executives to discuss also bringing War & Remembrance to the screen, he told them in no uncertain terms that he would agree to it only if he was given carte blanche to present the history as starkly as he could. Despite worries about FCC interference, the eventual series came off beautifully, and won the Emmy for best miniseries. That sort of dedication is apparent for the entire nearly 40 hour run time of this series. Curtis had been uncertain if he wanted to do the sequel-Winds of War had exhausted him-and was eventually convinced by those around him to speak with ABC, a development that often makes for less than enthusiastic film-making. Not here.
Why is such an often emotionally overwrought and soapy story placed on this list? Because of the Holocaust sequences. Period. These are etched in the memory as holding a special power because of their honesty, stripped of sensationalism. The sequence (spoilers) in which a character we have watched for 38 hours, is taken from a ghetto, loaded onto a train, hauled hundreds of miles to Auschwitz, unloaded, herded into a line, forced into a building, stripped of his clothing, and then gassed, before being cremated and his ashes poured into a river, is a sequence few will forget once they’ve seen it.
The casting of the two sides of this epic is something of legend. Robert Mitchum came in as Pug Henry, the head of the Henry family. In “Winds of War” his son, Byron, was played by Jan Michael Vincent, while Natalie Jastrow, Byron’s Jewish girlfriend, was played by Ali McGraw. All three were too old for the roles. Only Mitchum survived. Hart Bochner and Jane Seymour took over the parts for “War and Remembrance” and it is Seymour’s face, the horrors of living through the Holocaust etched on her face, that is among the final and most powerful images in the saga. Oh, and the series also cast John Houseman as her uncle, Aaron. Houseman was replaced in War and Remembrance by Sir John Gielgud, who, like Seymour, made the character his own. His passion and pain during the sequences set in the Theresiendat ghetto, is another in a long line of unforgettable moments linked to the Holocaust in this one.
There’s the White House Cottage gassings sequence, and the Babi Yar massacre, too. The later saw German officers and their wives lining up on the hillside of a ravine to watch Jews and others be mowed down by machine gun fire. There is also, of course, Pacific and Atlantic war footage, including some tense moments when the fleet Pug is in charge of is attacked, and a brilliant remounting of the attack on Pearl Harbor, in which Curtis seamlessly blends footage from Tora! Tora! Tora! Unfortunately, the series is not all about the historical events.
Instead, the series is about these historical events with a lot of “soap” mixed in. It is very well acted-mostly-and earnest soap, but it is still soap. For War and Remembrance, Wouk and Curtis split writing duties, with Wouk handling the historical sections, and Curtis the portions involving the more romantic aspects. The result is two halves. Two very good halves, but two halves and this one aspect is enough to keep it off some lists. However, for me, that was never a problem like it was with others. I could ignore the silliness of Pug’s wife, or the will they/won’t they of the early Byron/Natalie material, or the Pug and his love life stories of most of War and Remembrance.
So, are you saying this isn’t really very good, after all? Not at all. What I am saying is that you should know what you are getting, which is high class soap of the period mixed with an all time effort to present the Holocaust in wrenching detail, and some of the great World War Two material up to that period, and, in some sense, through to the present day. Just as Curtis borrowed footage from Tora! Tora! Tora! he has seen his work mimicked and borrowed for later films and television about these events.
The structure of these two extended series, which total nearly forty hours, follows the books, in that Winds of War begins in March of 1939 with the arrival of Pug and his family in Germany when he is newly assigned there, and concludes with the attack on Pearl Harbor, December 7th of 1940. War and Remembrance picks up immediately after Pearl Harbor, and concludes in the fall of 1945, within weeks of the end of the Pacific theatre of World War Two. This is an epic, both in terms of scale and presentation, but also in the scope of the emotions and character evolution-not always successfully conveyed-which occurs.
If the series has a weakness, it is the soap-opera element to each of the romantic stories, although once Byron and Natalie are separated by war and duty, and, most importantly, recast, the love there seems somehow more worth fighting for. The romance of Pug and Pamela, of course, is something that perhaps you intellectually root for-or not-but is something which comes across as unconvincing because Mitchum himself never seems invested in the story. It is a shame, because Victoria Tennant gives her all in what might be the series second least convincing storyline, aside from Rhoda and Palmer. Oh, and that is another thing.
Women do not come off well in this series. Neither do men. This is not some John Jakes novel about rapists and victims, but it does have its share of clinging, grasping women, typified by Rhoda, who rightly comes in for flack because in more capable hands, she could have been a terrific character. Yet Curtis, for all his competence in other areas of the production, failed to give this character her due. Instead of a woman driven to perpetual misery by her own desires, she comes across as petulant and, in the end, harshly judged and punished, trapped in a loveless marriage, forced to watch her son leave to find his wife and reconnect with her and their son, and to watch her husband marry a much younger, stronger and more confident woman. As for Natalie, well, she is put through the ringer, in part because the series needed a point of view character for the Holocaust sequences, and because she was too stubborn to leave Europe when she had the chance. She is a woman punished for loyalty, though the series rightly never judges her for it, unlike how Rhoda was punished for her desires.
Yet the series is not a failure, though it is flawed. Again, the historical sections are often heartbreaking. The Babi Yar massacre is preceded by a scene in which the Nazis have Jewish and Communist prisoners digging up bodies from earlier atrocities in order to burn the evidence, and the sequence in which Pug’s ship is hunted and torpedoed is, while not quite on the level of Das Boot, nonetheless thrilling work. The series takes place around the world, not just in Europe and the United States, but throughout Asia and the Pacific, and even in Africa. While focusing on Naval excursions-the Henry family was a naval family, as Wouk himself was once a Naval officer, so it was what he knew best-the series did touch on ground and air movements, as well. As a side note, Wouk enlisted right after the attack on Pearl Harbor and will celebrate his 103rd birthday in May of 2018.
There is too much in this series to cover in a relatively brief article, but applause must also, among others, be given to the splendid Ralph Bellamy, as Franklin Delano Roosevelt, Jeremy Kemp as General Armin Von Roon, Topol as Beryl Jastrow, David Dukes as Leslie Slote, Sami Frey as Avram Rabinovitz, Robert Hardy as Winston Churchill, Ian McShane as Phillip Rule, John Rhys-Davies as Sammy Muterpol, Robert Morley as Alistair Tudsbury and Milton Johns as Eichman. Oh, and a very young Sharon Stone acquits herself quite nicely in War and Remembrance as Janice Henry. Dan Curtis said just before the series aired that he knew when she walked into the audition that he was looking at a star. Alas, the less said about the portrayal of Hitler in this series, the better. Neither actor-Steven Berkoff replacing Gunter Meisner-was given good material. Indeed, if any part of the historical sections was weak, it was Hitler, made into a frothing madman without a single quiet moment. This is as far removed from a chilling portrait of evil as one can get, and it borders on lunatic camp. Yet, for me, it did not derail what I found to be an entertaining, engrossing epic of wartime life. One of the great miniseries and perhaps the last of the true epic miniseries to be presented on network television.