by Allan Fish
(USA 2001 701m) DVD1/2
We few, we happy few…
p Mary Richards, Erik Bork, Tom Hanks, Steven Spielberg d Mikael Salomon, David Leland, Richard Loncraine, Phil Alden Robinson, David Frankel, Tom Hanks, Tony To, David Nutter w E.Max Frye, Tom Hanks, Graham Yost, Bruce C.McKenna, Erik Jendresen, Erik Bork book Stephen E.Ambrose ph Remi Adefarasin, Joel J.Ransom ed Oral Norrie Ottey, Billy Fox, John Richards, Frances Parker m Michael Kamen art Anthony Pratt cos Anna Sheppard spc Joss Williams, Angus Bickerton, Mat Beck
Damian Lewis (Maj.Richard D.Winters), Ron Livingston (Capt.Lewis Nixon), Kirk Acevado (SSgt.Joseph Toye), Donnie Wahlberg (2nd Lt.C.Carwood Lipton), Matthew Settle (Capt.Ronald Spiers), Rick Warden (1st Lt.Harry Welsh). Frank John Hughes (Ssgt.William ‘Wild Bill’ Guarnere), David Schwimmer (Capt.Herbert Sobel), Michael Cudlitz (Sgt.Denver Bull Randleman), Marc Warren (Pvt.Albert Blithe), Colin Hanks (2nd Lt.Henry Jones), Dale Dye (Col.Robert Sink), Scott Grimes (TSgt Donald Malarkey), Dexter Fletcher (SSgt John Martin), Rick Gomez (Sgt.George Luz), Nolan Hemmings (Sgt.Charles ‘Chuck’ Grant), James McAvoy (Pvt.James Miller), Simon Pegg (1st Sgt.William Evans), Tom Hanks (British officer),
The Shakespearean title reference to this magnificent series could hardly be better chosen. Three years after the release of his over-praised Saving Private Ryan, Steven Spielberg produced this epic adaptation of Stephen Ambrose’s best-selling true story. The tale of Easy Company, in the 506th Regiment of the 101st Airborne Division, from their days training in late 1943, through Normandy, Market Garden, the Battle of the Bulge, the invasion of Germany, the liberation of the death camps and the final infiltration of Berchtesgarten.
On one hand the series is undoubtedly a conventional one, and memories of many films and series gone by flood back to the memory. A simple tale of one company of soldiers through the last eighteen months of the war and the following twelve, is told over ten episodes detailing different events during the conflict, and detailing how various men died or were affected by what they saw. However, the fact that everything we see actually happened – a feeling grasped from the first moment with each episode being begun with talk from the real-life veterans – gives it its own sense of not just gravitas but immediacy. To be perfectly honest, Saving Private Ryan is a total embarrassment in comparison, a strictly routine film that trivializes everything it touches.
Just take the individual factors that contributed to the series’ success; the use of such talented directors as Richard (Richard III) Loncraine and Phil Alden (Field of Dreams) Robinson; the magnificent career-best score from the late Michael Kamen (who even managed to perfectly incorporate several popular and classical themes, none more so than a sublime use of Purcell during the liberation of the death camp in episode 9), as inspirational as so many similar themes are saccharine; magnificent designs from unsung master Anthony Pratt (many of them recreated on 1,100-plus acres of an airfield in Hertfordshire). Not to mention the cast, heroes to a man; Fletcher, Wahlberg, Settle, Gomez, Acevado, Cudlitz, Grimes and Hughes were all merely perfect, Livingston never better than as Lewis Nixon, and superb cameos from a very un-Friends Schwimmer and the ever-excellent Warren. At its heart, though, as he was heart of the company, is Lewis, as the loyal, heroic Dick Winters, exhibiting the same sort of integral integrity that once was the realm of Gary Cooper, and like many Englishmen in the cast, never betraying his Anglo-origins. Yet this is not about heroes, and not about nationalism, for in many ways the series itself, and the men who form its core set of characters, are encapsulated in the farewell speech delivered by a German general to his surrendered troops. Yet the last word is saved for one of the real-life veterans who recounts on how he was asked by his grandson whether he was a hero in the war and he replied “no…but I served in a company of heroes.” No-one who saw Band of Brothers would ever argue.