Post by london777 on Apr 10, 2017 14:38:56 GMT
Seeing the interesting current thread on "Feature films that were television productions first" prompted me to watch Das Boot last night. I had previously seen the Director's Cut of the theatrical version. Last night I watched the uncut TV mini-series which was created adding material unused for the theatrical version (1981), and it is even better. I guess anyone who has any interest in seeing this masterpiece, arguably the best war movie ever, will already have done so, but in the unlikely event you will be enjoying it for the first time, this 1985 version is the one to watch.
It must be very unusual to make a TV series out of movie footage. Are there other examples? It sounds like a money-grubbing effort to extract a few more deutschmarks by padding out the length with previously discarded footage (and maybe it was), but the result was a rare case of successfully gilding the lily. Most of the added time is devoted to giving more background to the characters, making them more rounded and human figures. This is in turn quietly reinforces the message that war is futile and tragic.
This version is 293 minutes long (almost 5 hours). There is no more dramatic action than can be found crammed into in a typical Hollywood 90 minute war movie, yet I was able to watch it all in one sitting (with bathroom breaks!) and was glued to the screen (even though I had already seen the "film" version so knew what would happen). This is all the more remarkable because the drama, besides depicting the squalor and terror of the submariners' lives, also stresses the sheer boredom as weeks pass with essentially nothing happening other than an occasional false alarm or practice drill. Quite a skill to make boredom very watchable, though 90% of movies have little trouble in achieving the reverse.
A comment on IMDb says that the film took some flak in Germany for being too sympathetic to those fighting for the Nazi cause. It is true that the Navy was the most sympathetic of the fighting branches to the Nazi ideology, but I do not think that comes across in the movie at all. On the contrary I think it seeks to win approval in the US and other English-speaking markets by having most of the characters derisive of the Nazi leadership and strategy and is especially flattering to the British.
I had only recently watched Band of Brothers, and in many ways they are mirror images. Because the action is mostly confined to one sardine tin, and because it was not required to adhere so closely to actual events, Das Boot is more tightly constructed. It looks like the film it was conceived as, whereas BoB is more loosely episodic. And while both are centered on brilliant leaders who are loved and respected by their men, Captain Winters is absent from the screen for long stretches of BoB, whereas "The Old Man" is rarely more than a few feet away. Most everything Winters essays turns out well, whereas whatever the German captain does ends badly, through no fault of his own, which reflects the larger picture of the war.
While hardly one-hit wonders, neither Wolfgang Petersen nor Jürgen Prochnow will ever again approach their excellence here. I have seen Prochnow in a few other "blink and you miss him" parts, while Petersen's career has petersened out since Poseidon went belly up for a second time. I liked "Troy" and think it is underrated. (It is one of the few films in which I can stomach Peter O'Toole and in which Sean Bean survives). Maybe it was Brad Pitt's role which got up people's noses, but they are wrong. Ancient Greeks did not have pop stars or film stars to fawn over. Their pin-ups were the heroes of traditional stories like Achilles, and Brad Pitt's character fills that need well, whereas Clooney was miscast in The Perfect Storm (2000), another Petersen effort. Clooney is more suited to suave, even cocky, indoor roles.
Talking about miscasting, Robert Redford was originally mooted as the lead in Das Boot. then Rudger Hauer, who might have been good, but they got the right guy in the end.
Thoughts on Das Boot, guys? (One of the rare foreign movies never referred to by its English translated title, if you do not count untranslatable slang like Rififi or proper nouns).
And other examples of TV series solely cut from movie footage?
It must be very unusual to make a TV series out of movie footage. Are there other examples? It sounds like a money-grubbing effort to extract a few more deutschmarks by padding out the length with previously discarded footage (and maybe it was), but the result was a rare case of successfully gilding the lily. Most of the added time is devoted to giving more background to the characters, making them more rounded and human figures. This is in turn quietly reinforces the message that war is futile and tragic.
This version is 293 minutes long (almost 5 hours). There is no more dramatic action than can be found crammed into in a typical Hollywood 90 minute war movie, yet I was able to watch it all in one sitting (with bathroom breaks!) and was glued to the screen (even though I had already seen the "film" version so knew what would happen). This is all the more remarkable because the drama, besides depicting the squalor and terror of the submariners' lives, also stresses the sheer boredom as weeks pass with essentially nothing happening other than an occasional false alarm or practice drill. Quite a skill to make boredom very watchable, though 90% of movies have little trouble in achieving the reverse.
A comment on IMDb says that the film took some flak in Germany for being too sympathetic to those fighting for the Nazi cause. It is true that the Navy was the most sympathetic of the fighting branches to the Nazi ideology, but I do not think that comes across in the movie at all. On the contrary I think it seeks to win approval in the US and other English-speaking markets by having most of the characters derisive of the Nazi leadership and strategy and is especially flattering to the British.
I had only recently watched Band of Brothers, and in many ways they are mirror images. Because the action is mostly confined to one sardine tin, and because it was not required to adhere so closely to actual events, Das Boot is more tightly constructed. It looks like the film it was conceived as, whereas BoB is more loosely episodic. And while both are centered on brilliant leaders who are loved and respected by their men, Captain Winters is absent from the screen for long stretches of BoB, whereas "The Old Man" is rarely more than a few feet away. Most everything Winters essays turns out well, whereas whatever the German captain does ends badly, through no fault of his own, which reflects the larger picture of the war.
While hardly one-hit wonders, neither Wolfgang Petersen nor Jürgen Prochnow will ever again approach their excellence here. I have seen Prochnow in a few other "blink and you miss him" parts, while Petersen's career has petersened out since Poseidon went belly up for a second time. I liked "Troy" and think it is underrated. (It is one of the few films in which I can stomach Peter O'Toole and in which Sean Bean survives). Maybe it was Brad Pitt's role which got up people's noses, but they are wrong. Ancient Greeks did not have pop stars or film stars to fawn over. Their pin-ups were the heroes of traditional stories like Achilles, and Brad Pitt's character fills that need well, whereas Clooney was miscast in The Perfect Storm (2000), another Petersen effort. Clooney is more suited to suave, even cocky, indoor roles.
Talking about miscasting, Robert Redford was originally mooted as the lead in Das Boot. then Rudger Hauer, who might have been good, but they got the right guy in the end.
Thoughts on Das Boot, guys? (One of the rare foreign movies never referred to by its English translated title, if you do not count untranslatable slang like Rififi or proper nouns).
And other examples of TV series solely cut from movie footage?
