ThiefHott Too much of everything

Blake Rivera If you like to be scared, if you like to laugh, and if you like to learn a thing or two at the movies, this absolutely cannot be missed.

Ortiz Excellent and certainly provocative... If nothing else, the film is a real conversation starter.

Catherina If you're interested in the topic at hand, you should just watch it and judge yourself because the reviews have gone very biased by people that didn't even watch it and just hate (or love) the creator. I liked it, it was well written, narrated, and directed and it was about a topic that interests me.

mark.waltz The war was winding down, although the majority of the world was unaware of it, when Warner Brothers gave film hoers one of the biggest, one of the quietist, and one of the longest action adventures of that period. This is a drama that other than dramatic music and exotic bird sounds features only infrequent lines of dialog once Errol Flynn and his band of merry men five out of a plane into the unknown jungles and grassy knolls of Burma, the cover for Japanese soldiers preparing their own attacks. It's amazing how they put together a script with events surrounding a shell of a story and make it entertaining. Flynn is surrounded by a cast of mostly unknown contract character players whose faces you may recognize if you've seen a bulk of Warner's output. The most recognizable is George Tobias who seemed to be in every Warner film of the time, but I found myself also recognizing Henry Hull who just happened to pop up in at least three films I've watched in the past few days. I'd like to think that what I'm seeing is at least partially based upon truth, but after getting settled in after accepting the fact that I'd be tied down with this for 2 1/2 hours, I was pretty engrossed. It's up there with "Action in the North Atlantic", " Air Force", "Destination Tokyo" and "Edge of Darkness" as films which really put Warners on the map for their output of these brilliantly produced propaganda war films that kept the homefront in tuned with what was going on with their husbands and sons overseas.

johnkistner As a drama the film does a good job, in terms of historical accuracy one questions it. The fighting in Burma was not carried out by the USA, but by the army of the United Kingdom. Had this operation actually occurred, it would have been carried out by the SAS. English soldiers fought in Burma from day one until the very end of the war. Fighting in the harsh, humid jungles of Burma was no easy task for the English army who were not accustomed to the extreme climate, the Japanese soldiers had the advantage. By suggesting that the USA came in and saved the day, I.e., the Calvary rushing in at the last minute, we minimise the role of her Majesty's forces and those who fell in her service. Many Englishmen paid the ultimate sacrifice for their queen and country. Burma was a British sphere of operation, just as the Philippines were an American theatre of operations. Let's not minimise the role of others.

writers_reign For an Englishman, to watch this film for the first time in 2012, some 67 years after its initial release, is to ask what was all the fuss about. The fuss to which I refer is what I have read about in movie magazines and books about movies. Apparently the British people took exception to the way this film allegedly gave the impression that the Americans were solely responsible for victory in Burmaa and implied strongly that the British were not even there. Whilst it is true that the film concentrates on a small group of Americans, parachuted into Burma with a mission to destroy a Japanese radar installation and then, having done so, are obliged to walk some 200 miles to safety because it is unsafe for planes to land, I found nothing strange about focusing on one small unit in this way, I am sure a similar film could have been made about a strictly British unit involved in a similar mission and no one would have complained that there were no Americans portrayed. In fact at the close of the film the producers state that it is dedicated to all servicemen - English, Chinese, etc - who served in Burma. Errol Flynn is fine in the lead role and notably performs hardly any heroics, these are left to the men in his command, but Flynn's charm leaps off the screen. Henry Hull - who within two years would be appearing in O'Neill's Mourning Becomes Electra - is also splendid as a veteran war correspondent who elects to go on the mission. In short a fine example of the genre.

sddavis63 Errol Flynn (who I am most familiar with as a swashbuckling swordsman type) offered a totally convincing performance here as the commander of a group of American commandos sent behind enemy lines into Burma to blow up a Japanese radar station in preparation for an allied invasion of the country during World War II. At about the one hour mark of the movie you begin to wonder what's happening. Everything seems to be far too easy for the Americans. They get into Burma with no trouble; they blow up the radar station quickly and easily (and kill a bunch of Japanese soldiers in the process) and they quickly get away to the rendezvous point where they're to be picked up by an American plane - and they do all this without suffering a single casualty. And yet, it's the very easiness of the mission that begins to build the tension. You know it can't be this easy; you know something has to happen - which it finally does. The plane that's supposed to pick them up can't land because there are too many Japanese around, and the men are forced to try to find their way out of Burma and back to their base on foot - an increasingly hopeless task as they deal with hunger, the jungle, and the Japanese.The climax of the movie probably begins when Nelson (Flynn) orders the squad to split into two and meet up later. The second group gets captured, and when Nelson finally finds them, he discovers that they've been horribly massacred in a Japanese-held village. Nothing of the massacre is shown (which makes it all the more horrific to the viewer, because it's all left to your imagination) but we get a taste when they discover Lt. Jacobs (William Prince) still barely alive. He begs Nelson to kill him just before he dies, making you wonder what's happened to him. That was a very brief but very powerful scene.I would describe this movie as tense rather than exciting in the standard way, and the tension is built very well. I'm not tremendously fond of war movies, but I liked this because the emphasis wasn't so much on never-ending battle, but was rather on the human story of these soldiers and how they dealt with their seemingly hopeless situation, and with the prospect of dying in the jungle and never seeing home again.