Just finished slogging through the first half of this great miniseries. The biggest thing to keep in mind is that this is both historical and "entertainment." So it is possible then to have a disturbing vignette on the Babi Yar massacre and go immediately to Sharon Stone and Barry Bostwick Getting It On. Maybe if there were commerical breaks in between it would be harder to find the dissonance in tone.
The cast is great. Robert Mitchum is probably too old for his part, but he plays it flawlessly. As usual in this sort of thing, the leads are played by attractive but somewhat wooden people (Hart Bochner, David Dukes, Victoria Tennant), leaving the supporting cast to have fun with their roles. Bostwick is great as a roguish American naval man, while Ian MacShane takes his poorly defined role as a British charmer and is terrific. Of the other leads, Jane Seymour is her usual fine self as a Jewish woman stuck in Europe (and apparently attempts to do an American accent which comes and goes), and John Gielgud is somewhat irritating as her uncle (which I think is the point). A young Sharon Stone is in the film, and while she isn't bad, she's not really good either in her admittedly undemanding role. She is, of course, hot.
One major flaw is that while the Germans are represented and portrayed, the Japanese are not, giving the Pacific front a one-sided (but not jingoistic) appearance. That said, the German parts are all well played. Jeremy Kemp as the unflappable Van Roon is terrific, as are the smaller players--Milton Johns' unctuous Eichmann, Kenneth Colley's venal SS Colonel who blithely admits to developing the concentration camp system, and Gunther Maria Haldar's strong portrayal of Auschwitz Commandant Hoess.
The historical players do a fine job. Ralph Bellamy looks like FDR; his voice is slightly off, but the mannerisms are perefect. Robert Hardy looks like Winston Churchill come to life. Steven Berkoff does his usual Berkoffian mannerisms as Hitler, which is appropriate, I guess, and he does look like Hitler.
While this is a TV miniseries, the producers were given free reign by the censors so the concentration camp sequences are pretty graphic. One of the most gripping sequences is in the second episode when Heinrich Himmler shows up for a day at Auschwitz and requests an example of gassing. This is portrayed in almost real time fashion down to the last agonizing detail. Possibly even worse is the Babi Yar massacre, which happened prior to the development of gas chambers, when they simply rounded up Jews to be machine gunned to death (this is also shown on screen). It's a testament to the courage of the producers to unflinchingly portray these scenes.
The film is both helped and hindered by its extreme length. In some ways, this helps to allow time to fully get the scope of the war. In other points, it forces padding (there's almost some scenes that send up a red flag--Warning! Warning! Film Padding!). Some subplots are trite. The continual romantic sparks between almost every character gets ludicrous (Victoria Tennant's character is somewhat pursued by Mitchum, Ian MacShane, and her actual fiance!).
In fairness to Gielgud, by the way, he plays the part as written--a head-in-the-clouds intellectual that slowly wakes up to the true horror of the Holocaust. So while he is irritating in the beginning, his steely transformation is compelling. And in episode eight, there is an extremely disturbing sequence where he meets Eichmann and his tortured by an SS officer (played by the same guy that was the Nazi commander in "Raiders of the Lost Ark," Wolf Kahler). Gielgud is marvelous, so I'm not trying to put him down.
The weak links in the cast become more noticeable as the series plugs on. Polly Bergen does what she can with the very annoying role of Rhoda Henry; you almost want to shake her and tell her nobody cares about her problems when there's a freaking war going on. Hart Bochner's character has a right to be perpetually ticked off, but it kind of grates on the audience after a while.
Just finished the series. The ending is strong; the filmmakers put their money where their mouth is and don't wimp out too much for the Auschwitz sequences (the sparing of Natalie manages to prevent the viewer from becoming TOO depressed). The Pacific war gets amazingly short shrift at the end; not enough time is spent at such seminal moments as Iwo Jima and Okinawa and even the a-bomb sequence only gets one scene at Los Alamos.
The final chapters are somewhat variable. The insipid love stories betweeen Mitchum/Tennant and Bergen/Mike "Mannix" Connors (who is charming) get annoying. The filmmakers' insistence on killing off almost every supporting character gets kind of annoying after a while (Ian MacShane doesn't even get an on-screen demise). However, there are some great sequences: The plot to kill Hitler is done in gut-stopping, Mission: Impossible style fashion, with a wonderfully nuanced job by Sky Dumont as the steely Von Stauffenberg. Hitler's final moments are chillingly portrayed, as he rails insanely on to his ever-dwindling inner circle.
The final sequences are sort of ponderous (Byron's quest for his son) and are apparently designed to put a happy face on for the finale, although there are a lot of unanswered questions left at the end.
Ralph Bellamy looks like FDR...
Well, he's had past experience playing him. Such as the 1960 bio-pic Sunrise At Campobello.