I was strolling around the video department of the local Wal-Mart the other day when my eye landed on something remarkable: a reissue on DVD of the grand old TV documentary series Victory at Sea. What really got my attention was the price. The twenty-six episodes are spread over four DVDs, each of which costs (drum roll, please) a dollar.
For the benefit of those readers of less-than-curmudgeonly age - Victory at Sea was one of the first (maybe the first) TV documentary series about World War II - or any other subject. It initially ran in 1952. It was produced in cooperation with the U.S. Navy; one of the scriptwriters, Henry Saloman, had, as I recall, been a research assistant to Samuel Eliot Morison when the latter was writing his 14-volume History of U.S. Naval Operations in WWII. One of the show's most famous aspects was the music score, which was composed by Richard Rodgers (Oklahoma!, South Pacific, The King and I, The Sound of Music, etc.) and orchestrated by Robert Russell Bennett (who also orchestrated just about every famous Broadway musical from the thirties through the early sixties). In the original soundtrack, the score was played by the NBC Symphony Orchestra, which, in 1952, was Arturo Toscanini's orchestra - one of the finest in the world. These shows, in other words, represented the best the young TV industry had to offer.
By modern standards they are, in some respects, museum pieces. The film clips are a mixture of genuine action shots, posed ones, and the occasional staged propaganda movie; many of them have been recycled dozens of times in other places. Much of the information we now take for granted about World War II wasn't available in 1952, and some of the narration (by a gentleman named Leonard Graves, who I fear I haven't heard of in any other context) is pretty corny by modern standards. On the other hand, it's worth remembering that in 1952 there was no such thing as a cliche in a TV documentary.
Maybe the weakest parts of the series are the episodes in which it tries to narrate specific battles, using "stock footage" to fill in the many gaps when actual shots of that particular battle just aren't available. (Enthusiasts will spot, for instance, a Seafire landing on a British carrier in the midst of the Battle of Leyte Gulf, and a square-bridged Fletcher-class destroyer supposedly chasing a U-boat in 1941.) The best ones, to my taste, are the more generalized sequences about such topics as the Battle of the Atlantic and the American submarine campaign against Japan, when the editors put together a series of generically-relevant shots, the narrator shuts up, and Mr. Rodgers's wonderful music takes over. Ken Burns, eat your heart out.
Somewhere or other I read a quote from a TV critic to the effect that "every American ought to watch Victory at Sea once a year, and members of Congress ought to watch it twice." I'll add that anybody interested in naval history ought to seize the opportunity to grab it for four dollars. Our local Wal-Mart only had the first two volumes; I'll be on the lookout for the others.