World War II Documentary Double Feature: The Battle of Midway (1942)/Tunisian Victory (1944)
World War II Documentary Double Feature: The Battle of Midway (1942)/Tunisian Victory (1944)
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TUNISIAN VICTORY (1944):Tunisian Victory was meant as a sequel to Desert Victory (1943), the celebrated British documentary about the Battle of El Alamein. That battle had been one of the biggest Allied successes of the North African campaign, but the filmed document drew criticism for downplaying the Americans' part. (When asked about it, the British war department simply claimed that the Yanks "didn't have any good footage.") To prevent this from happening again, the film about the next step in the North African campaign, the liberation of Tunis from Nazi occupation, would be a full-blown British/American co-production. Both British and American camera crews were present as the largest armada ever assembled defeated the German Panzer Army holding the capital of Tunisia. In an unforeseeable turn of events, the ship carrying all the American footage back to the United States was then sunk by a German U-boat. Once again the Americans were in danger of being left out of the official record of one of the most important battles of World War II. So legendary directors Frank Capra and John Huston were assigned the task of filming staged "battle" sequences in the Mojave Desert and in Orlando, Florida. When presented with this footage, the British were skeptical of its authenticity, but could not dispute its high technical quality and incorporated it into the film anyway. Acknowledging the disparity between the two, the British sequences were narrated by Bernard Miles while Burgess Meredith narrated the American re-enactments. Tunisian Victory opened in theaters March 16, 1944 to audiences hungry for news of the war raging overseas.
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