This is one of those films you wonder how they could possibly cut down from 178 minutes down to 17. But they did, and all things considered, they did it really well.

The story is one everyone knows, its about the D Day landings on June 6th 1944 and the full film is a very good one for those who enjoy a good war movie.
The film is an all star cast and while this edit does a fairly good job condensing the film down, John Wayne is nowhere to be seen in this edit.

Beginning with the original opening titles, the first few minutes condense the run up to the beech landing, opening in England titled, "one of 1108 allied camps", from there we see the build up, the main beech landing, "Sword Beech 06.53 Hours", and then onto the amazing 90-second single take aerial shot of the advancing troops at Ouistreham, the planning and logistics of doing this shot in one single take must have took so much planning but it has to be one of the best movie single takes ever and it is included here in this edit. This digest concludes with the final explosive breakthrough and the original ending with Robert Mitchem getting into his jeep and driving past the soldiers as the original end title ends this digest.

This is a good cut down but unfortunately, the image is grainy in some scenes while the sound is less than good. It's loud and audible but is a bit on the muffled side, but it is perfectly audible, the quality is below the normal standards of these 400ft versions from the states. Luckily, the editing and action of this reel makes it worth while.

The trouble with an action film like this which is filmed in scope, sometimes the Panning & Scanning for an 8mm release can become very jerky, which can give the image a soft look, at least it's on genuine B/W stock, I wonder what source the negative was mastered from, that also can affect the final 8mm release prints!

It's a shame they never did any scope prints of this, but i guess it was at a time when scope was not a big seller. This would be a great contender for a 3 x 400ft scope version now. The trouble with ever having a full length copy on 16 is how often you would realistically get around to watching it, the same problem as Gone with the wind is on super 8. Although we have a copy of GWTW, i think i've only sat through it once in over twenty years, i know my Brothers watched it many times as it is one of his favourite films.

This film on this 400ft reel is actually one of those ones you pick off the shelf for an action packed 17 minutes or so, i assume the image quality is the same on all of them, i would rather hope that the sound is better on other prints. I would imagine that anyone with re recording skills could vastly improve on it but with the grainy image in parts im not sure it would be worth the effort, Still a good edit though and worth a look at. I've seen much much worse.

A nice one in the collection for sure! I also have the 400' but haven't watched it much since I got the feature on 16mm. But I agree with your comments on the editing!

Nice one Tom,as said not one that gets viewed a lot,my 16mm print only gets an occasional run but it’s a good one to have.

A 16mm print would be great to get, especially in scope, but due to its length it would have very limited viewings.

BBC2 did show the colourised version one afternoon, i am a firm believer that if a film is shot in b/w it should stay that way, but in this case, it worked very well, but that was the only TV showing i've seen in colour.