Tales of Adventure: Collection 6 (AU Import)

I’m old enough to remember those big, crappy DVD box sets that promised 20 “classic” films of some specific genre that would be gifted to some poor, unsuspecting film fan every Christmas. Whether it was a collection of adventure flicks, WWII films, westerns, or even grindhouse films—anything you said you were a big fan of— and sure, true enough, it would be 20 movies, but they’d all be terrible. They’d all be whatever could be slapped onto a handful of discs, either for free or very minimal cost, and it’d be 90% junk. Maybe one of the movies would have John Wayne in it for about ten seconds, so they’d slap his name on the cover of the set, touting, “Look! John Wayne!”

Via Vision and Imprint Films’ “Tales of Adventure” Blu-ray box sets show us how far we’ve come. These collections run the gamut from westerns to sci-fi features, and Tales of Adventure - Collection 6 takes to the land and sea in epic tales of survival, spanning from 1945 to 1969. The movies included look and sound terrific, but most surprising of all, the stories themselves are actually engaging.

Counter-Attack: 4/5 Stars
Starting the collection off is Counter-Attack, set during WWII. Alexei Kulkov  (Paul Muni, perhaps best known as the original Scarface) is a Russian paratrooper on a mission to attack and infiltrate Nazi headquarters to collect their plans for an oncoming attack. Kulkov and a guide named Lisa Elenko (Marguerite Chapman) are trapped in the basement of a building that collapses after being struck by artillery fire.

Counter-Attack was based on a play, which makes sense, because once the building collapses, the narrative very rarely strays from its single-location setting. Kulkov and Elenko must play a psychological battle of wits against the surviving Nazi soldiers to stay alive. It’s a tense, well-acted feature that helps shine a light on the absurdity of warfare. These soldiers, all trapped in a dangerous situation, should immediately forget all their differences and work together to escape. But because of some conflict beyond their control, they must remain wary and suspicious of one another. And as their rescue nears, no one knows for sure if their liberators will be on their side.

While Counter-Attack is a fun, well-made, and tense flick, it was released at the wrong time and was a box-office flop. By the time it came out, V.E. Day was right around the corner, and tensions between the U.S. and Russia were already beginning to mount. A movie that was sympathetic toward Russian soldiers wasn’t exactly warmly welcomed by American audiences. Today, it’s interesting to see an American film where the Russians are good guys who speak perfect, unaccented English. For the next however many decades, Russia would not fare so well in subsequent American films.

Abandon Ship!: 4.5/5 Stars
Holy crap!
Maybe it was the exclamation point in the title that threw me off, but I was expecting a fun, jaunty adventure on the high seas. I was not adequately prepared for the relentless, grueling experience that was Abandon Ship!, also known as Seven Waves Away.

Abandon Ship! stars Tyrone Power (who was spectacular in Nightmare Alley) as Alec Holmes, the E.O. of a cruise ship that accidentally hits an old mine in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean. After the ship sinks and the vast majority of its passengers are killed, twenty survivors cling desperately to a single lifeboat, as sharks circle and resources onboard begin to run low. It doesn’t take long for things to start getting real bad, real quick for the survivors. There are just too many for the little vessel to accommodate. With the original captain gone, Holmes steps in as the new commander and has to make some tough decisions in order to stay alive, and keep as many others alive as he can.

Most of the stories in this box set are focused on soldiers engaged in combat or prisoners of war who must sacrifice parts of their souls in order to live to see another day. Abandon Ship! is about civilians who suffer significant casualties caused by a relic of a war that was long over. It makes for a fascinating study on what kind of morals cease to exist when faced with such seemingly insurmountable odds. Abandon Ship! is almost unbearably tense at times, with an excellent, uncompromising lead from Tyrone Power, but there are no weak players in this cast. Everyone is perfectly cast, and the script supplies them with realistic, natural dialogue as they navigate through the murky waters of survival.  

King Rat: 4/5 Stars
While the setting of King Rat is no less harrowing, taking place in a Japanese POW camp located in Singapore, the film is a nice change of pace from the two previous entries in this box set. I was expecting each subsequent title to be a sort of contest of one-upmanship, with each story more and more extreme, given the trajectory between the first two titles I reviewed. Instead, things slow down a bit for King Rat, and it’s a more human story, focusing on the interactions and the constant butting of heads between British and American captors under Japanese authority in WWII.

The film’s opening montage and credit crawl introduce us to life in Singapore’s Changi Prison. There’s an attempt to replicate a normal life as much as possible, as soldiers tend to crops and go about other daily chores. We see very little of any Japanese guards; their presence in the story is minimal, as they’ve outsourced any tasks of enforcing rules to an overzealous British officer, not unlike Alec Guinness in The Bridge on the River Kwai. It's easy to compare King Rat to other thematically similar movies, like the aforementioned The Bridge on the River Kwai, and there’s even shades of Stalag 17 to it, given its dry, witty dialogue between prisoners. But King Rat is a unique tale, based in part on the experiences of writer James Clavell, who adapted his life in the prison camp into a novel.

George Segal leads the cast as Corporal King (the “King Rat” of the title), who, despite only being a corporal, is the big man on campus in the prison’s grounds. He’s not a bad man—or, well, at least, he’s not totally bad—he just happened to find the environment he’s best at. He can wheel and deal with the best of them. He knows how to game the system and get what he needs. While a certain overzealous British officer thinks he’s in charge, because he’s enforcing the rule of the Japanese on its inhabitants, King is in charge here. He’s got all the merchandise, money, clean clothes, and food to prove it. While most everyone is starving, he looks like a crisp million-dollar bill.

King Rat is a wonderful slice of life drama, written for the screen and directed by Bryan Forbes (The Stepford Wives). It’s a cynical look at what men can be reduced to in a forced hierarchy, without even the illusion of escape as an option—the ocean is too vast, and the jungle is too unforgiving. And so our prisoners spend the war trying to find some normalcy in a situation that’s anything but normal.

The Bridge at Remagen: 4/5 Stars
The final film in this adventure series is John Guillermin’s The Bridge at Remagen. Guillermin, who would go on to direct disaster flicks like The Towering Inferno and King Kong ’76 (well, that one was just a film that happened to be a disaster), is no slouch when it comes to capturing carnage and spectacle on film. Out of the four films included in this set, The Bridge at Remagen is the only true, “proper” combat picture. Counter-Attack featured combat sequences, but it was really something different—it was a paranoid, one-location thriller set inside of a combat picture. So, The Bridge at Remagen feels a bit like an outlier in this collection. It’s also an outlier in that it’s the only film that’s in color.

Good news for folks who can’t get enough George Segal! He stars in this one, too. And unlike his character in King Rat, he’s a much more sympathetic character here in Lieutenant Hartman. He’s a burnt-out platoon leader, tired of the mindless bureaucracy from orders above, who don’t view soldiers as anything other than disposable assets with which they can use to accomplish simple mathematics. They see a bridge, like the one in the film’s title, and figure it’s worth possibly losing a hundred men trying to take it, because it might mean saving 10,000 troops because of the strategic advantage the bridge poses. What they don’t, or won’t, see is that sending 100 men on a poorly planned suicide mission doesn’t help anyone.

The bridge at the center of The Bridge at Remagen is a point of interest for the Americans and for the Germans, as Major Paul Krueger (Robert Vaughn) on the Nazi side has been assigned by his own leadership to destroy it. Like Hartman, Krueger is sick of orders from above that don’t see the forest for the trees. He intentionally disobeys orders because he sees the bridge as a means of saving German lives, if he can fend off the American attack. If he succeeds, he’ll be a hero. If he fails… history has shown that Nazi leadership isn’t exactly kind to insubordination that leads to failure.

The Bridge at Remagen is the most traditional Hollywood film in this set, a big, epic actioner with a thrilling finale on massive set-pieces. It’s quite good and exciting—a vintage-feeling war picture that has a conscience. A bombing sequence, from the German perspective, allows us to feel the terror that civilians felt during the war. Again, like Counter-Attack, it came out at the wrong time. In 1969, audiences were seeing new horrors of the war in Vietnam every single day and growing disillusioned with America’s role as the world’s peacekeeper. They weren’t exactly lining up to see an old-fashioned movie about American heroism in WWII.

Vital Disc Stats: The Blu-ray Box Set
Tales of Adventure - Collection 6 spans four discs. Each feature film is printed onto a single disc, housed in a standard case, with classic poster artwork for the cover and a screenshot from the film spanning the inside. All four movies are encased in a rigid hardcase with artwork from the features spanning the box. For the first three featured, Counter-Attack, Abandon Ship!, and King Rat, this set marks their worldwide debut on Blu-ray.

Counter-Attack: 4.5/5 Stars
I’m not sure what restoration process had been used for these movies, whether the team at Imprint had access to the original camera negatives or if they were using an interpositive (or something else, for that matter), but whatever the source, the end-result is pretty fantastic. The black and white Counter-Attack has a few very minor technical issues, but these issues have nothing to do with the transfer. It looks like whatever source they used had some damage. There were some scratches and other noisy issues during a certain sequence, but 95% of the film’s run time looked terrific. For a movie presented in 1080p, with no HDR grading, those black levels were top-notch. The bulk of the film’s action takes place in a downed building, lit only be flashlight or a lamp, so the majority of the frame is engulfed in a thick, inky-black shadow, with no issues of crushing or color-banding. Through the feature, details are sharply rendered, and the presentation has a fine layer of film grain.

Abandon Ship!: 4/5 Stars
Another black and white entry into this adventure series collection, unlike Counter-Attack, Abandon Ship! is significantly rougher around the edges, as it looks like the source they used for this transfer had more damage. Plenty of sequences have deep scratches, dirt specks, and during some foggy sequences on the sea, there’s a lot of pulsating lens noise.

I point these out for purposes of transparency, not as gripes. We’re talking about an older film, largely shot on the water, with a handful of shots that look less-than-ideal, while the majority of the film is nearly pristine. Given the complexity of the shoot, I’d call that a major victory. Watching Abandon Ship! what impressed me most was that there was likely a combination of filming techniques used—sets with phony backgrounds, some genuine location shoots, mixed in with some stock footage for sharks—and the overall result is seamless. Abandon Ship! looks absolutely fantastic, and this transfer, even with the aforementioned issues, is excellent.

King Rat: 4.5/5 Stars
Like Counter-Attack and Abandon Ship!, King Rat is a black and white film and represents the most technically flawless presentation of the first three features. Any technical issues of the first two are extremely limited, but to even bring them up here is to be splitting (rat) hairs. A few select shots, out of hundreds and hundreds that comprise the film, are speckled with some scratches, dirt, and other debris. The rest of the picture is stunning in its clarity, separated into two unique looks: The daytime sequences are bathed in a harsh, blinding sunlight. And the nighttime sequences take on a moody, noirish aesthetic, with aggrandized shadows that look lifted right out of a Fritz Lang picture. The picture clarity is razor sharp, and we can see individual beads of sweat slither down the faces of the POWs.

The Bridge at Remagen: 4/5 Stars
The Bridge at Remagen is the only movie included in this set where I was able to see issues with the video transfer itself, not with the source provided for the transfer. While most of The Bridge at Remagen looks great - shot in Panavision, in glorious DeLuxe Color - however, certain sequences that are heavy on smoke show some compression artifacts. Smoke plumes will be pixelated at the edges, and some of the faces under the mist look a little misshapen. These shots are confined to the end of the film, within the last fifteen minutes or so, whereas the rest of the feature looks awesome. Colors are rich and vibrant, and details are sharp. While The Bridge at Remagen wasn’t terribly expensive to make (it still cost a pretty penny), it looks like it was. The set design and cinematography are both excellent, along with some top-tier scenes of warfare with tanks, bombs, and artillery raging.

Counter-Attack: 4/5 Stars
Counter-Attack features a lossless LPCM 2.0 mono sound mix. Since the story unfolds like a stage play, given the source it was adapted from, the soundtrack emphasizes dialogue quality above all else. During action sequences, there is gunfire aplenty, with explosions and ricochets screeching throughout. Given the age and the source of the sound recordings, some of the effects can sound a bit muffled or never quite reach the level of impact they should, but it’s an old movie, and any defect it may have is a symptom of the era from which it was made. The disc does a fine job of it, and despite a few gripes I have, it sounds about as good as it possibly could.

Abandon Ship!: 4/5 Stars
Unlike Counter-Attack and some of the others included in this box set, Abandon Ship! is low on aggressive, obvious sound effects like gunshots, explosions, etc., although there are a few. It is, however, rich in ambient noise, through constant aquatic motions, as our little lifeboat littered with shipwrecked survivors rocks to and fro on the Atlantic Ocean. Other effects, like a raging rainstorm, take full command of the front-only 2.0 LPCM mono soundstage. As this is a talky picture, propelled by dialogue, the spoken word is given priority in the overall mix.

King Rat: 4.5/5 Stars
Of the first three features, King Rat has the most complex and intricately realized sound design, despite being the least action-oriented. Instead, we’re given a 2.0 LPCM mono mix that’s constantly abuzz with the atmospheric effects of the jungle mere feet away from the prison camp. Chirping insects, squawking birds, and other wildlife add to the tapestry of effects that encompass the front-only soundstage on this feature. The mix also gives proper power to John Barry’s moody score, which features a haunting harp ringing out in the film’s quieter moments.

The Bridge at Remagen: 3.5/5 Stars
As the only “proper” combat picture of the set, it pains me that The Bridge at Remagen does not feature the best sound mix. The sound design itself is terrific, with explosions, gunfire, ricochets, crumbling buildings, etc., on full display, but my main beef is with the dialogue mixing, which is a few clicks too low. Elmer Bernstein’s triumphant score swells to climactic crescendos as bombastic hellfire rains down from the skies, and it’s all terrific stuff, but it’s not balanced well with the spoken dialogue of the characters to propel the story. I found myself fiddling with the volume level a lot—turning it up in the quiet moments, turning it down in the louder moments. And since it, like the other films included in the set, is present in 2.0 LPCM mono, it’s not possible for most folks to turn up the dialogue-dedicated center channel volume.

The only movie of this set I’d seen prior to reviewing was The Bridge at Remagen, which, as fate would have it, is also the only movie in the set to include any special features other than a vintage trailer. It’s a bummer because I really liked every single movie included, and I had not heard of most of them previously, so it would have been great to include some supplements that dive into each film’s historical relevance or contextualize it into the set’s larger theme of survival.

While most features included on the disc for The Bridge at Remagen are archival features, there are two new supplements: A new audio commentary track and a video essay.

• Audio Commentary - Filmmaker/historians Steve Mitchell & Steven Jay Rubin
• Isolated Music Track
• Cast a Skyward Gaze: Making the Case for John Guillermin (HD 14:15) - Video essay by film historian Daniel Kremer
• Interview - Actor Ben Gazzara (HD upscaled from SD 3:10)
• Archival - Actor George Segal (HD upscaled from SD 3:02)
• Theatrical Trailer

Tales of Adventure - Collection 6 features four films that are about the extraordinary things people will do when faced with a dire situation, and what they will do in order to survive. Whether using skills of cunning or manipulation to remain in control, even when outnumbered, these tales show humanity at its most altruistic and its most selfish. Hope and cynicism are portrayed in equal measure. Each movie included in this set is awesome—some are an easier watch than others—and despite some minor issues in video and audio quality, Tales of Adventure - Collection 6 from Via Vision and Imprint Films is Highly Recommended. 

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