(9 of 9)
It is, despite some serious flaws, a largely successful undertaking. The huge cast is, with very few exceptions, able and often exceptional. Mitchum, overaged and overweight as he is, is real and rocklike. As the actor says, "Pug sort of functions as a pylon at an air race. Everything revolves around him." Bergen is touching as the flighty, shallow but nonetheless sympathetic Rhoda; Houseman, who has been blessed with a much more amiable character than he usually portrays, is convincing as the civilized survivor of an ancient society who cannot believe that the barbarians have finally broken through the gates; and Vincent brings to the part of Byron a force of vitality and a hard, sometimes menacing passion. The only really bad performance, in fact, is MacGraw's. Although she looks splendid, she flounders in a role for which she is ill suited. Her voice has no inflections, her face has few expressions and her performance has no credibility.
Some of the blame for that must fall on Curtis. Paramount wanted a general to manage this vast project, and in Curtis it got one. Like Ulysses S. Grant, he eventually gains victory, but his tactics can be clumsy, and his formations are sometimes ragged along the edges. He is not, in short, an elegant director. His main concern is to keep the action moving, which he does.
The same might be said of Wouk. His plot is sometimes cumbersome and contrived. The wedding of Natalie's Polish relatives, for ex ample, looks as if it had been borrowed from Fiddler on the Roof, and the timing, the night before the German invasion, is ludicrous. His dialogue is often wooden. "Why did you insist on marrying me?" Natalie asks Byron. "We could have made love as much as you wanted. But now you've tied me to you on this rope of burning nerves." Furthermore, in all the hours of script there is scarcely a glint of humor. As a collegiate critic once said about an earlier work: "All Wouk and no play."
Still, with a little help from history, Wouk and Curtis do create an engrossing narrative. In most historical dramas, the depictions of real events often seem staged, while the author's inventions seem real. In The Winds of War, the reverse is true. The historical scenes, some of them scrupulously copied from old newsreels, are vivid and acute, while the fictional scenes sometimes look stiff and awkward. But those moments pass and the story takes over, building up momentum as it approaches its tragic conclusion, hour after hour after hour. Meanwhile, ABC hopes for a happier ending of its own. Having taken its gamble, the network must wait for the results, day after day after day. — By Gerald Clarke. Reported by Elaine Dutka/New York and Denise Worrell/ Los Angeles