Home :: DVD :: Action & Adventure :: Military & War  

Animal Action
Blackmail, Murder & Mayhem
Blaxploitation
Classics
Comic Action
Crime
Cult Classics
Disaster Films
Espionage
Futuristic
General
Hong Kong Action
Jungle Action
Kids & Teens
Martial Arts
Military & War

Romantic Adventure
Science Fiction
Sea Adventure
Series & Sequels
Superheroes
Swashbucklers
Television
Thrillers
Blockade

Blockade

List Price: $19.99
Your Price: $17.99
Product Info Reviews

Features:
  • Black & White


Description:

Hollywood's first earnest attempt to treat the Spanish Civil War is a deeply silly movie. There are few spectacles more forlorn than a film eager to be perceived as courageous, just not at the cost of having courage. Blockade strikes a radical pose. There's lots of rhetoric about getting "beyond flags and slogans"; "the people" keep forming up as a Spanish Greek chorus; director William Dieterle, besides borrowing blatantly from Potemkin in one scene, hazards a shift into direct address with anguished peasant-warrior Henry Fonda suddenly getting in our collective face to ask, "Where's the conscience of the world?!" Yet even though card-carrying leftist John Howard Lawson wrote it, Blockade neither takes nor identifies any political position. No one is fascist or communist or loyalist--there's just "The Enemy." The viewer will be hard-pressed to tell what is going on. Or to care. --Richard T. Jameson
© 2004, ReviewFocus or its affiliates