I had heard that the Horatio Hornblower films and the Shackleton mini-series were great and now I’ll get to check it out for myself. This neatly packaged (it looks like a book) 14 DVD set brings together the entirety of those two programs along with The Lost Battalion, Benedict Arnold A Question of Honor, Napoleon, The Duel, The Fire Ships, Longitude, The Wrong War, The Duchess and The Devil. As historical dramatizations go you don’t do much better than A&E. They tend to avoid sappy presentations in favor of genuine drama and character development and historical accuracy. And the stable of actors they’ve used (John Malkovich, Jeremy Irons, Isabella Rossellini, Gerard Depardieu etc.) are more than up to the task of keeping things from getting too melodramatic. The extras alone here would be worth another whole box set. I won’t list them here because I’m so behind in postings that I don’t want to wade through the fine print. Suffice to say that the list of extras is so extensive it really does appear in fine print on the back of the box. This is a simply awesome collection of historically based dramas.
Pssst. edit this post.