Victory at Sea - The Movie (1954)

The feature length(98 minutes) version of the series was released to theaters in 1954-'55. There was a Warner Bros VHS of this film available for a few years back in the early 1980s, and I'm lucky to have a copy.

But there was another version of this "feature length" film, which was a 75-minute re-edit that NBC broadcast in 1960 as part of its Project Twenty TV series. It is an interesting exercise to watch the two and compare. Alexander Scourby read the narration for both versions, and the scripts were different! I found a bootleg DVD of the 1960 version; and since it was trimmed down to 75 minutes, it was easy to see where much of the redundancy and drawn-out scenes had been shortened.

So, what started as a 26-episode, documentary series of half-hour shows, became a theatrical 98-minute feature, and that was later retooled to become a shorter documentary back on TV!

My favorite version has been the 1954 feature.