The Movie: If you wanted to make a modernized remake of this old classic, you could probably call it September 10th. It's a nice little love story set on the almost idyllic army bases in Hawaii, just before the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. So basically, you have this whole nice little movie going, but at the end of the movie it's December 7, and basically, all the stuff that seemed so important the day before just don't matter anymore. And that's the end of the movie. At least, that's the way I saw it.

While the story didn't have me stuck to the edge of the seat, there are definitely some great characters played by some great actors in this movie. Indeed, Frank Sinatra and Donna Reed both won Oscars for their supporting roles, with Montgomery Clift, Burt Lancaster and Deborah Kerr all receiving nominations for their leading roles. All told, it won 8 Oscars, including Best Picture.

This was a controversial movie (as was the book it was based on) because of its negative portrayal of the military, coming so close on the heels of World War II, and I suppose it'd be similar to someone trying to make a movie in the year 2011 portraying fire fighters in a negative fashion during or just before the tragedy of September 11.

But like I said, the story didn't have me riveted, but I certainly did appreciate the great characters and acting, as I mentioned before, so if you're looking for some great acting in a movie, this is definitely something you might want to check out.

The DVD:

Being from 1953, years before widescreen became the standard in filmmaking, this film is in black and white in the 4:3 aspect ratio. The video transfer I'd say looks pretty great for a film of this age overall, but there was some pretty obvious inconsistency in the quality of the original film's image from scene to scene. Some scenes looked super clean, razor sharp with great contrast, while others were dull, grainy and had a smeared look to them. But again, overall, it looks great for its age, and there are hardly any compression-related artifacts that I noticed.

Audio quality was similar to the video quality in that it was very good overall for the age of the film, but there were some areas where it seemed that something was lost from the original film, or something, with some strange gaps of silence appearing in some strange places. I'm pretty sure these were shortcomings in the actual film they used, and not something that went wrong in the DVD authoring process.

Special features are a bit on the light side. You get commentary from the director's son, a making of featurette, some text based stuff and some trailers, one for this film, and a couple for some other classic war films.