55 mins, with exclusive video & book. A Castle Vision production through Cromwell.

The film relies on the testimonies of 3 British veterans and the historical analysis of a British university lecturer. The video is also accompanied by a paperback booklet called the "Spanish Revolt" by Charles Cordoba written in 1936.

Unfortunately, the film has little pattern or structure and makes no effort to give a historical perspective of the war. In fact, the disjointed structure proves very irritating. The booklet is also of little value as it only covers the political events that lead up to the war and some of the very early fighting. This BOOKLET would be a very poor choice for anyone wishing to study the SCW for the first time, despite this being the intention of the package.

The comments of the lecturer are particularly annoying; he comments that the Italian bombing of Barcelona was carried out by the Italians to disprove their ice cream selling image and restore their more macho persona to the rest of the forces in Spain. His analysis of the role of armour in Spain is also lacking in accuracy.

The most disappointing aspect of the film is the failure to use footage, instead it uses popular photographs from the war, phasing in and out of the pictures and having the poems of John Cornford and Miguel Hernandez read over these images.

Overall this is an attempt to produce a video on the cheap, which is understandable as most production companies are faced with enormous costs.For example it will cost the production company £ 10 per second should they wish to buy the rights to show the Granada SCW series of documentaries shown on Channel 4 in the early 80's.

The video however should appeal to the devoted SCW fan, even though it adds nothing new to his knowledge or understanding of the war.

I must point back to the video reviewed by Geoff Barker in an edition of El Aficionado. This is called the Spanish Civil War, it is available through all video stockists, is 52 minutes long and is released through Vision 7 and Audio visual enterprises. This is just pure footage taken from French newsreels of the period and there is no commentary, thus one must piece together the events, i.e. there is plenty of footage from the siege of the Alcazar, Durutti's funeral, the Ebro offensive etc. Despite this, it is still worthy of consideration.

This video retails at approx £ 12, but I still feel it to be of excellent value. Maybe someone who has the video would like to produce an index of the events in the film to be printed in a future edition of "ABANDERADO"?

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