GIFT HORSE (1952)
Synopsis:
It's 1940 and the UK and it's empire stands alone against the German war machine, and if they don't do something, and soon, they will lose The Battle of the Atlantic. If they lose The Battle of the Atlantic, they will lose the war. At this critical time, Churchill and Roosevelt work out a deal where the USA will trade 50 WWI-era destroyers to the British in exchange for some Caribbean Bases. In the movie, one of these ships is recommissioned as the fictional HMS Ballantrae, and the Royal Navy pulls once-disgraced Lieutenant-Commander Fraser out of civilian life to be her captain. Fraser has to get his ship into shape and his inexperienced trained so they they can go to sea. The entire storyline is based very loosely on an actual ship.
Thoughts:
I have been a fan of this movie for a long time! I think I first saw Gift Horse when cable channels like TBS, WGN, etc., first aired, and I recorded this movie onto a VHS tape. The quality of that tape was decent, but when copied it onto a DVD the copy was terrible, and since I no longer had a VCR, I got rid of the original tape. I naively thought that I'd just wait and pick up a DVD someplace when it became available. That was probably 20 years ago, and it wasn't until this week that I was able to get this on movie as a DVD from a seller on Ebay.
Imagine my excitement when I popped it into my DVD player, and then imagine my disappointment when it wouldn't play. Why not? The disc I was sent is formatted for Region 2 (Europe, Africa, etc.), but NOT for North America (Region 1). When I double-checked the listing on Ebay, I was correct that there was no indication there about it being Region 2, but as I read on into what can only be described as the fine print about the seller's site, I discovered that all the movies sold at that site are for Region 2 only!
I sent them a note letting them know how sad I was that this happened, and that I would just keep it because I didn't want to spend the postage to return it. Imagine my surprise when I got a message the following morning letting me know that they'd issued a full refund!! I thought about passing it along to a local thrift shop, but then I wondered if I could find an all-region DVD player that wasn't too expensive. I found one at Amazon for about $35, and with the refund completed, that dropped the net price of the player enough that I bought it to play, basically, just this movie! Haha, yes, I like this movie that much.
The interesting thing about this movie is that it's not really that good as movies, go, but it's a great sister movie to other titles coming out of England at the time, such as The Cruel Sea and We Dive at Dawn.
Now that I have an all-region DVD player, I can look more widely for movies than I could before. Sadly my new player can play only DVDs.
Still, I'm smiling!
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