In his "Winds of War," novelist Herman Wouk painted a chilling picture of the ominous precursors to WWII. His sequel, "War and Remembrance," begins with the war's first battles rumbling and became an extraordinary miniseries that held an enormous audience spellbound. A sterling cast, superbly directed by Dan Curtis, enact Wouk's sweeping vision from the perspective of a fictional American Naval family headed by Pug Henry (Robert Mitchum). A saga of monumental proportions that captures all the horrors and heroics of a defining 20th-century event.

Director Dan Curtis said that after The Winds of War, the opportunity to show the Jews' plight led him to take on another daunting production. He takes the viewer into Auschwitz with unflinching realism (producer and former internee Branko Lustig returned to the subject a decade later with Schindler's List) and is just as deft with a few massive battle sequences combining models with colorized footage. Sometimes the soap opera of the characters' affairs seems pretty sappy, especially with some uneven acting. The DVD set also contains two featurettes from 1988 and 2002.