Jump Into Hell (DVD), Warner Archives, Drama

The 12,000 French troops holding Dien Bien Phu are outnumbered more than three to one by an ever-tightening vise of encircling Viet Minh. Supply lines are dwindling. The air base is overrun, leaving only one way for volunteer reinforcements to arrive. Commands plea for help goes out, and brave men answer the call in a film that is one of the earliest movies about the post-WWII conflict in Indochina (Vietnam). Through battlefield action and via glimpses of the lives and loves the men left behind, the film mirrors situations faced by, and pays heroic tribute, to soldiers who fought for France in 1954 Indochina. Jack Sernas (Helen of Troy, La Dolce Vita), who knew war firsthand as a member of the French Resistance and as a German prisoner at Buchenwald, stars as one of those combatants. Featuring actual combat footage, the film was scripted by Irving Wallace before he became a best-selling novelist.