Somebody at Columbia TriStar Home Entertainment has been doing their homework -- that's the best explanation for the release on DVD of John Farrow's Commandos Strike At Dawn (1942), a nicely made wartime drama about life in occupied Norway and the resistance to the Nazis. The movie lacks the wartime heroics or the stylized bravado of the most enduringly popular films of the period -- it has an extraordinary cast, including Paul Muni, Lillian Gish, Ray Collins, and George Macready, and a lot of sincerity in its script -- by Irwin Shaw from a story by C.S. Forester -- and intentions, as well as a fairly complex plot line that evolves carefully and manages to encompass both wartime patriotism and elements of a thriller. The movie is closer in spirit to, say, Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger's One Of Our Aircraft Is Missing than to Michael Curtiz's Casablanca. The transfer is very good, the night shots all realistically dark but still revealing useful picture information, while the day scenes are all clean but generally avoid the studio-bound sharpness that was typical of the period -- understandable, since the movie was shot largely on Vancouver Island. The result is a seductive realism that is captured very nicely on the DVD. The audio quality is similarly good, bringing out the gentle nuances of Muni's dialogue and the subtle tones of Louis Gruenberg's score. The 96 minute film has been given a very generous 28 chapters that outline the plot perfectly -- there is no original trailer (though there are trailers for The Bridge On The River Kwai, From Here To Eternity, and The Guns Of Navarone). The selection of features includes English, French, and Japanese subtitles, all accessible through a dual-layer menu that opens automatically on start-up.