There is a Warner DVD out there with an almost identical name -- it's called The Colour of War and is a 148-minute DVD issue of a British documentary entitled The Second World War In Colour.

It runs for almost 150 minutes. It aimed at presenting some of the very best of the colour footage surviving from World War Two -- revelatory footage, given that most documentaries we see are based firmly on the far more available black-and-white material.

Don't get the two confused. This present edition is dubbed The Colour of War -- Victory in Europe and runs for only 46 minutes.

This present DVD, despite its very short running time (which is over-stated on jacket sleeve), does contain very potent footage, thanks to that sudden injection of colour into events we've been conditioned as thinking of only in black-and-white terms.

The script, read by Joss Ackland, is well written; the footage has been carefully assembled.

But there's a grievous error been committed here, which just about rules an otherwise interesting DVD documentary out of court.

The jacket states (as we would expect) that this is shown in its original ratio, although alarm bells are raised by a '16:9' banner.

Put on the DVD and worst fears are realised. The film butchers have been at work, mutilating this precious original footage, cropping buildings, planes, torsos and everything else in the original frame, to squeeze the original Academy ratio into a spurious Widescreen.

The picture compositions at times look ridiculous. The entire project loses a sense of reality. Having some of this great footage (of battle, of VE celebrations, of the lives of desperate non-combatants in Europe and of privation-scarred Brits) treated this way is a travesty.

Seeing it in colour would have been enough of a reality-hit; we didn't need to have someone with a giant set of scissors go carving into it to try to pretend that this was also filmed in Widescreen!

What's left of the colour footage after the hacking about by clodhopper film technicians does look magnificent, given its vintage age and condition. I would guess that what was left on the cutting-room floor (or hidden inside the digital editing suite) looked just as good too.

Sound is decent enough too. There are no extras.