While new, tougher guidelines for the title of ''hero'' have emerged in new, tougher times, at least one old-school standard-bearer stands up to scrutiny: Sir Ernest Shackleton may have failed in his 1914–16 attempt to claim Antarctica for Britain, but he and his men on the luckless sailing ship ''Endurance'' set standards for bravery and resourcefulness that thrill every time their improbable story is told.
Shackleton had the amazing good luck to bring along photographer Frank Hurley, and much of The Endurance: Shackleton's Legendary Antarctic Expedition, directed with public-television refinement by George Butler (based on the book by Caroline Alexander), owes its power to those astonishing pictures, previously seen in the even more striking 1919 silent film ''South'' (available on video from Milestone). Butler's contribution, then, is the link he provides to the present: The interviews with descendants of the ship's crew add color to frozen black-and-white images of real survivors.
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