Cinema: The New Pictures, Sep. 17, 1945

The True Glory (War Department-Columbia), an official U.S.-British film, was produced by England's Captain Carol Reed, America's Captain Garson Kanin, and any number of talented assistants. Of the United Nations combat cameramen who shot the film, 32 were killed, 16 were reported missing, and 101 were wounded. It is one of the most difficult collaborative efforts in movie history—and a highly successful one. In a word, it is what the moviemakers constantly strain for and seldom achieve: colossal.

The makers of the film had to reduce some 6,500,000 feet of shots to theatrical coherence (it runs 84 minutes), and to outline clearly the history of one of the world's major campaigns: that which began at Southampton and ended in Berlin. Moreover, starting two months after Dday, they had to foam along the course with their noses at the withers of history, constantly forced to revise (first there was an ending in Paris, then one at the Rhine). They also took it on themselves to make the whole job an illustration of teamwork among the men of many services and of several nations. And to give these objectives their just emotional weight, they took on still another hard assignment: to tell everything in terms of "the really important" people—the ordinary servicemen.

Such a large and complex undertaking could hardly hope to have the extraordinary intensity of shorter, more single-focused films like San Pietro and Tarawa. But it is made, all the same, with force and fervor and intelligence. It is the richest single record of the war and one of its greatest pictures.

Striving to keep the great weight of fact and action quick, supple and personal, the film's creators hit on a few bold devices. The boldest: substituting for the customary bald-faced narrative prose some passages in blank verse written by Private Harry Brown—and for the customary sports announcer's voice, a far more intelligent Voice of History. Though the verse is generally middling and the BBC-accented Voice of History is a trifle pallid, the innovation is as welcome as it is startling.

A more successful device is the use of the voices of what seems like hundreds of individuals. Each voice, in the inflection of its own part of the world and in the jargon of a particular martial trade, gives one molecular view of the campaign. A Brooklyn tankman tells of his disgust when his tank runs out of gas, a Canadian describes the hideous fighting around Caen, a Royal Navy man admits his road sickness when his assault craft is trucked cross-country to the Rhine, a Negro cook tells how he learned to fire a bazooka at Bastogne, a primly petulant American supply officer tells of "a very humiliating experience" when Patton's men kept running off the edge of all available maps (and adds that he will be glad to get back to the Library of Congress, where maps have some permanence).

Expertly angled and written, with valid emotion, some fine humor and a laudable lack of pseudo-common-mannishness, these speeches should be an effective device for encouraging internationalism. The images which are set against them are even more so. Though some of the material—notably some great shots of the Norman shore—is familiar from newsreels, it has the power of a musical theme, triumphantly recapitulated.