The True Glory - 1945

The True Glory - 1945[b][center]
Director: Carol Reed and Garson Kanin.
Script: Private Peter Ustinov , Gerald Kersh, Private Harry Brown,
Staff Sgt Guy Trosper, Sgt Saul Levitt, Major Eric Maschwitz,
Captain Frank Harvey, Flt Lt Arthur Macrae and Flt Officer Jenny Nicholson.
Cinematography: Army Film Unit, American Army Pictorial Service,
Cameramen of Britain, USA, Canada, France, Belgium, Poland, Holland,
Czechoslavakia and Norway.
Editing: Lt. Robert Verrell, Sgt Lieberwitz, Sgt Bob Farrell, Sgt Jerry Cowen,
Sgt Bob Carrick and Sgt Bob Clark.
Music: William Alwyn
Plot Synopsis
The True Glory is a thrilling documentary account of the D-Day landings
and the subsequent conquest of Europe. A joint British-American effort,
the movie was the product of collaboration between Carol Reed and the
American playwright and director Garson Kanin. The completed film had
a prologue by no less than Dwight Eisenhower himself, Reed and Kanin
undertook the awesome task of distilling a feature-length movie from
approximately ten million feet of film, much of it shot in action. These
continents of celluloid came from the archives of a dozen countries and
represented the work of 1400 different cameramen, of whom 130
were killed or wounded.
Eisenhower's robust preamble sets the tone of the rest of the film. The
movie's high-minded inclusiveness takes some interesting forms.
Although a familiar orotund BBC type provides the main thread of
the narrative, hundreds of other voices break in along the way to supply
small, pungent glosses on life at the front. These personalised vignettes are
flavoured with the distinctive speech rhythms of the men and women who
recount them. French, Scottish, Irish and several American dialects (
even Brooklynese) are among the accents that make up the splendid
polyglot. Purportedly the voices of actual Allied servicemen
(and numerous civilians) speaking in 'their own words', these
interpolations are lively and pungent. Less successful, ironically,
is the more high-flown commentary of the central narrator, which
the filmmakers decided to cast in blank verse.
The film begins on a note of painful honesty, with an American
serviceman confessing that the greeting he and his platoon received
in England - a band playing 'White Christmas' -was 'pretty corny',
though well intentioned. An officer in the Royal Navy admits to getting
road sick while towing his craft to the Rhine. A Canadian recounts the
bloody fighting at Caen, one of the major battle theatres of the D-Day
invasion. Several Frenchmen summarise the miseries of the occupation.
An American supply officer complains, with a self-congratulatory tone,
that Patton's advance into Germany was so swift that new maps could
not be prepared quickly enough. Amidst the torrent of comments, none
is more exuberant than the tank man at the banks of the Rhine, where
every bridge except the one at Remagen had been destroyed is: 'A miracle'.
The watch on the Rhine was finished ... washed up ... or to coin a phrase,
"kaput!"' After his words, a sign flashes by briefly: 'Cross the Rhine
with dry feet courtesy of the Third Army.'
The superb footage, intercut with maps, makes the Allies' progress fairly
easy to follow. The beach-heads at Normandy, the terrible fighting at Caen,
the airborne invasion of Holland, the struggle to free the Antwerp estuary in
order to maintain the supply lines, Von Runkle's counteroffensive, the Battle
of the Bulge and the conquest of Germany itself - each stage in the monumental
campaign comes brilliantly to life. In view of his past achievements, there is no
reason to minimise Reed's part in telling this collaborative story. The pacing is
unfailingly brisk; using quick cuts and sharp transitions, Reed sweeps us
forward through the most complex military encounters of the Second World War,
cleverly resorting to shorthand to convey bulky information compactly. The
panoramic events of warfare are nicely counterpointed with small, personal
details - the touches for which Reed was already heralded - such as an old
French lady dressed in black near the English naval yards. In one startling leap,
the camera moves from the battlefronts to a quiet, orderly London street, where
the citizenry is 'doing its bit' by simply carrying on as usual. All the fabled heroism
of the stoical Londoners is captured in this single contrast. On a larger scale,
Reed balances the euphoria of liberation - thousands of jubilant French cheering
the arrival of American troops in Rennes, De Gaulle's triumphant return to
Paris - with the barbarism of the concentration camps, where a survivor is seen
kissing a soldier's hand.
The same deliberate play of antitheses concludes the film. Fraternising among
British, American and Russian servicemen lead to a young soldier's hopeful
prophecy: 'to the victor belongs the spoils. That's what they say. Well, what
are the spoils? Only this: a chance to build a free world better than before.
Maybe it's the last chance. Remember that.' At the same time, a huge military
cemetery, with its vast forest of crosses, haunts the last moments of The True Glory
and casts a backward shadow over everything that preceded it. The official record
of the colossal effort to free Europe and smash the Third Reich could not be
expected to deal dispassionately or charitably with the other side. Captured Germans
are displayed in unattractive poses, while a GI's remarks sort them into five or six
categories (sullen, defiant, pathetic, etc.). Still, the film avoids outright contempt,
crudity or the attribution of diabolism.

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