The True Glory (1945) User Reviews

Victory Lap.

[rmax304823 · 6/10 · 24 December 2011]

The earlier review is accurate enough. This is a documentary of World War II in the west, from the D Day landings to the surrender of the German Armed Forces. It's all news footage and maps, without any talking heads. The narration is by dozens of people, mostly from the UK and the US, and is by turns folksy and formal. Some of the footage is brutal. On the whole, the film reflects the feelings of most of the Allies at the time, and the view of the Germans -- all Germans -- is pitiless.

Some of the voices in the narration sounded familiar and I kept trying to identify them. They're not the voices of major movie stars like Cary Grant but rather supporting actors and players from movies and radio. (Kids, radio came before television, see, and there were these radio plays, either funny or dramatic, with names like "The Whistler" and "Inner Sanctum", and they used to employ lots of popular actors. As you may or may not know, on radio you can only hear their voices.) I thought I heard Jean Louis Heydt, Deborah Kerr, Sam Levine, and Peter Lawford, but might have been mistaken.

From the script: "Through hedges and fields they carved their heavy way." "Down we cast the gauntlet, challenging (the enemy) to stand and fight!" To the extent that the narration is folksy -- or corny, if you like -- there's good reason for it. Among the writers were Harry Brown who specialized in Army banter and gave us the exceptional war film, "A Walk In The Sun." And the more florid dialog probably belongs to Paddy Chayevsky, the man who gave us, "I'm mad as hell and I'm not going to TAKE IT anymore!"

The message of the movie is spelled out "loud and clear." We won this by all pulling together. Let's keep on keeping on. One folksy GI voice says, "The ones who want to start World War III haven't seen this one -- or not enough of it." That was probably aimed at Stalin but the lesson still applies today.

Much of the footage will be familiar to today's viewers but it was fresh in 1945 -- the concentration camps, the burning jeep, The British soldier waiting to leap from his landing craft into the sea on D Day and being tapped on the shoulder by the guy behind him and being startled by it. But, in the spirit of internationalism, some battles are described, however briefly, that are unfamiliar to most Americans -- the clearing of the Antwerp estuaries, for instance, an essential but dirty job with no glamor attached to it, carried out chiefly by Canadians.

It's also a bit surprising to see Operation Market Garden described in such detail. It was, after all, an unmitigated Allied defeat, and from 1945 one expects only a flag-waving panorama of Allied victories.

Full credit is given to all the Allied nations involved, with the Czechs, Poles, and Free French being mentioned. All of the other Armed Forces are mentioned as well -- the air forces and the navies. No reference to the US Coast Guard, although some of its members show up on screen. One enlisted man in the USCG managed to win a posthumous Medal of Honor at Normandy.

Nobody should expect a history lesson from this documentary. It's impressionistic and segues insensibly from one battle to the next. The maps are no help. In the print I saw, they were all furry with details and had cartoon airplanes, flags, and soldiers drawn onto them, as if done by Walt Disney while drunk. Any more confusing and they'd look like a work by Jackson Pollack. Yet, the editors can't be blamed for that. They did a good job of stitching combat footage together. (Not a frame is interpolated from the Pacific theater.) And, showing the war's end, we see the flames of artillery firing, the images and sounds slowly receding from foreground to background, growing infrequent, until the last of the little white spots disappears. It's an imaginative touch.

First draft of history

[SnoopyStyle · 7/10 · 3 July 2015]

This is a documentary of Victory in Europe starting from before D-day to VE day. The Allied military gathered combat and other military footage to put together their version of the fight from Normandy to Berlin. Eisenhower has a foreword introduction. There are lots of combat footage. Some of them are fairly bloody with dead bodies. They are very compelling and many of the footage have been reused over the years. There are two versions of the ending. One ends simply while the other ends mentioning Japan. I can do without the various people (actors?) doing the narration as a stereotype of each nationality and military unit.

THE TRUE GLORY (Garson Kanin and Carol Reed, 1945) ***1/2

[Bunuel1976 · 8/10 · 3 January 2014]

This is one of the best-regarded of the classic wartime documentaries – another Academy Award winner, as it happens – and, in retrospect, among those that has stood the test of time reasonably well. Co-incidentally, its viewing followed that of THEY WON'T FORGET (1937) starring Claude Rains, who is featured here as one of several uncredited narrators! With this in mind, while one understands that such films were made as collective efforts for morale-boosting purposes, it feels odd to realize who may or may not have been involved only while watching it…or even after the fact (I was not aware, for instance, that the script was by Paddy Chayefsky)! Anyway, its enduring qualities over more dated similar efforts has much to do with the film's very structure – not only the various nations involved in the Allied cause taking turns to provide 'first-hand' commentary throughout, but its detailing the progress towards the end of WWII (from D-Day to the fall of Berlin).

It was interesting, to be sure, to watch real footage of a number of famed battlegrounds which would later be fictionalized as star-studded spectacles by the commercial cinema – the Normandy invasion itself in THE LONGEST DAY (1962), the BATTLE OF THE BULGE (1965), the entry into Berlin following the capture of THE BRIDGE AT REMAGEN (1968) and the ill-fated Allied maneuver at Arnhem in A BRIDGE TOO FAR (1977). Other points worth mentioning here are the fact that this was 'presented' by U.S. Supreme Commander General Dwight D. Eisenhower (indeed, it is said that the gold statuette on Oscar night was delivered to him personally!), later the 34th American President, and the early harrowing depiction of the realities behind German concentration camps which, as stated in the film itself, removed from one's mind any notion of the futility for such a conflict.

What Price Glory

[sol- · 7/10 · 9 June 2017]

Not your average World War II documentary, 'The True Glory' avoids static interviews or impersonal narration, instead presenting collated archive footage from the final few months of the war, played out against real war veterans verbally relating their experiences. While some of the stock footage shown feels awfully familiar, there are several excellent, unusual shots throughout, most notably one where the camera is positioned at the wheels of the plane and a sequence where passers-by on the street walk up to the camera from all different directions. The nighttime footage is remarkable too. Not all of the verbal recounts resonate with a lot of flag-waving dialogue, however, several lines linger long in the mind ("I'm not squeamish... but I'm human") and the documentary refreshingly includes recounts from an extensive variety of personnel. Sure, most of the interviewees are soldiers, but we also get the perspective of an army hospital nurse, a war reporter and the list goes on. The documentary also curiously mentions the prospect of World War III some time in (then) foreseeable future with a reminder that war really can be a horrible thing. Indeed, while the film sometimes feels like the Allies patting themselves on the back for a successful victory, 'The True Glory' does not shy away from depicting how grueling war is and it deserves some credit for that.

Good documentary but dreadful blank verse commentary

[malcolmgsw · 6/10 · 13 May 2021]

The choice of film was excellent with one exception. They devoted one minute to Belsen with no actual mention of the Holocaust. The documentary though was almost ruined by the dreadful ponderous blank verse commentary.

how quickly things changed

[lee_eisenberg · 9/10 · 24 March 2018]

Obviously, "The True Glory" is propaganda in favor of World War II. Walking away from it, one gets the feeling that this was a war that had to get fought (and when you think about it, it WAS the last war declared by congress - as opposed to the president unilaterally launching it - and we paid for it with high taxes). None other than Dwight Eisenhower* introduces it and reminds the viewer that this is firsthand footage of the war. We get narration from all sorts of people: multiple nationalities, and even multiple races.

But something else caught my eye. Towards the end, we get footage of US troops meeting Soviet troops, and both sides hit it off. Any scholar of WWII knows that the USSR was our ally in that war. Well, a mere two years later, the United States and Soviet Union became enemies. A person seeing this documentary just a few years after its release would've gotten left befuddled at the sight of Ivan and GI Joe happily shaking hands, now that the US considered the USSR the world's #1 threat. But as George Orwell depicted in "Nineteen Eighty-Four", alliances shift depending on which war it is, and memories of previous alliances get erased.

Well, one has to understand that the documentary got released right after the war ended. The footage of Roosevelt, Churchill and Stalin holding their conference looked heroic (most people didn't know that Truman had ditched FDR's plans for a future without war). It's understandable that the documentary won Best Documentary Feature at the Academy Awards in 1946. While the propaganda factor may seem over-the-top, I still recommend the documentary as a look at the mindset in late 1945. To think that there was that brief period when it looked as though there would never be another war, and now a nuclear holocaust looks like a real possibility.

Anyway, you should see it (but also watch "The Atomic Cafe").

*It's probably worth noting that as president, Ike taxed the rich at 90% to pay off the war debt and build the Interstate system, defended Social Security, and worked to ease tensions with the Soviet Union. He could never get elected as a conservative nowadays.

Cliff notes version of D-DAY

[raskimono · 10/10 · 8 September 2005]

This fantastic documentary released by the United States Government and co-directed by the great and smart writer-director Garson Kanin and Michael Powell opens with DDE telling us that we are going to see the events as occurred as told by the men and women who were involved and there. This is no talking heads documentary. It essentially covers the journey from the moment the allies land on Normandy till they take Berlin. All the while, a series of voice-overs obviously scripted details the action as they talk. Be it English, American, Canadian, Czech, Russian, female paramedics, black soldiers we are given the whole she-bang. The voices change as randomly as the scene changes. There is a problem though. The dialog is scripted and can sound corny and a bit rah-rah and flag-waving. Everything is optimistic in this cinematic dairy so to speak. Scenes of allies being killed end with voice-over lines "We lost 3,000 but we moved on" and the editors will jump away to scenes of the army defeating or bombing Berlin. They do not linger or failure or tragedy except when it matters at the concentration when we see the dead bodies and survivors. That said, all sides of the human behavior are covered. We see soldiers who would rather shoot the Germans than capture them. You can feel the anger behind the voices of the soldiers as he chants racist mantras at the POWS. Anger, happiness, futility, fear, and foremost of all optimism is covered and the ending tells us that we can together and be one. The sea of flags ending might seem corny but it was made after the Great War. It has a right to be.

A Contemporary Memoir

[richardchatten · 10/10 · 14 July 2020]

Described by Basil Wright as "a really brilliant example of collaboration of talent on an international level" and bearing the official endorsement of an introduction by General Eisenhower, this blow by blow account of the final year of the war in Europe includes uncredited contributions from both commentator Leslie Banks and combat cameraman Russ Meyer.

Moving at a rare old lick, the frequent dry humour and laconic passion of the words combines with forcefully edited found footage to create an engrossing piece of reportage as fresh as the day it was made (although the actual events depicted probably felt like a lifetime to actually experience compared with the way the film flies past).

I guess it played a lot better back in 1945...

[planktonrules · 5/10 · 23 January 2012]

This film won the Oscar for Best Documentary Feature--and according to IMDb, Dwight Eisenhower himself got the trophy! The film is introduced by General Eisenhower himself and Robert Harris narrates. There are also folks who talk throughout the film--giving soldiers' accounts of the events. It chronicles the landing of the Allies at Normandy, France and continues up to the fall of Berlin. According to IMDb, the US and British government had access to the work of 1400 cameramen.

Historically speaking, this is an amazing and important film. However, when seen today by the average person, it's EXTREMELY slow going--with lots of grainy images and VERY dry narration. I would not recommend you see it and instead find a newer and more polished film. Heck, I am a retired history teach and I still found this pretty uninteresting!!

........." a continuing unto the end until it be thoroughly finished."

[brogmiller · 8/10 · 15 July 2020]

Later documentaries and war films have combined to make this piece seem rather outmoded in manner and naively optimistic in tone whilst its powerful images now alas seem all too familiar. At the time of course it must have packed quite a punch. The editing of newsreel footage shared among others by co-directors Carol Reed and Garson Kanin, is superlative. Some of the front line cameramen of course would not have lived to see the film receive its Oscar as Best Documentary. Splendid score by William Alwyn. Lots of familiar and uncredited voices here and the choice of Leslie Banks to declaim the somewhat purple prose is inspired following his role as Chorus in 'Henry V'. An 'uncredited' name as cinematographer is that of Russ Meyer who went on to film 'action' of an altogether different sort! The less successful aspects of the campaign are glossed over in keeping with its propogandist nature and the massive casualties are seen as the price to be paid for a job well done. History has naturally overtaken the film and it is most unsettling now to see Joseph Stalin, who was handed millions of East Europeans on a plate at the Yalta Conference, being described as one of the 'architects of peace'! The following year another of those architects, Winston Churchill, delivered his 'Iron Curtain' speech. Well-intentioned and technically faultless this is a moving testament to human beings 'in extremis'.

D-Day matters

[oscar-35 · 20 September 2012]

*Spoiler/plot- 1945, D-Day matters

*Special Stars- Narrator: Robert Harris

*Theme- The largest and most complex European invasion in modern times was not to be stopped or opposed.

*Trivia/location/goofs- American documentary, won Oscar

*Emotion- An enjoyable documentary made up of live action combat or newsreel footage. However, there are the unpleasant shots of injured Americans and killed Germans with some blatant racist language. But it is extremely educational and does what a narrative simulated war film can do.

Film And War Are Collaborative Media

[boblipton · 10/10 · 22 September 2023]

The British Ministry of Information and the U. S. Office of War Information produced this film of the Second World War from June 6, 1944 through the surrender of Germany on May 10, 1945.

There aren't many official credits on this winner of the Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature. The two uncredited directors are Garson Kanin and Carol Reed; Kanin claimed that as the uncredited producer, Dwight D. Eisenhower was the Oscar winner. Surely the estimated seven editors, the ten writers (including Joe Brown, Paddy Chayesfksy, and Peter Ustinov), performers who spoke the commentary and the purported memories, including Leslie Banks, Sam Levene, and Richard Attenborough, the war footage shot by, among other people, Russ Meyer, and the millions of Allied troops deserve praise.

Glory ?

[jromanbaker · 2/10 · 23 October 2019]

I do not want to linger on this film. I caught it on UK television by accident and saw within a brief space of time image after image of unbelievable horror. Fragments of people's destroyed lives and a collage of male voices voicing comments ( mostly American, nothing from Russia. Only a few remarks and images of Russians and given their losses that ran into millions this was to me inadmissible. And no women's voices but then I saw only most of this film and may have missed them. No voices of Germans and yes there were voices to be heard there as ' innocent ' men and women were caught up in the maelstrom of all this bedlam despite their nationality ) I saw a brief few images of the concentration camps but only a discreet nod to people of ' other ' religions!!! Not the single word ' Jewish ' and of course this being 1945 no mention of ' homosexuals ' or ' gypsies '. It is a film of its time when prejudices were rife and people could either not be mentioned or clumped into a stereotyped format. A convoy of slave labour passed by at one point and this was blithely mentioned and glossed over. Their agonized faces were equal to the liberating soldiers, but just a glance and a mention while we watched the soldiers. Every image was soaked in humanity in its filth and pain, yet the end of the film speaks of the ' true glory '. A black and white film in every sense. Glory is the last word to use when millions of innocents on all sides died and suffered and lived those long years under appalling conditions. And of course this being so-called objective no analysis about how we slid over long years into this morass of evil and unendurable pain. I give it 2 for the agony of the pain, and parts of it that must have been an education for some at the time.

Reasons not to see this movie by historical reproduction

[mrdonleone · 5/10 · 26 March 2022]

Imagine that nothing happens to you in your whole life; then all of a sudden you find yourself in the midst of war. Naturally you want to record your experiences to share them Mr with your children and your children's children and the future of mankind. There we find the same experience shared by thousands of people actually just always been the same. Challenging quite sad because many interesting original stories can be told about the second world war -especially from German point of view- instead one always get the same rehashed ocean of meat that we all know already with the only messages to obey to the government which of course is the great problem from the very beginning leading to all of the misery of the second world war to begin with. In total it can be sent that this documentary is pretty much boring do it the same time it must be interesting for somebody who never heard about the second world war but in reality we all heard about it already so nothing is no again and because nothing is new it is just keeping the old texts intact and by doing so it destroys the chance for future and by The strand of chance for future it destroys the chance of life and in this the movie is supporting the enemy or no matter which side of team you are standing. You want to do something right then don't watch this movie.