Review of The True Glory (1945) by Tonypolito — 31 Aug 2010

Basically, this is two hours of B&W WWII-related footage, but it is only recommended for those viewers who are truly, truly especially interested in seeing such.

Of course, there's the expected bombers/bombing runs, battleships cannoning away, footsoldiers trudging along and shooting from the trenches, enemy bunkers taken out with grenades and so forth.

However, there's also a lot of tangent content - stockpiling of stores, riveting of ships and planes, generals plotting and pointing at warmaps, soldiers relaxing in bunks or tents or USOs - that continually interrupts the actual action footage.

For what it is, the content is of reasonably high quality. The actual images, on the other hand, though reasonably viewable, could use improvement. There's zero resto work here, plenty of distracting catscratch and spackle.

The voiceover work - first from one unidentified commenter, then another - seems little more than semi-related to the coincident content. And there's a quite ponderous introduction to the film by Eisenhower.

The style of the film is extremely patch/quilt work in nature - a few seconds of this, a few sections of that, repeatedly. There is a chronologic embedded, from D-Day to Berlin, but all along the visuals just seem to be more of the same, again and again, rather than toward the telling of a story and/or odyssey.

It's not so hard to understand why this film won a documentary Academy Award in '46; American audiences surely hungered for such content just after the Allied victory. Today's viewer will find the images to be among some of the better available in this category, but will also find that the film just drags along through the muck - due to the fact that there's just no compelling, integrated story actually being told by its images.

RECOMMENDATION: Unless you're a WWII fanatic, take a pass.