THE CINEMA
The True Glory." At Warner's and the Odeon.—" Broken Dykes." Generally released. "Week-End at the Waldorf." At the Empire.
THE combined team of British and American Service film-makers were faced with a formidable task when they set out to produce a successor to Desert Victory and Tunisian Victory which would do justice to the Allied invasion and liberation of Western Europe. Yet The True Glory measures up to its epic subject-matter. The basic problem arising with films of this kind is that the raw material, the battle-front pictures, are photographed under conditions which do not permit of scenario planning. Only when the last gun is fired does the narrative line become clear. Yet the film-makers have discovered and conscientiously followed a simple method qf assembly which gives The True Glory, in spite of the vast ground to be covered and the complexity of the theme, an advantage over both Desert Victory and Tunisian Victory. These two films gave us a clear picture of the strategies involved but were less satisfactory in their presentation of the human side of war. They gave us a picture of achievement rather than of the human means to a triumphant end. The True Glory, on the other hand, has chosen to present the sweep from Caen to Hamburg in the form of a series of episodes, each representing some tactical aspect of the campaign, and each contriving also to give a keen impression of the emotions of the participants. The scenes chosen from the wealth of combat material are particularly those which throw emphasis on the indi- vidual contribution of the fighting man, and these are sup- ported in the sound-track by comments from front-line men and women drawn from every corner of the Allied world, with Eisen- hower mixed up comfortably amongst the narrators from Lancashire and Brooklyn.
Each man speaks of something he knew and felt, so that in con- tributing his anecdote about spear-heads over-running maps, or his joke about recruiting pamphlets, or his simple homely description of some moment which will gravely adorn the history-books of the future, he speaks with the authority of the expert and the unschooled eloquence of the eye-witness. Moreover, the individual scenes and comments are so ingeniously chosen and woven together that The True Glory does constitute a piece of balanced history. This in spite of maps over-embellished with romantic emblems and a linking, impersonal commentary which makes the astonishing mistake of trying to give events importance by describing them in :he archaic phrases of bad, pseudo-Shakespearean blank verse. There appears to me to be only one serious omission from the film. Why no mention of the D-day weather reports and of General Eisen- hower's truly momentous decision to rproceed in spite of the un- favourable conditions?
Broken Dykes, the M.o.I. monthly release, provides a brief supplement to The True Glory in that it depicts with artistry and feeling the ordeal of the inhabitants of bombed Walcheren and the stoicism and even humour with which Dutch families flooded from their homes by the necessary demolitions of the R.A.F. have joined the army of Europe's displaced persons. John Ferno, who made the film, will be remembered for his shots of peasants in Spanish Earth, and here again he has succeeded in investing his interior groupings and individual heads with the qualities of a whole people.
In Week-End at the Waldorf we meet again the familiar devict of a great modern hotel used to provide both scenic backgrounds and dramatic continuity for a group of episodes which range from farce to tragedy. The dialogue is witty and the occasional dis- jointedness outweighed by some good comedy from Waite, Pidgeon and some agreeable sentiment from Lana Turner and Van Johnson.
EDGAR ANSTEY.
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