StephenPaul C
The greatest 01 hour: and 25 minutes with real war fighting footage!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Rated 5/5 Stars •
Rated 5 out of 5 stars
06/23/23
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Audience Member
Its an interesting little documentary made back in the day when the war just ended. It won best documentary but compared to today's documentaries, its a bit flat, but seeing Ike do the introduction and seeing generals like Patton and Bradley in all their glory is always a great thing. If you want a basic summery of the war in Europe starting with D-Day, this is it.
Rated 3.5/5 Stars •
Rated 3.5 out of 5 stars
01/17/23
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Audience Member
gr8 doc from master brit director carol reed (the third man)
Rated 4.5/5 Stars •
Rated 4.5 out of 5 stars
01/21/23
Full Review
Audience Member
D-Day through most of the latter half of WWII is chronicled in this documentary.
Produced by the U.S.War Department, this film is basically propaganda for the war effort. Most of the voice overs seem scripted and stilted, though there are a few soldiers who don't have a sunny disposition (but even these moments only serve to accentuate their valor).
Overall, I don't deny the value of America's effort during WWII, but it doesn't make for good filmmaking, especially in 2012.
Rated 1/5 Stars •
Rated 1 out of 5 stars
02/26/23
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Audience Member
A two hour U.S/British propaganda look into the effort to sock it to the Third Reich. Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature. Even as propaganda, lots of actual war time film footage document perhaps the greatest story often told, the attack on the mainland of Europe.
[img]http://t2.gstatic.com/images?q=tbn:ANd9GcQ3whKHZBXxsunXViqgQVOvkxBz7-YVMYcI4cIbfM06aLX3fCzHyotF7vU[/img]
Lots of movies have shown the story, this one is the real deal. A non-fictional account of the greatest landing in war history to dislodge the German machine dominating France in WWII.
[img]http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/thumb/8/82/The_True_Glory.jpg/220px-The_True_Glory.jpg[/img]
Narration is supplied by voices of soldiers, or they're supposed to be.
[img]http://ia600208.us.archive.org/4/items/gov.ntis.ava02725vnb1/gov.ntis.ava02725vnb1.thumbs/gov.ntis.ava02725vnb1_000900.jpg[/img]
Canadians, Americans, French Resistance, Irish, British along with an English narrator also suppling explanation. The musical score is all classical and that gets a bit tiresome and unnecessary after a while.
[img]http://t2.gstatic.com/images?q=tbn:ANd9GcTv-xiOxpfenuVsD5U2D-6mgobzGwgzGvRzp9B4Ctnh4Wx7YU0-[/img]
While two hours is perhaps way too long to sit through at one time, the story of the invasion is made in detail. Great for those unaware of what D-Day was really all about and the days afterward.
True to the beginning, as Supreme Allied Commander Eisenhower (below)
[img]http://ia600208.us.archive.org/4/items/gov.ntis.ava02725vnb1/gov.ntis.ava02725vnb1.thumbs/gov.ntis.ava02725vnb1_000060.jpg[/img]
tells us, this is a story of team work and that theme is repeated. But by the current era, historians know that things were not all team work at all. Eisenhower had to constantly keep the Allies united. Especially the generals, especially Patton, DeGaul, Montgomery who were rivals throughout the campaign.
[img]http://t0.gstatic.com/images?q=tbn:ANd9GcThzzgNRiOUvJPZ3EumZDI4FfCA7DjYqoyESWUn7DObnd17o4kdFAyPkwOV[/img]
SEE the entire film at:
www.youtube.com/watch?v=ykyptM4_lbI
[img]http://ia600208.us.archive.org/4/items/gov.ntis.ava02725vnb1/gov.ntis.ava02725vnb1.thumbs/gov.ntis.ava02725vnb1_002040.jpg[/img]
or if that fails,
http://www.archive.org/details/gov.ntis.ava02725vnb1
[img]http://ia600208.us.archive.org/4/items/gov.ntis.ava02725vnb1/gov.ntis.ava02725vnb1.thumbs/gov.ntis.ava02725vnb1_003000.jpg[/img]
Directed:
Garson Kanin
Carol Reed (uncredited)
Writing credits:
(in alphabetical order)
Harry Brown uncredited
Paddy Chayefsky
Frank Harvey uncredited
Gerald Kersh uncredited
Saul Levitt uncredited
Arthur Macrae uncredited
Eric Maschwitz uncredited
Jenny Nicholson uncredited
Guy Trosper uncredited
Peter Ustinov [ACTOR in Sparticus, many others] uncredited
Cast (in alphabetical order)
Dwight D. Eisenhower ... Himself
Robert Harris ... Commentator (voice)
Peter Ustinov ... Himself
Original Music by
William Alwyn
Release date(s) 1945
Running time 85 min.
Country UK / US DVD Black n White
Language English
[img]http://ia600208.us.archive.org/4/items/gov.ntis.ava02725vnb1/gov.ntis.ava02725vnb1.thumbs/gov.ntis.ava02725vnb1_002400.jpg[/img]
NOTES:
1 Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature.
2 The film is introduced by General Dwight D. Eisenhower, Supreme Commander of Allied Forces in Europe, and many other prominent individuals appear in it including General George S. Patton, Sir General Bernard Montgomery.
[img]http://ia600208.us.archive.org/4/items/gov.ntis.ava02725vnb1/gov.ntis.ava02725vnb1.thumbs/gov.ntis.ava02725vnb1_002460.jpg[/img]
3 Harbors became exceedingly problematic for the Allies. At one point, troops started running out of gas and ammo.
A 50 mile long front was however established. The closer troops came east naturally the more bitter the struggle.
Already however, we start to see the youth of Germany being used as soldiers. By the time of the invasion, the mere fact it happened signaled to many the end for Germany was only a matter of time.
[img]http://ia600208.us.archive.org/4/items/gov.ntis.ava02725vnb1/gov.ntis.ava02725vnb1.thumbs/gov.ntis.ava02725vnb1_002100.jpg[/img]
REVIEWS:
1 Cliff notes version of D-DAY.... This fantastic documentary released by the United States Government [and Britain] and co-directed by the great and smart writer-director Garson Kanin and Michael Powell opens with DDE [Eisenhower] telling us that we are going to see the events as occurred as told by the men and women who were involved and there [supposedly there]. This is no talking heads documentary. The dialog is scripted and can sound corny and a bit rah-rah and flag-waving.
[img]http://t1.gstatic.com/images?q=tbn:ANd9GcSs5cc8liYGcdgbw0213JEFDSKS_R66FBCdnWgCijCNfeO7584W9g[/img]
Rated 4/5 Stars •
Rated 4 out of 5 stars
01/19/23
Full Review
Audience Member
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.
Rated 3/5 Stars •
Rated 3 out of 5 stars
01/14/23
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