The True Glory (1945)
Narrated entirely through the voices of ordinary soldiers, sailors, resistance fighters, and civilians rather than an omniscient narrator, the film traces the Allied campaign in Western Europe from the Normandy landings to Germany's surrender.
The True Glory was co-directed by Carol Reed and Garson Kanin from footage shot by more than a thousand Allied combat cameramen, weaving first-person testimony into a single sweeping account of the campaign; it won the Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature.
Background
The True Glory was co-directed by British filmmaker Carol Reed and American filmmaker Garson Kanin, drawing on footage shot by more than a thousand Allied combat cameramen during the campaign in Western Europe. Rather than relying on a single authoritative narrator, the film is built almost entirely from the voices of ordinary soldiers, sailors, resistance fighters, and civilians, an unusual structural choice for a wartime documentary of this scale.
What to watch for
Watch for how that structure changes the feel of the film compared to more conventional government-produced war documentaries: the sense of a single vast campaign is built up gradually through many individual, first-person perspectives rather than from an overarching official point of view. The film traces the Allied advance from the Normandy landings through to Germany’s surrender, and it won the Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature, a recognition of both its scale and its unusual approach to telling the story of the war’s final year in Europe.
