The True Glory

This expertly assembled WWII documentary, about the last year of the war in Europe, was financed by the American Office of War Information and the British MOI. It occupies a middle ground between the conventional propaganda films churned out in their hundreds and the poetic realism of Humphrey Jennings. Some of the footage is astonishing (unfortunately, William Alwyn's music is an often redundant dramatic enhancement), and parts of the commentary have a macabre humour. A British tommy, for instance, tells of his encounter in a bombed-out German village with a woman complaining that if the British had given up in 1940 she would still have a home to live in.