Days of Glory (1944)

User Rating:

6.1/10   

Director:

Jacques Tourneur

Writers:

Melchior Lengyel (story)
Casey Robinson (written by)

Release Date:

16 June 1944 (USA)

Genre:

Drama | Romance | War

Plot:

A heroic guerilla group fights back against impossible odds during the 1941 Nazi invasion of Russia.

Plot Keywords:

Russia | Retreat | Singing | Gunfire | Revenge

Awards:

Nominated for Oscar.

Cast

Tamara Toumanova	...	Nina Ivanova
Gregory Peck	...	Vladimir
Alan Reed	...	Sasha
Maria Palmer	...	Yelena
Lowell Gilmore	...	Semyon
Hugo Haas	...	Fedor
Dena Penn	...	Olga
Glen Vernon	...	Mitya (as Glenn Vernon)
Igor Dolgoruki	...	Dmitri
Edward L. Durst	...	Petrov (as Edward Durst)
Lou Crosby	...	Johann Staub

Also Known As:

Revenge (USA) (working title)

Runtime:

86 min

Country:

USA

Language:

English | German

Color:

Black and White

Aspect Ratio:

1.37 : 1

Sound Mix:

Mono (RCA Sound System)

Certification:

USA:TV-PG (TV rating) | USA:Approved (PCA #9519) | Argentina:13 | Sweden:15

Filming Locations:

Cedar City, Utah, USA

Company:

RKO Radio Pictures

Trivia:

Film debut of Alan Reed.

Movie Connections:

Referenced in Ballets russes (2005)

The transcendence of calamity

"Days of glory" (1944) directed by Jacques Tourneur is not out of speech, when a Russian ballerina dances for the American envoy during the blitz against a guerrilla war episode. Fighting German occupation during the WWII, made by the local partisan's which reoccupied now, at the time, an ancient region previously liberated : the scene occurs in an improvised bunker, where both for surviving an attack are there.

This is a movie about which it is what we call as belonging to the unspeakable glamor between two different cultures and a rare story made by a Hollywood production concerning the strength of friendship between Russians and Americans at war. As overview of a concealed problem about civil participation against the invaders, it is still a well conceived framework of cultural value from the past fight by peace instants of joy. Impeaching the destruction nearby Tula, this movie is only a clue for the increasing of attention from the public opinion of the time as concerning also an almost forgotten war on the backwards of German blockade and far away of the privileged American sacred soil, far away of the true and decisive front for winning Nazism, destroying it capacity of generalized genocide as invaders of the then Soviet Union. Is the first role of the honorable Gregory Peck that sounds strange when we saw it out of the year that it was located, nevertheless all sounds good and the sights in black and white have a legitimacy that impressions anybody.

This kind of human geography has a taste of cure against philistinism from last hour, it seems too like tourism of war nonetheless it was enough impressive as evocation of the forests, where the Clausewitz supporters lost any advantage facing cocktails Molotov and the knowledge from the ground by the local inhabitants near Moscow and their gifted Katiuchas, as collapse of war aggressors against the Russia mother of unity of all citizens of the world, even the devil gringo of a special envoy like this guy with long legs, directed by a French originally inspired by Lermontov read from Utah. It was for the time and even now a portrait of a foreigner private, somewhat as if it was the stage on the ground. When at the same time encircled by war like a repetition of trenches from the past war in the year of the centenary of a Russian writer. As though it was also pretext to universalize that, which explains why something of the nineteenth Century as a lesson from the Napoleonic times transited to the next XX Century. Like the same story told on the history of resisting against invaders, the French and Germans in two different centuries.