UnowPriceless hyped garbage

MamaGravity good back-story, and good acting

Kaydan Christian A terrific literary drama and character piece that shows how the process of creating art can be seen differently by those doing it and those looking at it from the outside.

Deanna There are moments in this movie where the great movie it could've been peek out... They're fleeting, here, but they're worth savoring, and they happen often enough to make it worth your while.

Richard Crawford I caught this film accidentally but was hugely impressed by the script. Although obviously intended to be a wartime morale booster, the story didn't pull punches - good ol' Gregory Peck as the partisan leader, for instance, deciding to save ammunition by bludgeoning a German prisoner to death with a rifle butt. Not something you see every day. A number of really nice moments and dilemmas for the main protagonists are handled well. The partisans are depicted with some realism, and without the rose tinted glasses you might expect. In fact realism is one of the strengths of the film. Everything looks right. And in the climactic combat sequence at the end of Act 3, the partisans seem to be actually shooting at German pzkpfwIV tanks, quite unusual in itself. Wonder where they got those from in 1944. The story and the realism goes a bit haywire in the last few minutes of the film, but it's forgivable given the fact that the war was still going on. Not as powerful as COME AND SEE but for a film that's sixty-odd years old, it comes close. Recommended.

theasp The first and one of the best war movies I ever saw. Was it pro-Russian propaganda? Yes. Was it fair and accurate? Yes. Was Russia our ally in World War II? Yes. It was also our ally during the American Civil War and World War I. Without Russia we could not have won World War II.The Soviet regime was evil but Russia is one of America's oldest and most effective allies in good times. I have attended post Cold War Conferences in which we have tried to heap our ills on the Russians while praising fair weather friends like Britain, Turkey and Israel. The latter two have never fought on our side but our recipients of much of our aid. Britain has fought for and against us but most of the third world wars we fought were because British colonialism created the conditions for those wars. This is not necessarily about the movie "Days of Glory" but it should remind people that we need to know more about our history. The movie does that very well.

bob the moo During the 1941 invasion of Russia by the Nazi's the odds are overwhelming as the German army marches across the land. However resistance among the brave Russians makes up with heart what it lacks in sophistication and size.One such outfit is a small group of guerrilla soldiers lead by Vladimir. The new arrival of an 'outsider' creates tensions within the group but the capture of a German soldier offers the possibility of information and the potential for a demoralising strike at the invading army as well as his attempted escape helping the group trust one another again.Perhaps understandably the Russian/German front has been largely ignored by Hollywood in the past few decades and even now it is possible that Days Of Glory is only increasing in circulation because the embarrassment factor has faded. During the cold war, nobody really wanted a WWII propaganda piece that shows the Russians (our enemy) as upright, heroic and American (!). However now we are all in the War on Terror together, I notice this film has started being seen more than it was ten years ago. I was attracted to this by the director and the presence of Peck – however this is far from being one of Tourneur's famous films and Peck was in his first screen role. Essentially this is a big 'thank you' to the Russian soldiers by putting them in a story where they talk endlessly about why they are fighting while falling in love, looking heroic and sacrificing their lives. It is as basic and uninspiring as all that sounds and it smacks of a film that puts propaganda first and entertainment second.This is not to say that it doesn't try because it does, with some action, some human drama and the standard wartime romance. It is not terrible but it does get a little dull at times and has far too much heavy handed preaching while the emotional music swells in the background. The cast features a surprising amount of people in their screen debuts – I'm not sure if that was deliberate but it doesn't show that much. Peck shows the sort of furrowed brow and screen presence that made him a famous leading man while the rest of the cast do OK in average characters who are either jovial, heroic or brave depending on what point the film is trying to get across.Overall this is an interesting film because it is unusual to see an American propaganda film bigging up the Russians. It has some involving action towards the end but mostly it is too talky and preachy, relying on music and heroic sacrifice to pull our heartstrings rather than writing real people who we can get emotionally involved with and care about.

Oct Pray silence, workers and peasants, for a "cast of new personalities" headed by the debut of "Mr Gregory Peck, distinguished actor on the New York stage".A suitably solemn intro for the late Mr P, who supplies a characteristically cigar-store-Indianesque turn as the darkly handsome Russian dam-builder turned train-buster, heading a WW2 band of partisans (i.e., terrorists). His stern Soviet soul is melted only by a sultry ballerina who is stranded with the gang. Other members include a comic peasant double act, a learned Oxonian sidekick and a winsome teen brother and sister, one of whom ends on a Nazi noose (the wrong one, given the girl's saccharine performance). This retrospectively hilarious and morally objectionable whitewashing of the most murderous tyranny in history- the communist USSR- fudges its politics like all the Hollywood "enemy of my enemy is my friend" wartime propaganda pieces. "Socialism" as the Peck character's creed is never mentioned. Inspiration for the partisans' efforts is made out to be no more than a worthy resentment of trespassers on their home ground, whether it's a dictatorship or not. (By the same logic Hollywood should now be shooting films justifying Iraqi guerilla resistance to the Americo-British occupation, but don't hold your breath.) The unpalatable truth that many in the western Soviet Union welcomed and collaborated with the Germans has to be evaded. In this flick, solidarity is absolute.Apart from this hollowness at the core, the film is a decent string of shoot-em-ups in a convincingly icy studio landscape. The stage actors in the cast were and remained unfamiliar, making the thing seem a mite more authentic than, say, "For Whom the Bell Tolls". But Ms Toumanova, the producer's girlfriend at the time, conceives emotional acting as gazing into the remote distance with her lips slightly parted: the influence of Garbo was disastrous! And it would take Selznick and King Vidor to extract a full-blooded performance from Peck, in "Duel in the Sun". It's curious, incidentally, that Casey Robinson, writer and producer of this paean to Stalin, never got serious heat from the House Un-American Activities Committee after the war. Did he cut a deal?