Landmark Books in All Fields
ItemID: #79918
Cost: $2,500.00

True Glory. WITH: modern DVD of the original

World war ii

TWO ORIGINAL REELS OF THE 1945 OSCAR-WINNING WORLD WAR II DOCUMENTARY FILM “THE TRUE GLORY,” INTRODUCED BY GENERAL DWIGHT D. EISENHOWER, WITH 2009 DVD OF THE ORIGINAL PRINT

(WORLD WAR II) KANIN, Garson and REED, Carol. The True Glory. Waterloo: Universal Video, [1945]. Three items. Two 16mm reels in original tins (14 inches in diameter); modern DVD. $2500.

Rare original print of the epic Second World War documentary film The True Glory, “an account of the really important men in the campaign— the enlisted soldiers, sailors and airmen” (Eisenhower).

This original print of the 1945 Oscar-winning full-length documentary The True Glory, chronicles the campaign to liberate Europe, covering everything from the Allied D-Day invasion of Normandy to the fall of Berlin, including the unsuccessful “Operation Market Garden”— the failed northern thrust into Holland in the fall of 1944. A segment on pre-invasion preparations focuses on work in munitions and heavy equipment plants. British filmmaker Carol Reed and American playwright Garson Kanin assembled The True Glory from more than 10 million feet of actual footage captured by over 1,400 cameramen from a dozen countries. The film opens with an introduction by Dwight D. Eisenhower: “As far as possible [this] is an account of the really important men in the campaign— the enlisted soldiers, sailors and airmen that fought through every obstacle to victory.” The principal narrative, delivered by Robert Harris and Peter Ustinov, is punctuated with the voices of actual servicemen, who give their own first-hand accounts of events—making the viewing of this film an especially poignant experience. The accompanying DVD was produced in 2009 by the British Imperial War Museum. This original print of The True Glory belonged to Belgian architect Hugo van Kuyck, who during the war was responsible for aerial photographs of the proposed D-Day landing areas, using colored lenses that revealed the underwater contours of the beaches (which differed from the prevailing British hydrographic maps of the English Channel). An accompanying photocopy of a letter by former General Arthur G. Trudeau documents van Kuyck’s critical observation: “The French data had never been checked before, and when you consider that the beaches we were to land on in France had a very flat slope, and the difference between high and low tide sometimes made a difference of about a mile and a half between the actual shore line,…it could have been very, very embarrassing if this hadn’t been found out, because there would have been many more ships that would have foundered or gotten hung up.”

Film still very flexible and well preserved, DVD unopened. A very desirable masterpiece of documentary filming.

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