The New Pictures

The True Glory (War Department-Columbia), an official U.S.-British film, was produced by England's Captain Carol Reed, America's Captain Garson Kanin, and any number of talented assistants. Of the United Nations combat cameramen who shot the film, 32 were killed, 16 were reported missing, and 101 were wounded. It is one of the most difficult collaborative efforts in movie history--and a highly successful one. In a word, it is what the moviemakers constantly strain for and seldom achieve: colossal.

The makers of the film had to reduce some 6,500,000 feet of shots to theatrical coherence (it runs 84 minutes), and to outline clearly the history of one of the world's major campaigns: that which began at Southampton and ended in Berlin. Moreover, starting two months after Dday, they had to foam along the course with their noses at the withers of history, constantly forced to revise (first there was an ending in Paris, then one at the Rhine). They also took it on themselves to make the whole job an illustration of teamwork among the men of many services and of several nations. And to give these objectives their just emotional weight, they took on still another hard assignment: to tell everything in terms of "the really important" people--the ordinary servicemen.

Such a large and complex undertaking could hardly hope to have the extraordinary intensity of shorter, more single-focused films like San Pietro and Tarawa. But it is made, all the same, with force and fervor and intelligence. It is the richest single record of the war and one of its greatest pictures.

Striving to keep the great weight of fact and action quick, supple and personal, the film's creators hit on a few bold devices. The boldest: substituting for the customary bald-faced narrative prose some passages in blank verse written by Private Harry Brown--and for the customary sports announcer's voice, a far more intelligent Voice of History. Though the verse is generally middling and the BBC-accented Voice of History is a trifle pallid, the innovation is as welcome as it is startling.

A more successful device is the use of the voices of what seems like hundreds of individuals. Each voice, in the inflection of its own part of the world and in the jargon of a particular martial trade, gives one molecular view of the campaign. A Brooklyn tankman tells of his disgust when his tank runs out of gas, a Canadian describes the hideous fighting around Caen, a Royal Navy man admits his road sickness when his assault craft is trucked cross-country to the Rhine, a Negro cook tells how he learned to fire a bazooka at Bastogne, a primly petulant American supply officer tells of "a very humiliating experience" when Patton's men kept running off the edge of all available maps (and adds that he will be glad to get back to the Library of Congress, where maps have some permanence).

Expertly angled and written, with valid emotion, some fine humor and a laudable lack of pseudo-common-mannishness, these speeches should be an effective device for encouraging internationalism. The images which are set against them are even more so. Though some of the material--notably some great shots of the Norman shore--is familiar from newsreels, it has the power of a musical theme, triumphantly recapitulated.

Sternly pleading a vigilant peace, an enduring remembrance of the miracles of comradeship and cooperation which war has taught, this beautiful film reveals the full meaning of its title only at the very end, when the commentator repeats Sir Francis Drake's prayer:

O Lord God, when Thou givest to Thy. servants to endeavour any great matter, grant us also to know that it is not the beginning, but the continuing of the same until it be thoroughly finished which yieldeth the true glory.

Isle of the Dead (RKO Radio) is a shuddery set of improvisations suggested by the famed, funereal painting of Swiss Romanticist Arnold Bocklin. Quarantined on a tomb-haunted island off the Grecian coast, after one of them dies of the plague, is a strange crew, including a Greek general (Boris Karloff), a sinister peasant woman (Helene Thimig), a genteel Englishman (Alan Napier), his sickly wife (Katherine Emery), their full-blown servant girl (Ellen Drew). For a while, with deliberate restraint, the movie is content to trail red herrings, tune up its infernal machinery and suggest perhaps a few too many moral and psychological implications. Tensions grow as the characters develop a pervasive fear of death.

All this gets started in a very leisurely fashion, but it is done with firm taste and imaginativeness. People who like their horror dished up with a lavish hand are liable to become restless. But they will do well to keep their seats: the time soon comes when a seat is handy for hanging onto.

About 30 minutes short of the end, an improvised coffin is borne solemnly to rest in a resonant stone vault. Its occupant has died before your eyes, but you can't be too sure, for she was subject to cataleptic trances. After the pallbearers have gone, the camera coldly, tenderly approaches the coffin in a silence so intense as to be almost unbearable. When the shriek of the prematurely buried woman finally comes, it releases the rest of the show into a free-for-all masterpiece of increasing terror.

The wild laughs, blown leaves, scrawks and tongue-swallowings of jittery nightbirds, and darkness in an empty room would have pleased and scared the daylights out of Poe himself. For all the film's gently dawdling beginning, horror-specialist Producer Val Lewton and his colleagues have turned Isle of the Dead into one of the best horror movies ever made

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