Days of Glory (1944)

                    “Days of Glory” is a curio back from the days when the Soviet Union was our best buddy.  Although an American production, it has an international flair.  Director Jacques Tourneur was French.  The leads were both making their film debuts.  Tamara Toumanova was an acclaimed Russian ballet dancer.  Gregory Peck was moving up from a stage career.  In case you are wondering, he was exempt from military service because of a back injury sustained from dancing lessons.  (The studio claimed he was injured rowing in college.)  Well, at least it wasn’t bone spurs.

                    The movie opens strong with a sniper’s eye view of Yelena (Maria Palmer) taking out two Germans.  Unfortunately, the movie is not going to be an homage to Soviet female snipers.  Instead, it will concentrate on a Soviet entertainer named Nina (Toumanova) who gets separated from her troupe and ends up with partisans led by Vladimir (Peck).  Vladimir was an architect before the war, but now it is his job to blow things up.  War, am I right?   It’s an ensemble movie as the partisan unit consists of several cinematic characters.  Besides Yelena, there is the intellectual Semyon (Lowell Gilmore).  Dmitri is the teenager who wants action.  The introduction into this group of an uncalloused entertainer causes a stir, but after she kills a German, she is accepted as one of them.  In fact, Vladimir decides she is sabotage-ready.  After all, Vlad is not going to leave his new squeeze behind, is he?  This leads to their involvement in a big Red Army attack.

                    The clear goal of the movie is to give credit to the Soviet partisans who were doing much more than American audiences to fight the fascist menace.  The film is not overly propagandistic and it is appropriately grim in depicting the dangers of being a partisan. Their actions are commendatory and a 1944 audience might have squirmed a bit when reflecting on the lives they were returning to when the lights came back on.  However, the script dilutes the homage with a heavy dose of cinematic balderdash.  The romance between Vladimir and Nina is mandatory, but defies reality.  A guy like Vladimir would not fall for someone like Nina.  She is a fish out of water and should have been gasping for air, not blowing up trains.  The decision to downplay the truly heroic Yelena was a 1940s-style decision that separates war movies then from those of today.  I’ll mention “Enemy at the Gates” as an example of this.  It doesn’t help that Toumanova is terrible in this movie.  She may have been a great dancer, but that does not translate to playing one in a movie.  On the other side of the cheeks (there’s lots of cheek-to-cheek talking in the movie), Peck shows in his debut that he is going to be a major star. 

                    I can’t really recommend this movie other than as an example of the pro-Soviet movies made during the war.  It is better than most of those, like “The North Star”.  As a war movie, it lacks action, but it does avoid most cliches and it is unpredictable.  The death toll is very high for a 1940s war flick.  Watch a Soviet movie instead.  You may have to read subtitles, but that’s better than having to watch a ballerina try to act.

GRADE  =  C