Theirs Is the Glory

The film re-enacts the battle of Arnhem in the Second World War. The re-enactment is done not by actors but by the soldiers who came out of that battle alive. That choice places the film somewhere between a war film and a piece of testimony. That the men who lived through it play the battle themselves takes the re-enactment out of the usual shape of a genre scene. The account tells less of victory than of loss and of holding on. Shot in 1946, right after the end of the war, its date also sets the tone. What people are doing on screen when they play out what happened to them is a matter of its own inside the account. Stanley Maxted and Leo Genn also appear. Brian Desmond Hurst’s eighty two minute British film was completed in 1946.