On DVD from Warner Archives 3/1/11

Days of Glory, notable almost solely as the film debut of Gregory Peck, has been released on DVD-R by Warner Archives.

Frankly, it's a pretty stolid melodrama about Russian guerrillas fighting the Nazis during the German invasion of the USSR. This film could well win an award for the most stilted, unrealistic dialogue ever found in a mainstream Hollywood movie: even the dullest Soviet automaton would speak in a more lively and conversational fashion than this. Screenwriter-producer Casey Robinson, whose career somehow survived this film (both artistically and politically), intended it as a launching pad for his fiancee, the ballerina Tamara Toumanova, but stardom eluded her while Greg Peck, the turgid nature of this movie notwithstanding, saw his career take off almost immediately -- despite, not because of, this picture.

Still, both for its being Peck's first screen performance, and for its interest as a relic of an era when Hollywood was doing its bit for our wartime ally by producing several pro-Soviet films of variable quality and little accuracy, Days of Glory is of a notch more interest than it otherwise would have been, as dense, plodding and downright dumb as it is in most respects. It's perhaps just too fitting that its acronym is DOG.

But it does have the real Fred Flintstone! (Alan Reed.)