Perhaps British cinema’s prime example of postwar neo-realist film, the Belfast-born Hurst, took a cast of non-actors - surviving British paratroopers no less - back to Arnhem, pock-marked with shrapnel and still in ruins, less than a year after the battle, and shot a day-by-day documentary reconstruction of events.

Produced by Gaumont-British and with the cinematography of C. Pennington-Richards, much was made of the film’s documentary veracity. Indeed, Hurst edited actuality footage shot by the original army film crew for the airdrop into the film and a BBC radio war reporter provided voice-over commentary.

Although based on official war diary accounts, Louis Golding’s script was augmented by combatants’ anecdotes, elicited by Hurst, who had himself survived Gallipoli in 1915. Playing themselves, the soldiers’ minimal dialogue is sometimes stilted, yet the film achieves its most moving impact in silent moments of sublime emotion on the faces of men facing their doom. Theirs is the Glory was eclipsed by Attenborough’s A Bridge Too Far but this screening will show just why Hurst’s film deserves review.

This screening will be followed by a Q&A with Lance Pettitt, author of The Last Bohemian (2023) and An Ulsterman’s Arnhem in History Ireland (September 2024).