Days Of Glory (or Indigènes to the rest of the world) covers the tale of a handful of North African volunteers fighting among the Free French army during the latter parts of World War II. Built around the strong performances of Jamel Debbouze (Amelie), Samy Naceri, Roschdy Zem and Sami Bouajila as the volunteers, the plot covers the traditional ground of raw recruits bonding together and surviving to go on and prove themselves as brave and valuable soldiers.

The film has received much praise for the addition of strong political message about the racism shown towards the central characters but unfortunately I felt the horrific prejudice and inequality suffered by the arabic & african troops was too often dealt with in an offhand manner, encouraging it’s dismissal by the audience as of little consequence and frequently appearing irrelevant. This however doesn’t detract from it being a great war film, the battlefield scenes are handled very capably, capturing the personal horror of conflict in a similar manner that Steven Spielberg championed with Saving Private Ryan. Here though there’s much less schmaltz to attract us to the main characters but still the immediate sense of danger and fear for them is just as powerful. Both the first large scale battle and the final intimate last-stand are the equal of any involving battle scene.

The political message of the film is hammered home at the end, in a cliched ‘60 years later’ visit to war graves with text captioning that eventually forced the French government to change policy and re-instate pensions for soldiers they had tried to write out of their history. Possibly though, the most striking political thought for me was the only recognition of any actor in the film was of their roles in Hollywood blockbusters over the last decade—playing the generic terrorist bad guy …