TV Reviews : D-Day Invasion Fires Early Shots

The invasion is underway.

The TV invasion, that is, about the D-Day invasion 50 years ago. “Masterpiece Theatre” fired an early shot with its “A Foreign Field,” soon followed by the spare, brilliantly constructed “D-Day” for “The American Experience” on PBS, and retired Gen. Norman Schwarzkopf’s own reconnaissance with CBS’ Dan Rather.

With wave after wave of TV troops, it’ll be easy to lose filmmaker Christopher Koch’s 90-minute “Normandy: The Great Crusade” in the barrage. While it lacks the grim purity of PBS’ “D-Day” film, it is an even more ambitious montage of archival film, photos and personal documents covering the entire course of the Allied campaign from the invasion to the eventual collapse of the Nazi occupation of France.

This is the product of the school of history-as-biography--history reconstructed through the diaries, letters, poems, home movies and other personal scribblings of soldiers, loved ones and innocents caught between the lines.

In this latter category, Koch takes a huge interest in the plight of Marie-Louise Osmond (spoken fervently by Leslie Caron), whose Normandy manor home was occupied by the Germans in 1940 and then, in the summer of 1944, became the center for hot days of battles. Koch gets hokey, though, when his camera tries frantically to track Osmond’s point of view as she escapes the bullets and bombs.

While “D-Day” recorded the voices of actual soldiers recalling those terrifying days, “The Great Crusade’s” use of actors reading material written as blood was being spilled causes an odd distancing from a film full of visceral horror. (The images of a dead soldier covered in flies is out of Bunuel.) Narrator Charles Durning, himself part of the first invading force on Omaha Beach, adds to the distancing since he doesn’t include (reportedly by his own request) any of his own personal recollections.

For all of its attention to the individual perspective, “The Great Crusade” encompasses a vast sound scape of voices, from American widower Karin King and Nazi-hating Berlin reporter Ursula von Kardorff (Joanna Pacula, in a reading tinged with bitterness) to early teen-aged Hitlerjungend sent to the front lines and confused but excited Allied troopers. Their words resound with the sense of people swept into forces beyond their control, fearfully expectant, even inspired by war’s ferocity to poetry. * “Normandy: The Great Crusade” airs tonight at 9 and midnight on Discovery Channel. Other D-Day programming this week includes “George Stevens: D-Day to Berlin,” Tuesday, 9 p.m. on Disney Channel; “Turning Point at Normandy: The Soldiers’ Story,” Wednesday, 9:30 p.m., ABC, and “Fall From Grace,” a two-part TV movie, Thursday and Friday, 9 p.m., CBS.