Instructor: Walter Metz

World War II and American Cinema

As with most facets of its operations, the Roosevelt administration was intensely media-savvy in its selling of the war to the American people. Before Pearl Harbor (December 1941), Americans were intensely isolationist (that is, against America’s entrance into the war). From the time of the Japanese invasion of China (1931) and the German invasion of Czechoslovakia (1938), President Roosevelt, on the other hand, was very internationalist in his foreign policy, attempting to explain to Americans how a concern for Europe and Asia was very much in the national security interests of the United States. The Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor convinced the Congress and the American people of the necessity of entering the war.  Shortly after the attack on Pearl Harbor, the Roosevelt Administration set up the Office of War Information (OWI) to spearhead a propaganda campaign to keep Americans informed of the progress of the war as well as to popularize various policies for fighting the war both at home and abroad. Within the OWI, specific media were targeted: the Bureau of Motion Picture Affairs targeted Hollywood while a separate entity was responible for establishing liasons with the radio industry.

Conversely, Hollywood was also very much interested in helping the American war effort (as a moral principle and of course as a business enterprise). The Hollywood studios assured Americans that they would do all they could to aid in the war effort. The most complex example of how the studios attempted to aid the war effort involves Hollywood war-time films that positioned the Soviet Union as a worthy ally in the fight against Germany. Up until World War II, the United States had been thoroughly antagonistic to the Soviet Union. During the 1917 Soviet Revolution, American President Woodrow Wilson sent secret monetary aid to the "Whites" (the non-communist Russian forces fighting the "Red" Lenin-led communist forces). In the summer of 1918, Wilson instituted an American naval blockade of Soviet warm-water ports as well as sent American troops to Siberia to help overthrow the Soviet government. These troops finally left Soviet soil in April 1920. This is what historian Robert Maddox labelled, in his book, The Unknown War with Russia. For more information on this and other historical blindspots in the American experience, see James Loewen, Lies My Teacher Told Me. American antagonism toward the Soviet Union is more clearly displayed in the 1920 Palmer Raids, FBI terrorism of suspected communists in the United States, the abuse of power involved therein would only be eclipsed by the post-World War II anti-communist witchhunts which we will study later in the semester.

America during World War II thus found itself in a strange position. The Soviet Union was desperately needed as an ally to defeat the Nazis, yet the American people had been indoctrinated to hate the Russians since the founding of the Soviet state in 1918. Hollywood thus made war-time films, at the behest of the OWI, which praised our Soviet allies.

Two Examples of Pro-Soviet War-time Hollywood Cinema

1. The North Star (1943) is one of the great understudied films in American film history. It was directed by Lewis Milestone (the pacifist director of 1930's All Quiet on the Western Front), based on a story by intense anti-Fascist Lillian Hellmann, featured music by Aaron Copeland, and produced independently by Samuel Goldwyn (distributed by RKO). The film tells the story of the members of a peaceful Soviet farming community thrown into chaos by the Nazi takeover. Walter Huston plays the Russian town’s doctor who confronts a Nazi doctor (played by Erich Von Stroheim) who is draining the blood from the town’s Russian children in order to treat wounded Nazi soldiers. The film ends with the townspeople successfully rebelling against the Nazis.

CLIP: The North Star: Walter Huston shoots Erich Von Stroheim

2. Mission to Moscow (Michael Curtiz, 1943) is a Warner Bros. adaptation of the memoirs of Ambassador Joseph Davies (portrayed in the film by Walter Huston), President Roosevelt’s 1930s American ambassador to the Soviet Union.  The film tells the story of how Davies was won over by the goodness of the Soviet people. In an absolutely absurd scene, the film actually apologizes for the Stalin purges of the late 1930s, arguing that the purges were necessary to avoid Nazi infiltration of the Soviet government.

CLIP: Mission to Moscow: The Stalin Purge Trials

After World War II, these films would bring nothing but trouble for the Hollywood studios. Once the Cold War began (from 1945 onward), the Soviet Union returned to being the ideological monster in the American imagination.  Jack Warner, one of the most jingoistic, pro-American men in Hollywood, was ironically called before the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) to explain why his studio had made such a pro-Soviet film as Mission to Moscow, despite the fact that the film was made at the behest of the OWI.  The North Star was cut from its original running-time of 105 minutes down to 84 minutes, excising the film’s celebration of the Soviet people and downplaying their heroic nature.

War-time Documentary

The most profound effect that World War II had on American cinema was through the newsreel’s ability to bring the reality of combat home to the American people for the first time in history. The war-time documentaries utilized lightweight 16mm cameras to shoot real combat footage. These documentaries, and weekly newsreels which documented the progress of the war, brought an unprecedented awareness about the realities of combat never before seen.

CLIP: The Memphis Belle: A Story of a Flying Fortress (William Wyler, 1944): The German fighters attack the returning American bombers

Unlike the Depression-era documentaries, The Memphis Belle played in Hollywood theatres; it was distributed by a major Hollywood studio, Paramount. The film was produced by Hollywood’s War Activities Committee in collaboration with the OWI. Through the War Activities Committee many famous Hollywood personnel went to work making documentaries which explained the progress of the war. The Memphis Belle, directed by William Wyler, is one of these films; the most famous series is Why We Fight, directed by Frank Capra.

The war-time documentaries also argued for the contributions of all Americans to the war effort, a project in keeping with the liberal social policies of the Roosevelt administration. For example, The Negro Soldier (1945) tells the story of the important role African-American soldiers played in the victory over the Nazis.

CLIP: The Negro Soldier: The pastor compares the Joe Lewis-Max Schmelling fight to WWII

Hollywood Genre Films Were "Retrofitted" to Deal with the War

Hollywood genre films also responded to World War II. Many film genres were "retrofitted" to emplot stories pertaining to the fighting of the war. The most famous example is Casablanca (1943), in which the Warner Bros. production unit (in this case, director Michael Curtiz and actor Humphrey Bogart) tweaked their typical gritty plot so that it now featured a grandiose fight against Nazi evil. A less famous, but more interesting example, is Across the Pacific (John Huston, 1942), in which a detective plot about Humphrey Bogart trying to figure out what evil Sydney Greenstreet is up to reveals his plan to blow up the Panama Canal the night before the Pearl Harbor attack.  Across the Pacific can thus best be described as "The Maltese Falcon Joins the Army."

A Reading of Across the Pacific

1. The film is as visually striking as many more commonly-praised films of the Classical Hollywood Cinema

CLIP: Across the Pacific: Bogart investigates the mystery at a movie theatre

Compare this, for example, to Orson Welles’ The Lady From Shanghai (1948)

2. The film argues that people of Asian heritage are inherently suspect and evil

CLIP: Across the Pacific: Emperor Hirohito’s son arrives at the Plantation

It is no accident, given these sorts of representations, that Japanese-Americans were sent to internment camps.

3. The film argues that white folks sympathetic to the Japanese are hypocritical and cowardly

CLIP: Across the Pacific: Greenstreet does not have the courage to commit hari-kiri

Hollywood War-time Cinema and the Home Front

War-time Hollywood films also told stories about those who remained back at home in America. Surprisingly, many Hollywood films represent the Home Front in more complicated ways than we would at first expect. While most Hollywood home front films were like Star Spangled Rhythm (George Marshall, 1942), flimsy narratives which served as excuses for patriotic musical numbers, some Hollywood genre films produce a subtext which interrogates the complexities of a wartime culture.

Two Examples of Complex Home Front Films

1. The Screwball Comedy

Example: The Miracle of Morgan’s Creek (Preston Sturges, 1944): to be discussed next week

A useful example, because both Star Spangled Rhythm and The Miracle of Morgan’s Creek were war-time Paramount films starring Betty Hutton and Eddie Bracken.

2. The Suspense Thriller

Example: Shadow of a Doubt (Alfred Hitchcock, 1943)

CLIP: Shadow of a Doubt: In the soldier-filled nightclub, Uncle Charlie tells Young Charlie how horrible small-town America is

American War-time Avant-Garde Cinema

World War II also served as the cultural moment in which the modern American avant-garde cinema germinated. As one example, the New York City-based Maya Deren began making experimental, modernist films. 1943's Meshes of the Afternoon (with her husband Alexander Hammid) is the most-discussed of her films, but her next film, At Land (1944), allows us to forge connections between the bellicose, war-time Hollywood films that we've been studying so far, and the implicit critiques of such patriarchal violence contained in Deren’s avant-garde films.

CLIP: At Land: ending chess game

Immediate Post-war American Genre Films are Still Haunted by the War

1. The Social Problem Film (1945-1950)

Example: The Best Years of Our Lives (William Wyler, 1946)

CLIP: The Best Years of Our Lives: The depressed pilot sits in his junked bomber

The Memphis Belle can be seen as a documentary correlative to The Best Years of Our Lives

CLIP: The Memphis Belle: opening montage sequence of bombers

2. Film Noir: to be discussed in a few weeks

3. The Suspense Thriller

Example: Notorious (Alfred Hitchcock, 1946), one of our additional viewings, which you should watch in preparation for the next lecture.

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This page was last updated on May 30, 2001

Questions or Comments? Please phone me at (406) 994-6403 or send e-mail to:  metz@montana.edu

Walter Metz, Department of Media and Theatre Arts, Montana State University--Bozeman