“United We Stand,” a documentary film intended to cover political history from Versailles to Pearl Harbor, is worth seeing by anyone, but especially I would advise it for the people who made the newsreels from which this picture was culled. The average person will find nothing in it that he didn’t know, see or hear of before, but the conquests of Poland, Czecho-Slovakia, Ethiopia, Spain and the partial conquest of China should be seen again if only to get sick and revolted at what we allowed. Whereas much of the film is seriously lacking in detail—the results without the causes—the Chungking sequence, with all of its human slaughter, the people working to protect themselves from bombs without the tools to work, a child breaking up stones for mortar and nothing to use except other stones, has details that will upset you. So will the scenes of Dunkirk, which lack the heroics of rescue but show the acres of shells, railway guns, airplanes which were left behind—enough to supply an entire army. As illuminating are the scenes during the French retreat: roads choked with refugees and soldiers trying to get past, and always walking with packs and seemingly without aim. Of course there is the complete destruction which is like another world.
The rest is pageantry. The marriage of Juliana to Bernhard, Sir John Simon walking hurriedly into Number 10 Downing Street, the coronation of at least a dozen puppets, glimpses of important people’s faces, which are disappointing because they are too negligible to be informative. The only illuminating portrait is that of Mussolini, with theatrical bombast and hand gestures so oddly unsynchronized. A few shots of Hitler are also interesting but more familiar.
But so much of this film is on top of the headlines, where it is misleading, that if people who saw the original newsreels had had no other information, and many of them undoubtedly had not, they must have formed grotesquely inaccurate ideas of what was going on. For instance, the coverage of the Spanish war in this picture contains only the statement that there was dissension within the country—nothing of the meaning of the dissension. A mere shot of Gandhi and no mention of what he stood for, nor of any other part of the Indian problem. Appeasers are simply labeled men who wanted peace, which they did, but other things as well, and of these things there is no mention. The French and British statesmen are shown leaving the 1939 negotiations with the Russians, with no pertinent information given about who held out for what. This presentation throughout the whole picture of results without causes argues very well the theory that disunity, which is a result, brought on the present war. It would seem more appropriate to have shown the bases of disunity. It always has seemed inevitable in newsreels that if something was to be said about Rumania, for example, it was said about Crown Prince Michael, who was only one of several million Rumanians, and with perhaps less significant problems. So that this particular resumé of world history is just who happened to be wearing the crown when.
Walter Wanger’s movie, “Eagle Squadron,” is so timely it has Quentin Reynolds in it for the first few minutes. According to Mr. Reynolds, this movie is the story of the Americans who went over to England a year ago to fly for the RAF, “the boys who didn’t wait for the stab in the back.” Following Mr. Reynolds there are some shots of these Americans, and then the movie gets off—no more surprises, just typical movieland blah.
July 20, 1942