FUTURE historians will find that aside from the Russians, who had only to send their movie-makers into their front yards, the most informative documentaries of the war, up till now, shown in the United States were made by the National Film Board of Canada. America’s fact films are produced by the OWI, Hollywood and The March of Time. The OWI’s purpose is to show how perfectly American industry, government and people work together in this war. It does the best job technically, but it uses a formal, coldly passive camera that seldom catches a spontaneous action. The OWI soldier in “Troop Train” is well combed and brushed, rehearsed in his lines and directed in his actions until there isn’t much left of him. “Troop Train,” however, has the fine distinction of trying it alone without a narrator. “Paratroops” has the narrator back, but has also some good music and the photographic nobility of an Eisenstein picture, where man is shown large, daring and efficient against the vastness of nature. Hollywood’s most informing documentary is a Pete Smith two-reeler which describes in detail the brutal but effective hand-to-hand fighting techniques being taught our soldiers.
The Canadian films, “The World in Action” series, written and edited by Stuart Legg, have material from the vital zones of the war, material that hasn’t been prepared, set and posed in a studio nor sterilized by overzealous censorship, nor conceived in the pseudo-realism of Luce, Inc., or Mr. Metro. These shorts are intelligent editing jobs on film gathered from every available source in the world; so that their value is dependent on the vitality of the individual shots rather than on progressive development. The most terrifyingly beautiful scene I’ve seen of this war is in their latest release, “The Invasion of North Africa,” of an early dawn populated by General Montgomery’s tanks, each tank fuzzily discernible in the less than half-light, but jutting out of desert sands on all sides as far as the eye can see. It is this shot and others (the horizon full of the 850 ships that made up our convoy to Africa, the grotesque Brobdingnagian quality of a German railroad cannon being moved up to the Russian front, a bird’s-eye view of the Libyan desert’s cobweb of dirt roads, every foot jammed with motorized transport) that achieve the sense of quantity in this war. This short would be worth seeing if only for the one shot of Casablanca’s French citizenry saluting the captured German officers with a gesture of four-letter implication.
Many of the early films of this series were marred by too long and complex a story structure, which called for excessive cutting and extended explanation by Lorne Greene. They attempted a detailed analysis of Haushoferian geopolitics, of the civilization of the Japanese in two reels, or ten minutes. Yet their material, in contrast to that of the OWI, was unconventionalized: the opening sequences of “The Mask of Nippon” are as revolting as anyone will ever see—they include a Japanese soldier throwing a child into the air and catching it on his bayonet, and whole groups of Chinese being buried alive. “North Africa” and “Fighting Freighters” are neither so all-encompassing in structure nor so ear-shattering in talk as were the earlier ones (“Our Russian Ally,” “Inside Fighting China,” “Food for Conquest”). “Fighting Freighters” is a fair account of the merchant marine, with a rough, thorny feeling that Coward’s “In Which We Serve” lacked. The Canadians have been criticized for juxtaposing German as well as Allied film, because, it is said, one didn’t know which side was winning in a “World in Action” war. Obviously, however, enemy film which showed some of the 2,000,000 tons of Allied shipping they sank in six months of the war is necessary to a discussion of the merchant marine.
Behind our American shorts there is the unpleasant sense of meeting a quota; proving that we are doing our part. There is too much dwelling on obvious facts—that our army is well fed (“Army Food”); that the universities are taking part in the war (“The Universities in Wartime”) and that the railroads are moving our troops efficiently, but not nearly enough of the actual documentation seen in Russian and Canadian films. This war is being thoroughly filmed by our government, and it seems to me that releasing at least some of this action film along with OWI food talks would create a better understanding.
February 15, 1943