“Prelude to War,” made by the government specifically to educate men in the armed forces, is an assembly of newsreel clips arranged to show the events, and some of the causes, leading up to the war. The army unit under Col. Frank Capra made the film so well that it is Capra’s best film as well as the government’s. Its exceptional quality only highlights the fact that no film like it came out when it could have done the most good: that is, before the war began, when the events it shows were happening. In 1939 Will Hays was striking out of movies any hint that Hitler was evil; until that year, and “Confessions of a Nazi Spy,” the industry hadn’t condemned fascism—if you got your news from movies you might not have known fascism existed.
The cause for the war, “Prelude” says, was Axis aggression and militarism. The film contrasts the freedoms we have in this country with the destruction of freedom in Italy, Germany and Japan, accents the regimentation of children and marriage to further the ends of militarism, and shows that the people of the Axis nations were the pawns and victims of small groups of men. The newsreels it uses to show its hatred of these men are familiar, but it is still worth seeing Mussolini mugging to sell a line of oratory two minutes after the line is spoken, or Hitler simpering in his own you-can’t-do-this-to-me fashion. Its most surprising departure from earlier films of this type is its determined branding of all the Fascist leaders, saying “Remember these faces!” as it shows careful close-ups of everyone from Hess to Dietrich. It is interesting to note at this time that wherever the movie boasts of the brightest gains made by democracy, it shows a contribution of the New Deal—the FSA Housing project at Greenbelt; the amazing Grand Central Parkway in Queens built by the PWA; the CCC; the wages-and-hours bill being signed by Roosevelt.
It is a masterful job of clear, effortless story-telling from stray scraps of disconnected shots, which are put together to catch secondary meanings beyond mere news data. The finest part—a symphonic arrangement of dictators’ armies marching—keeps enlarging, Bolero-like, on the grotesque sleepwalking quality of these armies, yet never loses sight of their concentrated power and breadth. The effortlessness of its story-telling is got by compressing incidents to their barest essentials, and then overlapping or double-exposing them. In this way it runs through its calendar of the war in a tenth of the time earlier films took, with more power and a pace adapted to the explosiveness of blitz warfare. Moreover, it captures to a poignant degree the particular tragedy of each conquered country. If the movie does not go very deeply into the reasons why whole nations of men and women would sacrifice individual liberty for the sake of being mothered by the state, the dissolute vacuity on the faces in the scene of Nazi mass marriages is one revealing shot.
Ease of thought and technique is a main ingredient of all Capra films. It is a little too easy here. The psychological and economic reasons for the rise of fascism are quickly and effortlessly glossed over. The hope of the United Nations is never wholly presented; the impression the movie leaves is that we fight for the survival of such freedoms as we have had—the right of Americans to continue voting, the right of the Chinese to their own country—but the dynamic kind of freedom we haven’t had before, freedom and growth of people everywhere, doesn’t emerge. Not that the interpretation of events is wrong, but that it is not carried far enough. The film makes the very human mistake of holding idyllic Greenbelt to be a not uncommon American neighborhood, which is as excusable as thinking of your Sunday best as your characteristic dress. In terms of the American people’s ambitions, of the surface aspects of fascism, of recent history, its interpretations are accurate, intelligent and, above all, brilliantly translated into a visual language. As a limited but discerning mirror of civilization in the thirties the movie manages a rough, clumsy vitality, which makes the Hollywood versions of the same period seem bloodless and inconsequential.
May 31, 1943