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Wartime
Hollywood
Since the
first scenes of warfare appeared in a brief 1898 silent movie
filmed during the Spanish American War, many American films have
sought to capture the horror and unbridled heroism, carnage and
undaunted courage, the senseless and meaning of warfare. These
films explore the realities of combat, the relationships that
soldiers form within their units; and the interior mind of soldiers
as Wartime Hollywood.
Beginning
in September 1941, a Senate subcommittee launched an investigation
into whether Hollywood was campaigning to bring the United States
into World War II by inserting pro-British and pro-interventionist
messages in its films. Isolationist Senator Gerald Nye charged
Hollywood with producing "at least twenty pictures in the
last year designed to drug the reason of the American people,
set aflame their emotions, turn their hatred into a blaze, fill
them with fear that Hitler will come over here and capture them."
After reading a list of the names of studio executives - many
of whom were Jewish - he condemned Hollywood as "a raging
volcano of war fever."
While Hollywood
did in fact release a few anti-Nazi films, such as Confessions
of a Nazi Spy, what is remarkable in retrospect is how slowly
Hollywood awoke to the fascist threat. Heavily dependent on the
European market for revenue, Hollywood feared offending foreign
audiences. Indeed, at the Nazis' request, Hollywood actually
fired "non-Aryan" employees in its German business
offices. Although the industry produced such preparedness films
as Sergeant York, anti-fascist movies as The Great
Dictator, and pro-British films films as A Yank in the
R.A.F. between 1939 and 1941, before Pearl Harbor it did
not release a single film advocating immediate American intervention
in the war on the allies' behalf.
After Pearl
Harbor, however, Hollywood quickly enlisted in the war cause.
The studios quickly copyrighted topical movie titles like "Sunday
in Hawaii," "Yellow Peril," and "V for Victory."
Warner Brothers ordered a hasty rewrite of "Across the Pacific"
which involved a Japanese plot to blow up Pearl Harbor, changing
the setting to the Panama Canal. The use of searchlights at Hollywood
premiers was prohibited, and Jack Warner painted a 20-foot arrow
atop his studio, reading: "Lockheed - Thataway."
Hollywood's
greatest contribution to the war effort was morale. Many of the
movies produced during the war were patriotic rallying cries
that affirmed a sense of national purpose. Combat films of the
war years emphasized patriotism, group effort, and the value
of individual sacrifices for a larger cause. They portrayed World
War II as a peoples' war, typically featuring a group of men
from diverse ethnic backgrounds who are thrown together, tested
on the battlefield, and molded into a dedicated fighting unit.
Many wartime films featured women characters playing an active
role in the war by serving as combat nurses, riveters, welders,
and long-suffering mothers who kept the home fires burning. Even
cartoons, like Bugs Bunny "Nips the Nips," contributed
to morale.
Off the screen,
leading actors and actresses led recruitment and bond drives
and entertained the troops. Leading directors like Frank Capra,
John Ford, and John Huston enlisted and made documentaries to
explain, "why we fight" and to offer civilians an idea
of what actual combat looked like. In less than a year, 12 percent
of all film industry employees entered the armed forces, including
Clark Gable, Henry Fonda, and Jimmy Stewart. By the war's end,
one-quarter of Hollywood's male employees were in uniform.
Hollywood,
like other industries, encountered many wartime problems. The
government cut the amount of available film stock by 25 percent
and restricted the money that could be spent on sets to $5,000
for each movie. Nevertheless, the war years proved to be highly
profitable for the movie industry. Spurred by shortages of gasoline
and tires, as well as the appeal of newsreels, the war boosted
movie attendance to near-record levels of 90 million a week.
From the
moment America entered the war, Hollywood feared that the industry
would be subject to heavy-handed government censorship. But the
government itself wanted no repeat of World War I, when the Committee
on Public Information had whipped up anti?German hysteria and
oversold the war as "a Crusade not merely to re-win the
tomb of Christ, but to bring back to earth the rule of right,
the peace, goodwill to men and gentleness he taught." Less
than two weeks after Pearl Harbor, President Roosevelt declared
that the movie industry could make "a very useful contribution"
to the war effort. But, he went on, "The motion picture
industry must remain free . . . I want no censorship."
Convinced
that movies could contribute to national morale, but fearing
outright censorship, the federal government established two agencies
within the Office of War Information (OWI) in 1942 to supervise
the film industry: the Bureau of Motion Pictures, which produced
educational films and reviewed scripts submitted by the studios,
and the Bureau of Censorship, which oversaw film exports.
At the time
these agencies were founded, OWI officials were quite unhappy
with Hollywood movies, which they considered "escapist and
delusive." The movies, these officials believed, failed
to convey what the allies were fighting for, grossly exaggerated
the extent of Nazi and Japanese espionage and sabotage, portrayed
our allies in an offensive manner, and presented a false picture
of the United States as a land of gangsters, labor strife, and
racial conflict. A study of films issued in 1942 seemed to confirm
the OWI concerns. It found that of the films dealing with the
war, roughly two-thirds were spy pictures or comedies or musicals
about camp life - conveying a highly distorted picture of the
war.
To encourage
the industry to provide more acceptable films, the Bureau of
Motion Pictures issued "The Government Information Manual
for the Motion Picture." This manual suggested that before
producing a film, moviemakers consider the question: "Will
this picture help to win the war?" It also asked the studios
to inject images of "people making small sacrifices for
victory - making them voluntarily, cheerfully, and because of
the people's own sense of responsibility." During its existence,
the Bureau evaluated individual film scripts to assess how they
depicted war aims, the American military, the enemy, the allies,
and the home front.
After the
Bureau of Motion Pictures died out in the spring of 1943, government
responsibility for monitoring the film industry shifted to the
Office of Censorship. This agency prohibited the export of films
that showed racial discrimination, depicted Americans as single-handedly
winning the war, or painted our allies as imperialists.
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