hollywood in the 1940s
With the outbreak of World War II in 1939 after the German invasion of Poland, the United States remained neutral for another two years, studiously avoiding involving itself directly in the affairs of Europe, despite the nightly bombing campaigns carried out by Hitler’s Luftwaffe against close American ally the United Kingdom and their eventual invasion of France and capture of Paris. It took the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941 to draw America into the conflict, and when this happened, the propaganda potential of Hollywood was set in motion. Though the Hollywood studios had stuck closely to neutrality while the American government remained on the sidelines, they quickly began to marshal their narrative prowess around the war effort, immediately putting into production a great number of films that overtly took a stance on the war—if America was in the war, then Hollywood was going to do its part to help win it.
Hollywood studios worked closely not only with the Production Code office, but with the U.S. government’s Office of War Information (OWI) to make sure that its films were contributing positively to the war effort. In return, the OWI helped to coordinate the use of equipment and official personnel, whose involvement in the making of war films lent them authenticity. Title cards at the beginning or ending of many films made during and after the war years specifically thanked the United States military or its specific branches for their cooperation in the making of the production.
One particular filmmaker, Michael Curtiz, a Hungarian immigrant who became one of the studio era’s most dependable and artistically significant directors, made two films in 1942 that served this ideological function. The first was Yankee Doodle Dandy, a musical starring James Cagney as songwriter George M. Cohan, who tells his story in flashback to President Roosevelt after being summoned to the White House because FDR wants Cohan to write a new series of songs to support the American war effort. The second was the romantic drama Casablanca, which is set in Morocco under Nazi occupation. The film’s protagonist, Rick (Humphrey Bogart) remains on the sidelines until a personal motivation—the return of his lost love Ilsa (Ingrid Bergman), whose husband is a scientists who is trying to get to America to join the fight against the Nazis—draws him into the fight. The film is an obvious allegory for the need of the American public to overcome its isolationism and join the battle against a terrible enemy. The film argues, through its narrative, that Rick’s neutrality, like America’s, is no longer tenable.
This same propagandistic ideological motivation also dominates the combat films made during the war, and in particular, the violent war films of 1943. An example: midway through the 1943 World War II combat film So Proudly We Hail!, one of the protagonists is caught between a rock and a hard place: besieged on the island of Bataan by advancing Japanese troops, the American military unit trying to make its retreat is pinned down by an enemy fighting force. In a desperate bid to save the lives of everyone in the unit, one brave fighter urges the others to flee, and then rushes headlong into a group of Japanese soldiers with a live grenade. While the helpless bystanders look on, watching their compatriot’s sacrifice, the grenade explodes, taking the martyr and a group of soldiers with it. The scene is raw, intense, and emotional, and befits similar sequence in a number of combat films produced both during and after World War II. Scenes of this type are, whatever their individual level of effectiveness, certainly not rare for war films.
This moment in So Proudly We Hail!, directed by Mark Sandrich, is unique because the person with the grenade is Veronica Lake. She plays Lt. Olivia D’Arcy, one of a number of the ensemble film’s protagonists, most of whom are U.S. Army Nurses pressed into service in the South Pacific in the aftermath of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. Though Lake’s D’Arcy is killed in the above-described moment halfway through the film, her narrative arc forms the basis of the film’s general intent, which is to inspire a nervous nation to support the war effort both in word and deed. So Proudly We Hail! joins the likes of Howard Hawks’s Air Force, Zoltan Korda’s Sahara, Delmer Daves’s Destination Tokyo, and Tay Garnett’s Bataan, all in 1943, as the latest entries in Hollywood’s contributions to the war effort; these films are quintessential pieces of inspirational wartime propaganda designed to maximize the American public’s faith in American values. Hawks, Korda, Daves, and Garnett, unsurprisingly, chronicle the sacrifices of men in battle – the all-male fighting forces of the American military and their allies in their struggles against the Germans, Italians, and Japanese. Sandrich’s So Proudly We Hail! stands out as a remarkable artifact of rare note – a film about women in combat – that remains virtually alone in mainstream American cinema. Like many of the war films produced during the conflict, it feels shockingly immediate.
When D’Arcy rushes the group of Japanese soldiers, she fulfills her desire for vengeance against those who killed her fiancé, but she also does it to give her fellow nurses the chance to escape. Though the Production Code would not permit it outright, the intimation of the scene where the nurses huddle inside a hut while the Japanese sneak into the camp is that if they are captured, they will almost certainly be raped. This plays into the film’s often lapses into ugly racial stereotypes, of course, but also serves as a reminder of specific dangers that women in combat face, frequently from their own comrades. So Proudly We Hail! is just one example of a number of films, especially those made in 1943, that were unafraid to show the horrors of war, but did so in service of a larger ideal: to inspire the viewing public to acknowledge the sacrifice of those serving in combat, and to contribute to the war effort however they could.
As a result, a number of these films gain increased independence, however fleetingly, from the restrictions of the Motion Picture Production Code, the censorship restrictions that governed film content from 1934 until 1966. In Hawks’ Air Force, John Garfield’s tail-gunner Winocki stares out the window of the plane at the wreckage left behind at Pearl Harbor, still flaming: “Damn them. Damn them,” he says, breaking the Code’s prohibition on profanity to express a profound sense of moral outrage. In each of these films, it is not uncommon to see blood—in black and white, but blood nonetheless—which would be a rare sight in major studio films queasy about depicting violence too graphically. The 1943 combat films seem motivated to show the destruction, both of physical property and of bodies, to make an argumentative point. They do not go as far as later films, of course—this is not the bloody, dismembered, disemboweled carnage of the D-Day Normandy beach invasion of Saving Private Ryan (1998, Dir. Steven Spielberg)—but they approach their depiction of the horrors of war in a much more intense way than many combat films made after the conclusion of the fighting in 1945.
Winocki’s “Damn them” speaks to the genuine sense of moral outrage that runs through the 1943 combat films, especially in their darker moments: the righteous indignation at the Japanese sneak attack often gives way to outright racism, something that will be no surprise to those who have examined contemporaneous propaganda posters. Several moments in So Proudly We Hail! offer an unintentional explanation for the hatred and othering that could lead to the internment of more than 100,000 Japanese Americans in camps around the country. Though the film contains a Pearl Harbor sequence, like many war films produced in Hollywood in 1943 and beyond, it takes place far from the Hawaii base: a group of the central characters gather around the radio as news filters in, their disbelief giving way to shock then giving way to bloodlust. On Bataan, the film restages its own miniature Pearl Harbor when a group of Japanese planes mount a sneak attack on an ad hoc medical station. The fighters strafe the encampment, despite the overtly labeled tents marked with a medical insignia, and drop bombs on impromptu patient wards, killing the defenseless wounded. Davidson, one of the film’s heroines, looks at the sky and curses the pilots of the passing planes, calling them “apes.” Though Pearl Harbor takes place off screen, sequences like this create a permission structure for the audience to relive it, restaging the perceived dishonor in microcosm, and motivating the characters’ desire to fight back, going so far as to excuse their racism as rooted in genuine betrayal. The film further underlines the Japanese fighters’ dishonor when one of the nurses, Lt. Rosemary Larson (Barbara Britton), is killed while assisting an operation on a wounded man when a bomb hits the operating theater.
Sequences like this exemplify the film’s boldness, if not its moral purity—they deliberately confront the costs of war. However, because So Proudly We Hail! was released in 1943, that cost cannot be too high. The film’s propagandistic aim requires that it remain fundamentally inspirational and affirmational in its final moments. As many Classic Hollywood films worked to resolve two stories at once—the main plot, or the A-storyline, and the romantic plot, the B-storyline—so does So Proudly We Hail!. After the film circles back around to the end of the escape from Corregidor and the nurses’ retreat to the Navy cruiser, Davidson is brought back around by the receipt of a letter from Summers, who not only survived the mission to delay the Japanese and give the survivors the chance to escape, but is now shipping out to win the war, apparently singlehandedly. His voice intones over the soundtrack as he speaks the contents of the letter, his ghostly face framed on one side of the screen while Davidson’s emotion grows in her face on the other. Endings like this not only resolve the narrative in the manner typical of Classic Hollywood, but also illustrate the crucial demand placed on combat films released during the war. Because World War II is well-ensconced in history, it can be easy to think about its outcome as a foregone conclusion. In 1943, Allied victory was very far from certain. A number of films, So Proudly We Hail! included, chronicle a moment in then-very recent history when defeat seemed like a much more probable eventuality. The retreat from the Philippines was a psychological blow to the nation’s war effort, and Hollywood did its part to dramatize those events, paying tribute to those who lost their lives but refusing to lie down. While a number of combat films released in 1943 focus almost exclusively on the male war effort, So Proudly We Hail! finds nobility, heroism, anger, racism, sacrifice, and camaraderie in its female characters.
Watch the commentary at right on another Classic Hollywood-era war film, Bombardier (1943, Wallace), made for RKO Studios. Like many other war films made during the conflict, Bombardier is unflinching in its depiction of the brutality of the fighting, but ultimately offers its characters’ sacrifices as necessary for the greater good. The scene you’ll see comes from the end of the film, in which a pilot conducts a bombing raid that he knows will kill his best friend.
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War films made in Hollywood during World War II are unlike any propaganda effort undertaken by the American movie industry before or since; they are seemingly unified by grand ideological purpose, representing the film business’s attempt to do its part to win the war.
clip quiz - Hollywood during the war
Review the following clips and answer the questions on Blackboard.
TENDER COMRADE (1943, Dmytryk)
Imagine the impact of this scene from Tender Comrade on the audience watching the film in 1943. What is the film trying to tell the people on the homefront about how they can contribute to the war effort, and how does it do that? |
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ALL THROUGH THE NIGHT (1942, Sherman)
In this scene from All Through The Night, even gangsters get on board with the cause of defeating the Nazis. How does this clip help us sympathize with the crooks and condemn the Germans? |
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PRIDE OF THE MARINES (1945, Daves)
A number of films made during and immediately after the war dramatize scenes like this one from Pride of the Marines, where the characters learn about the Japanese bombing of Pearl Harbor. Why would scenes like this be included? What value would they have for the audience? |
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AIR FORCE (1943, Hawks)
Though the production code had restrictions on violence, exceptions were made for combat films made during the war, which were given extra latitude to depict battles. What feels especially violent in this scene from Air Force? |
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propaganda and guadalcanal Diary
During World War II, the historical tide turned in 1943; a series of Allied victories in North Africa, Italy, and in the Pacific Islands pushed the Axis powers back into a defensive crouch. In Hollywood, many studios sought to capture the immediacy of that historical moment by bringing fictionalized versions of actual battles that had been fought just months earlier to the screen. The United States Marines landed on the small island of Guadalcanal on August 7th, 1942, in an effort to take it from the embedded Japanese forces. Along with them was journalist Richard Tregaskis, who recounted his observations of the fighting in a book called Guadalcanal Diary, which immediately became a best-seller upon publication in early 1943.
In keeping with the Hollywood studios’ commitment to the war effort throughout the years of combat operations, Twentieth Century Fox bought the rights to Tregaskis’s memoir and set about adapting it for the screen, with Lewis Seiler behind the camera as director, and a cast made up of mostly bit players and character actors: Lloyd Nolan, William Bendix, Richard Conte, Anthony Quinn, and others. The film opens both with an acknowledgement of the cooperation of the United States government and its military branches, and also a literary device that shows the opening of the pages of the book Guadalcanal Diary; the idea is to root the film’s events in actual lived history—albeit very recent history. The parade of characters is also introduced with the actors’ faces, an extension of the idea that this is a film made as an act of service.
It is essential to see films like Guadalcanal Diary for what they are: propaganda movies designed to inspire the American public to stay committed to the war effort in all of its difficulty and demands of sacrifice. All its formal and narrative choices serve that larger propagandistic purpose. It is in this context that we need to see the use of a voice over narration at the outset of Guadalcanal Diary that sets the scene; these kinds of authoritative voice overs are sometimes called “The Voice of God,” since they seem to speak from a position of total omniscience and command respect and attention. In this case, it’s probably less God and more Uncle Sam, but the idea is more or less the same. In the next scene, though, governmental authority is aligned with religious authority, as a group of men sing the religious hymn “Rock of Ages,” included as a deliberate invocation of moral and religious authority that invests the American cause with righteousness.
The propaganda is most effective, though, when it merges with Hollywood’s reliance on classical storytelling structures; to this end, the film builds a relationship between the audience and its characters by focusing on the social bonds among the men in the fighting unit. There are a number of scenes of the men hanging out with one another, talking about their lives back home and getting to know each other better. One common screenwriting tactic in this era is to give the men something to protect; these men have a dog with them on board their ship, which gives them a fundamental humanity. When push comes to shove, they’ll pick up a gun, but they’re mostly good guys who just want to do the right thing.
There is also a strong appeal to authenticity in the staging of these sequences of combat, which freely mix scenes staged and shot with the actors and documentary footage taken from the actual landing at Guadalcanal. This integration of fiction and documentary encourages the audience to see the fictionalized scenes as constructed authentically, rooting them in the real historical moment. The top two images below are documentary footage, while the bottom two are shot with the actors.
The propagandistic purpose of a film like this is especially visible when it comes to its portrayal of the Japanese. Because of the surprise attack at Pearl Harbor, and Hollywood’s west coast location that made a lot of its residents think that Los Angeles might be next, war films of this period that are set in the Pacific theatre tend to be particularly venomous with respect to the Japanese. The American soldiers are shown to be morally righteous, treating the civilian Japanese prisoners humanely—they don’t torture them, they don’t shoot them for no reason, they bandage their wounds and win their hearts and minds.
The Japanese, by contrast, are treated as vicious and sneaky. One soldier says, “I bet there ain’t a Jap within ten miles of here,” and is immediately shot to death, a victim of yet another Japanese sneak attack. He tempts fate—the film’s lesson is never to forget Pearl Harbor. Another man’s casual racism towards the Japanese is a frequent occurrence in films like this, as anyone who has seen the horrendously caricatured depictions of Japanese people in propaganda posters of the period will understand.
Though the Production Code was still heavily enforced in 1943, war films like Guadalcanal Diary got a bit of latitude when it came to violence; the goal was to portray these combat sequences with more authenticity, and that meant bending the rules on violence and brutality, normally kept at the margins of traditional films in this period. A series of violent confrontations not only show the devastation of the fighting on American soldiers, they also show the necessity of using violence to get revenge for Pearl Harbor. Anthony Quinn’s Alvarez absolutely lays waste to a Japanese soldier with his Thompson machine gun, and then says it’s “For Captain Cross,” his commanding officer who the Japanese killed in a firefight.
From our own vantage point, it can be somewhat hard to appreciate the historical immediacy of a film like Guadalcanal Diary, which was released a little more than a year after the events it dramatizes, and openly embraces a clear political position. It’s basically impossible to fathom a contemporary film studio wading into a political environment so openly, making not just a pro-war film, but a pro-this-war film that dramatizes events that many in the audience would have clear memories of reading about in newspapers or seeing depicted in film newsreels. Guadalcanal Diary roots its action in the contemporary moment, firmly embracing its position as a piece of propaganda that was designed to inspire its audience to recognize the sacrifices of fighting men abroad but also to convince them to do their part at home. During World War II, there was society-wide mobilization, and in 1943, when this film was planned and produced, the outcome was far from certain. Everyone really did need to do their part, and movies like Guadalcanal Diary attempted to contribute in their own small way to that effort.
The war had an incredible impact on the film business in America, even if the country never saw the same kind of destruction as Europe, Africa, and Asia. In Hollywood during the war years, the film industry undertook a one-of-a-kind political project that would never be repeated; unlike many later moments of high political drama in the United States, the war was something almost everybody agreed upon.