Triumph of the Will (Triumph des Willens) is a filmed record of the 1934 Nazi Party Convention, in Nuremberg. No, it is more than just a record: it is an exultation of Adolf Hitler, who from the moment his plane descends from Valhalla-like clouds is visually characterized as a God on Earth. The "Jewish question" is disposed of with a few fleeting ...
After the success of Strike (1924), Sergei Eisenstein was commissioned by the Soviet government to make a film commemorating the uprising of 1905. Eisenstein's scenario, boiled down from what was to have been a multipart epic of the occasion, focussed on the crew of the battleship Potemkin . Fed up with the extreme cruelties of their officers and ...
The 60-minute documentary was the fifth of the Army Special Service's "Why We Fight" series. Assembled under the supervision of Lt. Colonel Frank Capra, the film is a sublimely assembled collection of authentic newsreel footage from both the U.S. Signal Corps and various Soviet sources. Narrated by Anthony Veiller, Battle for Russia is designed to ...
This 43-minute animated feature is Walt Disney's contribution to the wartime "Good Neighbor Policy" between the USA and Latin America. Opening with live-action footage of Disney and his staff (referred to by the narrator as a "group of artists and musicians") heading off to South America to glean material for a new cartoon project, the film then ...
The first full-length feature project of pantheon Russian filmmaker Sergei Eisenstein, Strike is a government-commissioned celebration of the unrealized 1905 Bolshevik revolution. The story is set in motion by a series of outrages and humiliations perpetrated on the workers of a metalworks plant. The Czarist regime is unsympathetic to the workers, ...
Set in Japanese-occupied China shortly before the bombing of Pearl Harbor, this action/drama stars Alan Ladd as Mr. Jones, a cynically materialistic American who has no qualms about selling oil to the enemy; as far as he's concerned, their money spends as well as anyone's. Against the advice of his friend and partner Johnny Sparrow (William Bendix ...
One of three morale-boosting government documentaries directed by Lieutenant Colonel William Wyler (the others were The Memphis Belle and Thunderbolt), The Fighting Lady follows the exploits of an aircraft carrier, its crew, and the planes transported on its deck. The officers and enlistees are not required to perform; that function is handled by ...
Elizabeth Taylor played her first grown-up romantic lead in the Anglo-American melodrama Conspirator. Taylor portrays Melinda Greyton, the new bride of highly respected Major Michael Curraugh (Robert Taylor). It comes as quite a jolt when Melinda learns that her husband is actually a spy for the communists (ironically, Robert Taylor had been one ...
In this, one of many World War II propaganda films of the early 1940s, Errol Flynn is one of five RAF pilots to survive a crash-landing in occupied Poland. They are relentlessly pursued by Nazi officer Raymond Massey, who despite his erudition and poise comes across as one of the densest men on earth--not that his Nazi underlings are any brighter. ...
A wounded aerial gunner tells his story in this wartime propaganda film. He begins with his recruitment and basic training before the war. There he discovers that his sergeant is one of his foes, and that both of them are fighting for the affection of the lovely sister of a fellow recruit who becomes terrified of flying and suffers a plane crash ...
Filmed in color, The Memphis Belle has long been held up as a "model" wartime documentary. In a terse, exciting 41 minutes, the film assembles footage from several allied bombing missions into one single representative flight of the famed Flying Fortress known as The Memphis Belle. Though both the crewmen and the filmmakers take considerable pride ...
Made in the same atmosphere and paranoia that spawned the infamous Joseph McCarthy, this is an anti-communist propaganda movie looking more at the dark side of communism than at its subject matter--the life and times of Joszef Cardinal Mindszenty of Hungary. Mindszenty was imprisoned as an enemy of the State for his outspokenness and, during his ...
The Immortal Battalion has a bit of a convoluted history. It started life as a training film, The New Lot, which ran 44 minutes. When Winston Churchill approached David Niven about creating a film that would do for the British Army what In Which We Serve had done for the Royal Navy, he contacted Carol Reed and suggested expanding The New Lot. The ...
Borrowing its title from a book by American journalist John Reed (of Reds fame), Sergei Eisenstein's Ten Days That Shook the World reenacts the crucial week-and-a-half in October, 1918, when the Russian Kerensky regime was toppled by the Bolsheviks. While Eisenstein takes certain liberties in characterization--those opposing the Bolsheviks are ...
Though the filmmakers claimed they were writing a biography of Nazi minister Dr. Joseph Goebbels, this film is actually highly fictionalized and filled with patriotic propaganda. The story attempts to explain Goebbels' madness, blaming it on a love affair gone awry when he was a young aspiring playwright. The love in question was a young actress ...
Originally Potomak Chingis-khan (The Heir to Genghis Khan), Russian filmmaker Vsevolod Pudovkin's Storm Over Asia is set in Central Asia in 1920. Valeri Inkijinov plays a young Mongolian trapper ostracized from his village after he is cheated out of a valuable fox fur by a European trader. Becoming a Soviet partisan, the trapper is thrust into ...
In this collection of vintage educational films dating from the late 1940s though the early 1970s, children are informed of the best ways to fit in socially, wash thoroughly, make smart decisions, and exercise proper cafeteria etiquette. Films featured include Lunchroom Manners, Shy Guy, Why Doesn't Cathy Eat Breakfast?, Soapy the Germ Fighter, ...
A handful of strangers are suddenly thrown together as America goes face-to-face against the Communist threat in this curious example of Cold War exploitation. A few people are enjoying drinks in a Manhattan cocktail lounge - television reporter Vince Potter (Gerald Mohr), vacationing tractor tycoon George Sylvester (Robert Bice), cattle baron Ed ...
A husband-and-wife scientist team (Peter Graves, Andrea King) are experimenting with a "hydrogen tube" invention (which he got from a missing German scientist, lost in the collapse of the Reich), when they get signals back from what appears to be Mars. The culture-shock of that event is serious enough, and the couple and their family are suddenly ...
A young Alfred Hitchcock made this propaganda film as an homage to the courageous members of the French Resistance as he tells the tale of a British RAF pilot who escapes from France with the assistance of the French Underground and a treacherous Nazi informer. ~ Sandra Brennan, All Movie Guide
In this propaganda film that embraces pacifism, a German boy of 19 moves to Russia with his parents. He comes upon the body of a German woman who has willfully killed herself to avoid being captured by the Russians. In an incredible sequence of events, Germans take up arms against SS troops towards the end of the war. The young man liberates a ...
The Arsenal features Semyon Svashenko as Tyrnish, a humble Ukranian soldier. Through Tyrnish's experiences we are permitted to witness the incredible social upheavals of the World War I years which led to the Russian revolution. The film's setpiece is the 1918 Kiev worker's rebellion. The White Russian troops are clearly the villains of the piece- ...
This Russian drama chronicles the tale of a strike on Hamburg's docks that was inspired by leftists. Livanov, their leader, finds that his weak heart cannot stand the strain of the strike; he must return to Russia to rest. While he is gone, the strike situation becomes more serious. The German government uses violent measures to repress the strike ...
This release compiles driver safety films from the forties and fifties. Due to their earnestness and occasionally graphic content, these films continue to have a cult following. Included are films with the titles The Bottle and the Throttle, Safety Belt For Susie, The Last Prom, and The Talking Care. ~ Perry Seibert, All Movie Guide
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