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What the Critics are Saying
"Whether dealing with famous flicks or lesser known titles, McLaughlin and Parry maintain a scholarly tone, treating blockbusters and B-movies with equal rigor, but never forgetting the view from the peanut gallery or the history and movie buffs among them."--Publishers Weekly
"A unique and exhaustive analysis of many home front films of different genres that have been ignored for decades but are significant in their effects on the wartime American moviegoing public."--Ralph R. Donald, Southern Illinois University Edwardsville
Film Flam:Hollywood has gone from helping fight World War II to churning out bombs and duds.
Reviewed by John DiLeo,
Washington Post, Sunday, February 19, 2006
When channel-surfing old-movie stations, you can't mistake those World War II films made during the war, so identifiable is their blatant promotion of morale, unity and flag-waving, not to mention their widespread (and now startlingly casual) use of ethnic slurs in describing our enemies. Hollywood studios used their influence as never before (or since), doing their part to win the war by teaching Americans how to understand and process it. That's the assertion behind Robert L. McLaughlin and Sally E. Parry's We'll Always Have the Movies , an admirable survey of those movies whose aim was "to take the confusing and chaotic elements of wartime and make them knowable by turning them into narrative." Today many of the films seem naive, and some laughable, but their stirring urgency hasn't dimmed, and they provide a time capsule of social and cultural history.
The book begins with war-related films of the late 1930s and early '40s, movies designed to awaken stateside audiences to the mounting horrors in Europe (e.g., "The Mortal Storm"), some showing regular Americans politicized by first-hand exposure to the Nazis (Alfred Hitchcock's "Foreign Correspondent"), still others indirectly addressing the moral imperative of our intervention by invoking World War I as a just cause (Howard Hawks's "Sergeant York" ).
The authors astutely note a shift in Hollywood's emphasis, from a 1930s buildup of individual heroism to a post-Pearl Harbor glorification of teamwork. But as men were being told to become team players, women were instructed to be more independent, leading to a confusing postwar transition back to "normalcy." There's a perceptive account here of the discordant threads of optimism and pessimism coursing through "The Best Years of Our Lives," the greatest of the homecoming pictures, in which veterans are filled with hope while civilians display cynicism and anxiety.
This orderly book has an impressive dot-connecting clarity, and it never condescends to the films it dissects. In addition to discussing such mandatory films as "Casablanca" and "Mrs. Miniver," the authors wisely give equal space to lesser-known (yet superb) pictures like "None Shall Escape," plus some intriguing B films that made highly critical evaluations of home-front issues, including rising juvenile delinquency. I lament the omissions of such emblematic wartime movies as "Tomorrow the World" and "Watch on the Rhine," not because they're good (they're not) but because they belong in the conversation. However, this is a carefully thought-out book that serves its subject with confidence, lucidity and insight. It leaves you armed with valuable information for the next time you stumble upon one of these movies.