propaganda

Fighting U.S. Marines: Marines line up at attention. Marines in their dress blues holding flag. Recruits walking out from getting their hair cut. Recruit get their new rifles and are assigned to their bunks. Marines blind folded fighting each other. Marines lined up doing excises. Marines on firing line, shooting at target with rifles and machine guns. Marines running through obstacle course. Marines running on beach into ocean. Marine in classroom and marching . Launching assault boats. Flying gliders, paratrooper Marines parachute out of plane. Marines charge on beach. Marines march in dress blues. 

All Star Bond Rally (Michael Audley, B+W, 1945, excerpts)

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In recent years, the nation has proven it can wage war without Bob Hope, but for decades it seemed unthinkable! Here Hope does his best to get Mr. and Mrs. America to invest in freedom at a hundred bucks a pop. Hollywood pinups such as whacky Carmen Miranda and luscious Linda Darnell come to life to flirt with shocked servicemen in a saucy montage sequence.

Women in Defense (B+W, 1941)

For an enterprise involving so much metal and machinery there certainly is a lot of sewing! Many of the skills women have naturally are needed for the nation's defense. Tiny ball bearings and other precision instruments need the touch of well-manicured feminine hands. Or at least this is what the narration, written by Eleanor Roosevelt and read by a very Katharine Hepburn-sounding Katharine Hepburn, would have you believe. 

A narrative film that begins in a 1940s American suburb. A man is chats with a young newspaper boy, whose brother is a bomber pilot in World War II, about the war. The film shifts to the newspaper boy’s brother, who is on a mission with his fellow pilots. The aviators of the fighter planes (possibly Douglas A-20 Invaders) chat over their radios about life back in America while waiting for commands. When they are given the command to bomb an enemy ship, they begin shooting at dropping bombs on the ship. While the ship is successfully destroyed, our hero’s plane is hit, and begins to descend. The next day, he and his fellow pilot sit in a lifeboat in the middle of the ocean, waiting to be rescued. They reminisce about life back home, and our hero talks about a fellow female colleague in the air force whom he was in love with. During this flashback, we see footage of the pilot training by flying over an island and landing his plane on a carrier ship. We flash back to the two pilots begin to realize that they may not be found and rescued, and discuss how the people back in the US are part of the same war as they are. The film flashes back to the man in the suburbs, who says that the war can’t last much longer. The final shot of the narrative is of a newspaper that says that all the bombers came back except for one. The film shifts to the Chief of Chaplains, who speaks to the audience and reminds them that while WWII might be almost over, they must still keep thinking about the war. While it may be hard to keep thinking about the war (perhaps harder than it was to think about it when it first started), they must because the war is almost over.