Book Review: American Cinema During WWII

Aaron J Stockham - Journal of Popular Culture

We'll Always Have the Movies: American Cinema During World War II

We'll Always Have the Movies: American Cinema during World War II. Robert L. McLaughlin and Sally E. Parry. Lexington: The University Press of Kentucky, 2006.

In their thoroughly researched and well-crafted analysis of six hundred films, from Charlie Chaplin's The Great Dictator (1940) to the Oscar-winning drama The Best Years of Our Lives (1946), Robert McLaughlin and Sally Parry argue that American films made during World War II performed two functions. First, films reflected commonly held notions that American moviegoers could adapt to this new war. Second, they created long-lasting themes that have influenced the ways in which Americans understood the war. Cinema was much more than propaganda. The World War II, films created a way of understanding America's place in this transformative event by using images and narratives Americans recognized.

Movies were the war's most important contribution to popular culture. Because of their popularity and narrative structure, films were uniquely positioned to create cues that helped Americans understand the war. Using easily recognized character types and storylines allowed moviegoers to connect what they saw in the theater to the larger world. Comedic representation of rationing, such as 1943's The More the Merrier, showed extreme housing arrangements audiences recognized. This Land Is Mine (1943) gave viewers the vicarious experience of occupation. The description of these narratives and analysis of the cues make up the bulk of the book. Before America's involvement in the war, filmmakers carefully balanced their own antifascist feelings and the isolationism of the general public. After Pearl Harbor, films quickly connected oddly named islands in the distant Pacific to America's West Coast, giving those battles importance and relevance to the public.

The authors complicate the notion that American cinema offered simplistic portrayals of the Allies and Axis. Stereotypes existed for the Germans and British, but these had to be altered for the new situation. There were "bad" Germans, corrupted by the Nazi leadership, and "good" Germans who, not surprisingly, still seemed American. The British were a natural ally, most like Americans, yet their class-based society was critiqued in films. The Japanese and Soviets, however, had no usable stereotype, but filmmakers adapted. The Japanese became treacherous, deceitful, and, interestingly, more comfortable in natural surroundings; while films often turned negative Soviet character traits into positives, or moved narratives about Russians away from specifically Soviet settings. In these ways, the narratives created by films allowed Americans to understand those fighting.

Films about the home front saw a significant shift in the gendered visions of how Americans should act. Men, previously portrayed as rugged individuals, learned to be part of a team. War required a new kind of hero, who understood his connections with the world and the relative unimportance of the individual. Women became more individualistic. As their husbands and fathers went off to war, women led their own lives and became more than typical wives or mothers. In this sense, the authors stress, the films of World War II mimicked changes in American society.

There are minor problems. While the authors researched hundreds of films, they narrow their analysis to a select few like Casablanca (1942) and So Proudly We Hail! (1943). If repetition was critical to the formarion of narrative cues, and to filmgoers' understanding of the war, the authors need to show that breadth. This book also cut short one of its most interesting insights. The similarities between Japanese and Native American characterizations were too quickly abandoned. This surprising connecrion deserved more discussion because of its insight into American cinema's portrayal of the Other, both during the war and in other eras. Overall, the importance of films to our understanding of World War II cannot be underesrimated. This book persuasively shows the power film had in crafting Americans' understanding of the war, both at the time and into the postwar world.