Hollywood Helps the Cause (2006 Video) User Reviews

Mr. Smith helps "the cause" MORE than the Gipper!

[cricket30 · 8/10 · 14 March 2013]

This 20 minute, 39.91 second short is attached to the Warner Brothers\Turner 2006 DVD package for Humphrey Bogart's 1942 spy versus spy romance, ACROSS THE PACIFIC. Though this short focuses almost exclusively on movies available as part of the same DVD set, it still seems to provide a pretty good cross-section of stars doing their part to aid the U.S. efforts to win WWII. The movies touched upon besides PACIFIC include SERGEANT YORK, MRS. MINIVER, CONFESSIONS OF A NAZI SPY, ACTION IN THE NORTH ATLANT!C, DESTINATION TOKIO (sic), WINNING YOUR WINGS, UNDERGROUND, ESCAPE, THE FIGHTING 69TH, JOE SMITH AMER!CAN, YANKEE DOODLE DANDY, AIR FORCE, and CASABLANCA. TV's Band of Brothers writer Bruce C. McKenna states America was emotionally unprepared to enter WWII, but Hollywood got us ready. Gary Cooper's WWI bio-pic York was the nation's biggest grosser in the months leading up to Pearl Harbor. Though the Republicans in the U.S. Senate put Hollywood on trial for "sullying" Hitler's name in CONFESSIONS OF A NAZI SPY, after Pearl Harbor the G.O.P did not have a leg left to stand on. Robert Osborne, the TCM channel host on television, points out "movies are America's best propaganda machine." For instance, movies such as PACIFIC put out the party line that "one man can make a difference." But after the Office of War Information: The Bureau of Motion Pictures was established, every movie of the 1940s was required to cover six points, according to Warner Brothers archivist Randi Hokett: weapons manufacture, war issues, vilifying the enemy, glorifying American service people, praising the Allies, and telling U.S. civilians to suck it up. If this bureau had remained active AFTER the War ended, surely it would have sent bomber crewman Mr. Smith to Washington instead of the lame "where's the rest of me" Gipper!