In the United Kingdom the need to continue with everyday life resulted in a business-as-usual approach by cinema managers, echoing the practical patriotism of the United States. In British theaters during the winter of 1915, audiences of uniformed men laughed at the broad comedy of pantomime one moment and sang melancholy war anthems, such as "Keep the Home Fires Burning," the next; in similar fashion, cinema's blend of reality with escapism was readily accepted. Movie theaters accommodated audiences seeking refuge from cold homes, offering an evening's entertainment and of course information about the war. They also raised funds for the war effort, as on Cinema Day, 9 November 1915, when the day's box-office takings were presented to the king and used to purchase fifty ambulances. Like the slide shows in the United States, local theaters also screened "Roll of Honor" films, greeted with both cheers and tears for those lost or wounded "over there." Many local scenes were particularly poignant. One film shown at the Imperial War Museum, London, specially shot for locals at the Tivoli Cinema in Grimsby, featured the "chums" of the Tenth Battalion Lincolnshire Regiment in training. The patrons were most likely unaware, when the film was shown on 4 July 1916, that the battalion had been wiped out on the first day of the Battle of the Somme three days earlier.
After protracted negotiations with the War Office, the first official propaganda film, Britain Prepared, was shown on 29 December 1915, complete with sequences in Kinemacolor, the world's first "natural" color process. Despite support from former President Theodore Roosevelt (1858–1919) and US government officials along with the Patriotic Film Corporation, the director Charles Urban faced significant opposition in America when promoting the film there because of its preparedness message. The first two official cameramen were also dispatched to the front at this time, and their first footage, screened early the next year, complemented the domestic character of "Topical Budget" shorts until that point. Initial objections to filming the conflict were driven by a distaste for what some saw as the working-class nature of cinema—thus lacking the sophistication appropriate to the endeavor—and the belief that tight media control had aided the Japanese during the Russo-Japanese war of 1904–1905. In February 1918 Pictorial News (Official), under the auspices of Lord Beaverbrook's (1879–1964) Ministry of Information (MOI), replaced the "Topical" shorts. During the war 240 films and 152 issues of the official newsreel were released.
Film screenings, often amid the ruins of barns and outbuildings, became an increasingly popular entertainment among both Allied and German forces toward the end of the war. The British Mobile Cinema Unit, headed by Major A. C. Bromhead, brought films to audiences of up to nine thousand servicemen and women, with screenings projected using searchlight dynamos onto mobile, two-sided screens that toured around the four fronts of the war during 1916 and 1917. Smaller gatherings took place at hospitals, and footage was recut for different local audiences. Beaverbrook appeared in one edition of the newsreel Pictorial News (April 1918) inspecting a fleet of ten "Cine Motor-Cars," which were to be dispatched to "depict war truths in the villages." Under Beaverbrook, the style of Pictorial News films developed into a much more sophisticated and efficient narrative, with improved intertitles and more dynamic editing. Popular stars such as Ivy Close (1890–1968) were featured in shorts such as Women's Land Army (1917), calling for volunteers while declaring "weeds, like U-Boats, must be exterminated!" as female workers are superimposed on the cornfields before the image of Britannia appears at the end to pay tribute to her "toiling sisters." Films in other countries made use of similar tableaux, appropriating suitably iconic and relevant figures such as Joan of Arc. Cecil B. DeMille's (1881–1959) epic Joan the Woman (1917), for example, presented Joan as a transnational figure of unity and reconciliation for French, British, and American troops through a framing narrative set in a World War I trench.
The landmark British film of the period, however, was The Battle of the Somme (1916), the first and most successful of the three official "battle" features produced between summer 1916 and spring 1917 and one of the most successful and influential British films ever made. An estimated twenty million people saw the film within six weeks of its August release and the majority of the population soon after. Having the biggest impact in 1916 were sequences (subsequently believed to have been simulated) of men forsaking safety by going over the top of the trenches to engage the enemy (the origin of the idiom "over the top") and lingering images of the British and German dead. Audiences were shocked by the film's uncompromising images of war. The Battle of the Somme was shown around the world; in Canada, where the Department of Militia and Defense had called for
In a film career whose durability was unrivalled by almost any other director, by the early 1920s King Vidor had developed a reputation as a morally earnest director of meaningful, atmospheric pictures about ordinary people in extraordinary and often hostile environments.
Vidor's early years were steeped in the movies. As a teenager he filmed footage for the Mutual Weekly newsreels of US troops sent to the border during the Mexican civil war. He continued to sell material on a piecemeal basis while working as a clerk at Universal, submitting scripts under the pseudonym Charles Wallis. Vidor gained recognition writing and directing independent features with The Turn in the Road and The Other Half (both 1919), starring his wife, Florence. After short contracts with First National and building his own small studio, Vidor Village, which closed in 1922, Vidor worked separately with Louis B. Mayer and Samuel Goldwyn before working under the new Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer studio in 1924, a relationship that would last twenty years. By turning down Ben-Hur (1925), Vidor was able to direct the World War I epic The Big Parade (1925). With a budget of $245,000, it is estimated to have made over $15 million in a few years at a time when few films made over a tenth of that. The film consolidated his reputation for working to erode social barriers through powerful images of ordinary people, as with the character played by James Murray in The Crowd (1928), the film that earned the director the first of six Academy Award® nominations during his career.
Vidor's first sound film was the all-black musical drama, Hallelujah (1929). During the Depression, his socially aware film Our Daily Bread (1934) called for cooperative living. His "war, wheat, and steel" trilogy was completed with An American Romance (1944). After a few formula features Vidor was on form again, with the celebrated melodrama Stella Dallas (1937) and The Citadel (1938), a British film set in a Welsh mining town. In 1939 Vidor spent three weeks on the troubled shoot of The Wizard of Oz, notably directing the "Somewhere Over the Rainbow" sequence, one of cinema's most poignant expressions of personal isolation and the desire to escape. Duel in the Sun (1946), a huge hit, is a gloriously lurid western with an all-star cast.
In the 1950s he made fewer films; his epic Italian-American co-production War and Peace (1956) brought Oscar® recognition once again, but his directorial career ended with Solomon and Sheba (1959). In 1979 Vidor was recognized with an honorary Academy Award® for "incomparable achievements as a cinematic creator and innovator."
The Jack Knife Man (1920), Peg o' My Heart (1922), The Big Parade (1925), The Crowd (1928), Hallelujah (1929), The Champ (1931), Our Daily Bread (1934), Stella Dallas (1937), Northwest Passage (1940), Duel in the Sun (1946), The Fountainhead (1949), Ruby Gentry (1952), Man Without a Star (1955)
Baxter, John. King Vidor. New York: Monarch Press. 1976.
Dowd, Nancy, and David Shepard, interviewers. King Vidor. Hollywood, CA: Director's Guild of America; Metuchen, NJ: Scarecrow Press, 1988.
Schickel, Richard. The Men Who Made the Movies: Interviews with Frank Capra, George Cukor, Howard Hawks, Alfred Hitchcock, Vincente Minnelli, King Vidor, Raoul Walsh and William A. Wellman. New York: Atheneum, 1975.
Vidor, King. A Tree Is a Tree. New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1953.
——. King Vidor on Film Making. New York: McKay, 1972.
Michael Williams
certain images to be censored early in 1915, some scenes of warfare were cut.
After The Battle of the Somme, Griffith's The Birth of a Nation (1915) was the most significant film of the period for British audiences. The film was shown only in theaters and not cinemas, sparking debate among exhibitors, who felt they were being squeezed out because the theater showings attracted a middle-class clientele that did not normally frequent the cinema.
Both Allied and German governments had interests in influencing the populations of neutral countries through control of exhibition venues, particularly in Holland and Switzerland and also across Scandinavia. In February 1918 the Société Suisse d'Exploitation des Films, effectively a field outpost of the CPI, warned Washington that German agents were penetrating the best picture-houses in the larger cities of Switzerland and sent back black lists of firms trading with Germany. The Société attempted to screen war films on behalf of the Allies, with some success in that The Battle of the Somme was seen by some 75,000 Swiss. The American CPI and British MOI formed a joint company to ensure that a sympathetic cinema, exclusively showing American, British, and French films, could be established in each major city in the country. The two bodies discussed whether the company should attempt to block all German product but agreed on a ratio of one-third German to two-thirds Allied. At the same time, material exported to such sensitive destinations was to be carefully censored so as not to play into enemy hands. For example, a commissioner warned the War Trade Board that Spanish audiences had interpreted one Pathé film as an accurate picture of life in New York, inadvertently serving as propaganda for the Germans.