World War I

PEACE OR PREPAREDNESS?

In the period of early cinema, the United States was primarily concerned with its domestic market, but from 1909 the commercial advantage of exporting film overseas became clear. Although Hollywood had successfully exported before 1914, the dominance it achieved a few years later was made possible by the war. France had been the world leader in film export, with Italy and Denmark close behind; indeed, France had been at the forefront of cinema's development, with pioneering filmmakers such as Georges Méliès (1861–1938) and the Lumière brothers (Auguste Lumière [1862–1954] and Louis Lumière [1864–1948]) and the world's number one film producer, Pathé. But when Pathé made an ill-timed move to concentrate on US distribution rather than production, France's grip on its internal market slipped, allowing 50 percent of films shown in 1917 to be American. In addition, the French film industry, like that of Italy when it entered the war in 1917, suffered from the shutdown of all cinemas and productions during the first months of the war. Once Hollywood's international distribution moved from London to New York, US film companies began to gain control of foreign distribution to Latin America and the Far East. The dwindling supply of film stock exacerbated problems facing the European film industry and affected others as far away as China. Suddenly an enlarged export market granted Hollywood more reliable profit margins; hence film budgets increased, giving Hollywood's often powerfully escapist product added international appeal. With Europe distracted, Hollywood began to organize its various independent studios into the vertically integrated industry that emerged after the war. By 1919 five major studios were in place: Universal (1912), Warner Bros. (1913), Paramount (1914), Fox (1915), and United Artists (1919), as well as the three component companies of MGM (1914–1917).

With the declaration of war in Europe, US opinion was divided, not least because it had close ethnic ties with all the parties involved. Despite calls from the United Kingdom and France for support, President Woodrow Wilson (1856–1924) chose neutrality over intervention and continued trade with the belligerent powers against a rising tide of attacks on American shipping. The first propaganda film to call for US intervention was J. Stuart Blackton's (1875–1941) The Battle Cry for Peace (1915). The oxymoronically titled film warned against complacency by depicting the destruction of major American cities after the lowering of national defenses. The film received silent backing from the arms manufacturer Hudson Maxim.

Films calling for "peace" included Herbert Brenon's War Brides , based on the emotive vaudeville "playlet" by Marion Craig Wentworth and released in November 1916. Although set in an imaginary kingdom, the film was pointedly contemporary in showing its heroine commit suicide rather than bear children to be sacrificed in future battles. As an answer to Blackton's film, Thomas Ince's (1882–1924) celebrated Civilization (1916), under the advertising slogan "PEACE—The Battle Cry of Civilization," was another allegorical narrative with a war-mongering king. The king directs the engineer Count Ferdinand to wage submarine war—plainly referencing the 1915 sinking of the Lusitania —before the count converts to pacifism and sacrifices himself and his ship. After the count's resurrection to spread the message of peace, the king witnesses a vision of Christ foretelling the horrors of war, an image that borrows from the semireligious postcards popular during the war. This spiritualist iconography was highly influential on film both during and after the war, as evident, for example, in The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse (1921), as the ghostly "resurrection" of Rudolph Valentino's soldier returns to his grieving wife.