Although the initial response to the outbreak of war in Britain in 1939 was to close all cinemas, they soon reopened and film attendance grew steadily throughout the war years. In spite of shortages, the reduction of studio space available for feature film production, and increased taxation and the consequent increases in ticket prices, World War II was a prosperous time for British cinema.
General trends in film attendance were recorded in a survey undertaken for the Ministry of Information called The Cinema Audience, which showed that film outstripped newspapers and books in its ability to reach large segments of the population. Thus, the ministry's Films Division organized a program of both theatrical and nontheatrical exhibition, utilizing commercial cinema circuits as well as such other venues as churches, canteens, and even railway stations.
Given that the ministry's purpose was propaganda and information, most of the films commissioned by the Films Division were documentaries, and its "five minute films" were designed to fit easily into a program of feature film viewing. Their content varied from news to practical information, as in When the Pie Was Opened (1941), which used a variety of animation techniques to illustrate a recipe for making vegetable pie. But the Films Division also produced longer documentaries, such as what many consider the definitive document of the blitz, the Crown Film Unit's Fires Were Started (1943), directed by Humphrey Jennings. In some cases, it even funded commercial projects, such as Michael Powell's 49th Parallel (1941), a film that explained "why we fight." Scripted by Emeric Pressburger, it also explained—by bringing the war to America's doorstep—why Americans, too, should fight: a small band of Nazis stranded in Canada have a series of ideologically charged encounters with a French-Canadian trapper, an ethnically-German religious community, and an English intellectual who studies Native American cultures. In each encounter the opposition between democracy and Nazi ideology is made clear. Featuring two bankable British stars, Leslie Howard and Laurence Olivier, as well as a strong dose of adventure, it made top box office in Britain and abroad.
Following the bombing of British cities in 1940 and 1941, filmmakers called for fewer war films because they believed that an exhausted public needed escape from battle. In 1942 the Films Division issued a statement regarding its willingness to balance production between war films and other types of propaganda, provided that the films produced were of a high quality and positively represented the British identity and the democratic way of life. Depictions of a popular war ensued, a war fought on a variety of fronts by a variety of ordinary British people. For example, The Foreman Went to France (1942) and Millions Like Us (1943) depicted the wartime experiences and contributions of factory workers.
The successes of wartime British cinema would carry over into the early 1950s. After Powell and Pressburger's success with 49th Parallel, they continued to work together; one of their most popular wartime films was the portrait of military heroism, The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp (The Adventures of Colonel Blimp, 1943). Still making films together in the 1950s, they constituted one of the most important creative collaborations in British cinema.
France was invaded by Germany in June 1940. The Nazis occupied Paris while a right-wing French government was established in Vichy. At the beginning of the Occupation, all films screened for French audiences were German productions. Some proved popular, including the anti-Semitic Jud Süß, but French audiences preferred French films, so domestic production was resumed in 1941. The Germans invested heavily in France's film industry, considering it both good diplomacy—to demonstrate the benefits of cooperation—and an investment in the future of a German-controlled European film industry. In the absence of films from its main competitor, Hollywood, French film enjoyed greater profits in the Occupation era than it had garnered before the invasion. Meanwhile, in the unoccupied zone, the Vichy government formed the Comité d'Organisation de l'Industrie Cinématographique (COIC) in 1940 to control film production. Both the scope of the COIC's distribution and its funding were limited, although it received support from the United States and Italy.
One of the most famous directors of the studio era—and one of the very few to have his name above the title—Frank Capra is best remembered today for a series of populist comedies he made in the 1930s, most notably Mr. Deeds Goes to Town (1936), Mr. Smith Goes to Washington (1939), and Meet John Doe (1941). Although his career before that was both prolific and varied, the comedies that pitted the little guy against corrupt institutions struck a responsive chord with Depression-era audiences.
Capra began his career in 1922, directing the independent short Fultah Fisher's Boarding House. Working his way into the industry, Capra became a comedy writer for both Hal Roach, for some of his Our Gang comedy shorts, and Mack Sennett, the recognized master of slapstick comedy. Capra then worked on three popular comedies starring the comedian Harold Lloyd, including Tramp, Tramp, Tramp (1926) and The Strong Man (1926). But the pair parted ways when Lloyd decided to direct his own films. In 1928 Harry Cohn, president of Columbia Pictures, then a struggling studio, hired Capra as a house director. Directing twenty-five films for the studio over the next ten years, nine of which were made in the first year alone, Capra rose to preeminence at Columbia.
The early Columbia films were in a variety of genres, but the perky comedy Platinum Blonde (1931), starring Jean Harlow, was a defining point in Capra's career. The film marked the first of eight collaborations with the writer Robert Riskin. One of their collaborations, It Happened One Night (1934), starring Clark Gable as a working class journalist and Claudette Colbert as a spoiled socialist who find themselves thrown together on a road trip adventure, swept the Oscars® and is recognized as one of the prototypes of the screwball comedy genre.
When the United States entered World War II, Capra joined the Army and produced a series of training films, the most important of which are seven collectively known as Why We Fight (1943–1945). Because Capra's Hollywood comedies were on one level entertaining pro-American propaganda, he proved adept at more overt political propaganda, bringing together a variety of cinematic techniques, clever editing, and a sure-handed manipulation of cultural iconography to sway Americans from their earlier isolationist stance and to motivate soldiers for battle.
After the war Capra's vision just as quickly seemed out of date, and he lost step with audiences. His later films failed to capture the success of his prewar work. Capra's major postwar film, It's a Wonderful Life (1946), reveals the director's loss of idealism and faith in the common man, as it requires the divine intervention of an angel to restore the hero's faith in American tradition and the masses.
Platinum Blonde (1931), American Madness (1932), The Bitter Tea of General Yen (1933), It Happened One Night (1934), Mr. Deeds Goes to Town (1936), Lost Horizon (1937), Mr. Smith Goes to Washington (1939), Meet John Doe (1941), Why We Fight, 1: Prelude to War (1943), Why We Fight, 2: The Nazis Strike (1943), Why We Fight, 3: Divide and Conquer (1943), Arsenic and Old Lace (1944), Know Your Enemy: Japan (1945), It's a Wonderful Life (1946)
Capra, Frank. The Name Above the Title: An Autobiography. New York: Macmillan, 1971.
Carney, Raymond. American Vision: The Films of Frank Capra. Cambridge, UK and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1986.
Glatzer, Richard, and John Raeburn, eds. Frank Capra: The Man and His Films. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1975.
McBride, Joseph. Frank Capra: The Catastrophe of Success. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1992.
Barry Keith Grant
In both the Vichy and German zones during the Occupation, censorship of film content strictly forbade any mention of the war; furthermore, laws were passed in both regions to prevent the employment of Jews in the
industry as well as the screening of pre-war films with Jewish actors. In both zones the dominant genres were comedies and melodramas designed to avoid all references to contentious political topics. The departure or imprisonment of French film talent meant that a new generation of French filmmakers emerged during the Occupation, including Jacques Becker, who was active in the resistance movement; Henri-George Clouzot; Claude Autant-Lara; Jean Delannoy; and others. The most significant of these new directors was Robert Bresson, who made his first film, Les Anges du péché (Angels of the Streets), in 1943.
Marcel Carné's Les Enfants du paradis (Children of Paradise, 1945) is undoubtedly the most famous film made during the Occupation. Like the "prestige" films made during the war, it was a costume drama with extraordinarily detailed settings and a multilayered narrative that created a densely textured world of nineteenth-century Parisian theaters and nightclubs. It shared with other productions of the Occupation, such as Jean Delannoy's L'Eternal retour (The Eternal Return, 1943), a sense of fatalism that scholars have read as a veiled response to the social and cultural changes brought by the Occupation.
After the Liberation ended the Nazi Occupation, numerous small production companies competed for France's market. In 1946 the prime minister signed an agreement with the United States to do away with prewar quotas, freeing up the market for competition among French producers—and from Hollywood. Within the year it became clear that French cinema needed support and protection. The government created the Centre National de la Cinématographie to regulate production, promote French film internationally, and organize festival entries. France established new quotas for American films in 1948 and made new development funds for film available in 1953. Altogether, these responses to Hollywood's overseas expansion set the stage for a revival of the French film industry, the economic context in which the French New Wave emerged.
While the film industries of most combatant nations made significant aesthetic and industrial changes to meet the needs of war information and propaganda, Soviet cinema was already committed to the cause of indoctrination. Governed by the policy of Socialist Realism, its cinema from 1935 onward was entirely dominated by the needs and requirements of the Communist Party: formal experimentation was banned and films were designed to educate and to provide role models appropriate to Communist ideology. World War II did nothing to change this, although historian Peter Kenez has observed that the opportunities afforded by the war—to depict some of the real suffering of Soviet peoples as evidence of Nazi treachery and the need for vengeance—offered a degree of representational freedom not otherwise associated with Stalinist film.
Prior to entry into the war, the Soviets made a number of anti-Nazi films, including Professor Mamlock (1938), in which the life of a Jewish surgeon is destroyed by the Nazis. Despite ideological opposition to the Nazis, Stalin signed a nonaggression pact with Germany in August 1939 in an attempt to avoid invasion. The pact held Germany at bay until June 1941; by early 1942 areas west of Moscow were under Nazi occupation. The abuses suffered by those in this area would fuel much of the war-era film that followed, in which vengeance was a dominant theme.
The majority of these films were documentary accounts—or fiction films with strong documentary tendencies. The first newsreel appeared three days after the war began, and newsreels continued to be released every three days throughout the war, despite limited resources. The first documentary made from this newsreel material was Nasha Moskva (Our Moscow, 1941), which depicted the home-front preparation for siege undertaken by soldiers and civilians. Perhaps the most important documentary of the war was the one that followed, Razgromnemetskikh voysk pod Moskvoy (1942), which focused on German losses—its prisoners of war, its weaponry destroyed and discarded in the snow. Released in the United Kingdom and the United States under the title Moscow Fights Back, it won a New York Film Critics' award. In the documentaries that followed, Soviet filmmakers demonstrated a willingness to depict the pain and injuries of war unusual in World War II cinemas: its purpose was to stoke up Russian hatred of its enemy. For instance, in Alexander Dovzhenko's Bitva za nashu Sovetskuyu Ukrainu (Ukraine in Flames, 1943), he heightened the effect by intercutting captured Nazi footage—of smiling Germans—with images of suffering in the Ukraine.
Shortages plagued Soviet film production during the war and major studios were lost early on; when films could no longer be produced in Moscow and Leningrad, Mosfilm and Lenfilm moved to cities in Central Asia. In order to keep village soviets supplied with film during a time of limited resources, production shifted from full length to short films from 1941 to 1942; these were released in groups called the Fighting Film Collections. The shorts varied from documentaries to short dramas; the best known is called Pir v Girmunka (Feast in Zhirmunka 1941), directed by Vsevolod Pudovkin, in which a Soviet woman feeds a poisoned meal to the occupying army. In order to assure the Germans that the food is wholesome, she eats with them and dies; her body is discovered along with the enemy corpses.
From 1942 onward, feature-length production was again possible; the majority of these were war films, including a number that dealt with partisan warfare. The key themes in these films were the happiness of Soviet life before invasion, the brutality of the Nazis, and the consequent necessity for courage and vengeance on the part of both men and women. A number of films showed graphic violence against women and children, including Raduga (The Rainbow, 1944), in which a newly delivered mother is tortured, a newborn baby is killed, and a young boy who tries to bring food to a prisoner is executed. Home-front films, like partisan war films, often featured female heroes, but instead of directly fighting the evil Nazis, they struggled as civilians to support the war effort.
After the war's end, Soviet film production dropped precipitously; by the 1950s, only four or five feature films were released each year. The reason for this appears to be that under Stalin the political demands upon scripts were so strict that few could be completed.