Tomorrow, December 7th, marks the 77th anniversary of the day America stood on the precipice of World War II, and a generation -- now referred to as The Greatest Generation, faced another moment of destiny.
Yesterday, we held a national day of mourning for former President George Herbert Walker Bush, who was our last president to have served in World War II. Characteristically of that generation, he enlisted on his eighteenth birthday.
Here is archival footage of twenty-year-old Lt. J.G. Bush being rescued after being shot down.
To keep faith with that Greatest Generation and the continuing gift of freedom they have left us, we need to remind ourselves of the reasons they had to give up their youth, in many cases, their lives, to a higher purpose.
Hollywood contributed a unique perspective and legacy of that era. We classic film buffs are familiar with the wartime dramas, the musicals, the patriotic messages, as well as the number of actors who left their careers to enter the military and the hundreds of others who supported the nation's war mission by entertaining troops, appearing at bond drives, and volunteering in many ways.
We've discussed in this previous post about the Hollywood Commandos or the FMPU which produced wartime training films. One of the most important projects made by this unit was director Frank Capra's Why We Fight series. This was meant to inform, inspire, and provide the necessary background to the purpose of why the service personnel were required to fight. Training them to use certain weapons, or how to act in certain situations was not the only important education they received in boot camp. The fight against fascism was as intellectual and emotional as it was tactical.
The first film in that series, Prelude to War is up at the top of this post. One hopes that in an era where fascism has found a foothold in our country, and young people know next to nothing about World War II, that an imperfect, decades-old training film, called "propaganda" today, is not so remote that it would not touch even the most stupid and cynical teenager posing for a class photo while giving the Nazi salute, or painting swastika graffiti, or draping a rope noose where it will be noticed.
Requiescat in pace, President Bush. Requiescat in pace, Greatest Generation.
In Our Dancing Daughters (1928) and Our Modern Maidens (1929), Joan Crawford epitomizes the daring flapper, living only for the moment, the eternal symbol (one of many glitzy symbols) of the 1920s. We continue today with part 3 of our series on the 1920s – Then and Now. Novelist-turned-Hollywood-writer F. Scott Fitzgerald saw in Joan Crawford the essence of the flapper, as he is noted to have remarked: Joan Crawford is doubtless the best example of the flapper, the girl you see in smart night clubs, gowned to the apex of sophistication, toying iced glasses with a remote, faintly bitter expression, dancing deliciously, laughing a great deal, with wide, hurt eyes. Young things with a talent for living. He might have been describing her in these two movies. Our Dancing Daughters stars Joan as a high-octane flapper or “modern,” her name for the first time above the title. This movie and Our Modern Maidens are "modern" morality plays of sorts – Joan Crawford is not s...
The March of Time short subject Teen-Age Girls (1945) is a window on a societal ripple in postwar America that is, unusually, both dated and prescient. The documentary examines the emergence of teens as a new and important demographic, particularly females in this case, with a lighthearted and even amused attitude, but with a curious reservation—perhaps not unlike the way a parent first notices that a child isn’t a child anymore. This is our final post in this series about how Hollywood depicted children during World War II. The March of Time apparently felt, and perhaps not wrongly, that the dawn of the Teen-Age was as likely to be as influential a force in American society as the nuclear age. The narrator begins: Of all the phenomena in wartime life in the United States, one of the most fascinating and mysterious…has been the emergence of the teenage girl in her own right. This was not something Hollywood evidently considered earlier in the war, when the worldwi...
The Racket (1928) is surprisingly cynical, even while still coyly presenting what we recognize as frothy 1920s images – including speakeasies, callow youth, and an almost manic desire to rebel. Even those inclined to think that silent movies, by virtue of their being silent, are a bit of a joke will still see much in this movie that is starkly modern and which speaks to us today. Producer Howard Hughes was only twenty-three years old when he took this on for one of his very first projects in the film industry. It is a story of Chicago gangsters and the honest cop who tries to bring them down. The honest cop, played by Thomas Meighan, one of the most popular leading men of his day, is not so incorruptible that he doesn’t resort to beating up suspects to get the truth. This is, after all, Chicago, and it is, after all, the 1920s. The film makes no explanation and certainly no apology for his beating up suspects in custody, rather it paints him as a savvy hero of the dirty streets he pa...
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