Mind-Munitions

The Second World War
217
posters, stated that propaganda posters had to overcome three
obstacles:
Firstly, a general aversion to reading any notice of any sort, secondly a
general disinclination to believe that any notice, even if it was read, can
possibly be addressed to oneself; thirdly, a general unwillingness, even
so, to remember the message long enough to do anything about it.
It was for these reasons that the spoken word, as conveyed by radio
and, in conjunction with images, film was far more potent an
instrument of propaganda.
The MOI was at first slow to act in the case of film propaganda.
The first propaganda film of the war, The Lion Has Wings (1939),
was made independently of MOI influence by Alexander Korda.
But by 1940 the MOI had drawn up a programme for film propaganda
and it had taken over the old GPO Film Unit, renaming it
the Crown Film Unit, to produce its own official films. Going to
the pictures remained what it had become in the 1930s – a normal
part of most people’s life, an ‘essential social habit’, by far the most
popular form of entertainment, particularly for the working classes
who were now being called upon to fight the People’s War. In 1939,
19 million people went to the cinema in Britain every week and by
1945 the figure had risen to 30 million – half the population. After
November 1939, there were no less than 4000 cinemas in operation
at any given time, even during air raids. Although the longestablished
Hollywood dominance of screen fare was never really
challenged by the British film industry during the war, British
cinema none the less enjoyed something of a golden age between
1939 and 1945, both in terms of popularity and of critical acclaim.
Whereas Hollywood produced an average of about 400 feature
films per year during the war years, the British output was never
more than a fifth of that figure. Although most of these were
escapist entertainment, with the comedy films of Gracie Fields and
George Formby being particularly popular, British films did begin
to compete favourably at the box office with their American rivals.
Some were even awarded Oscars by the American Academy of
Motion Picture Arts and Sciences: Noël Coward’s In Which We
Serve (1942) and Olivier’s Henry V (1944) were awarded special
Academy Awards, and Roy Boulting’s Desert Victory (1943) won
the Oscar for Best Documentary. By the end of the war, despite the
fact that 80 per cent of the films seen weekly by those 30 million