Mind-Munitions

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Propaganda in the Age of Total War and Cold War
many years, but the most explicitly anti-Nazi series, The March of
Time, whose exposé of Nazi brutality in ‘Inside Nazi Germany’
(1938) was banned in Britain pre-war, used a combination of actuality
footage and staged material. In other words, the American
film industry was more prepared to criticize the Nazis than the
British were before 1939, although after the invasion of Poland
American anti-Nazi films reinforced the British propaganda effort.
So explicitly propagandist were some Hollywood products at a
time when the United States was, theoretically at least, supposed to
be neutral that they were banned by some American movie houses,
particularly in towns and cities where German-American bunds
were present. One example was Beasts of Berlin (1939, originally
entitled Hitler, Beast of Berlin and subsequently released as Goose
Step and Hell’s Devils), which was denied a certificate by the
Motion Picture Producers and Distributors Association, the
American equivalent of the British Board of Film Censors. Shot in
less than a week by a small production company (PRC), Beasts of
Berlin attempted to capitalize on the success of Confessions, but it
was in fact the forerunner of many classic wartime propaganda
films. In the summer of 1941, Warner Brothers released two further
pro-Allied films, International Squadron, a tribute to the RAF, and
Sergeant York. Although the latter was set in the First World War,
the moral and religious agonizing of its lead character, played by
Gary Cooper, over whether or not to take up arms is a metaphor of
the debate between isolationism versus intervention that was
raging in America at the time. Indeed, this film, together with
MGM’s exposé of anti-Semitism, The Mortal Storm (1940), 20th
Century-Fox’s The Man I Married (1940, originally entitled I
Married a Nazi), Charlie Chaplin’s 1940 satirical masterpiece, The
Great Dictator, and many others, prompted two isolationist senators,
Nye and Clark, to take action. On 1 August 1941 they called
for ‘a thorough and complete investigation of any propaganda
disseminated by motion pictures and radio and any other activity
of the motion-picture industry to influence public sentiment in the
direction of participation by the United States in the present
European war’. This Senate Resolution 152 was not just an
attempt to break the monopoly in movie-making by the eight
major studios (Paramount, MGM, RKO, Warner Brothers, 20th
Century-Fox, Columbia, Universal, and United Artists) that were
felt by Nye to be riddled with pro-Allied foreign propagandists. It