In 1914, when the Archduke Francis Ferdinand of Austria was assassinated, precipitating "The Great War" that is now known as World War I, it had been barely 20 years since the motion picture was born. Yet, like other great inventions of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the automobile and the airplane, the motion picture had become a vital part of daily life. As European countries went to war in the autumn of 1914, America was not yet committed to the British cause, or to American entry into the war on either side. The country was divided between those who urged military preparedness and support of the Allies and those isolationists who urged peace at any cost--and the implicit political messages of many films reflected that divide.
Film during the early years of war
According to Variety, the first dramatic film about World War I made in the United States was The War of Wars; Or, The Franco-German Invasion, released late in 1914. The film portrayed a mixture of good and bad characters from both sides of the conflict: "Yvonne" (Edith Hallor),
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| Titles of popular songs from 1915-1919 | |
| "I Didn't Raise My Boy to Be a Soldier" (1915)
"Keep the Home Fires Burning" (1915)
"Pack Up Your Troubles in Your Old Kit Bag and Smile, Smile, Smile" (1915)
"America, I Love You" (1915)
"Goodbye Broadway, Hello France" (1917)
"Over There" (1917)
"When Yankee Doodle Learns to Parlez Vous Francais" (1917)
"Hinky, Dinky Parlay Voo (Mad'moiselle from Armentieres)" (1918)
"Oh, How I Hate to Get Up in the Morning" (1918)
"How Ya Gonna Keep 'Em Down on the Farm (After They've Seen Paree)" (1919) | |
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a brave young French woman who owns a chateau on the French border, and "Eric" (Stuart Holmes), a young German officer. After an encounter with Yvonne in a wine cellar, Eric is falsely accused of raping her. Following a number of unlikely coincidences and false assumptions characteristic of films during this period, Eric and Yvonne eventually fall in love and decide to wait out the war together. Between 1914-7, the years before the United States entered the war, film production continued to steadily rise, and filmmakers tried to captivate and influence American audiences' attitudes toward the war. In the Name of the Prince of Peace and The Battle Cry of Peace (later called The Battle Cry of War) were two early war-inspired films that reflected the nation's growing concern toward the war in general, and particularly America's involvement in it.
In the Name of the Prince of Peace (1914) provided a clear anti-war message in which the French are depicted as no more sympathetic than the Germans. The main characters, a German baron and his daughter, are shot on the steps of an altar. After they are killed, both their spirits rise, along with those of other dead soldiers, to appeal to the Prince of Peace to end the war.
The Battle Cry of Peace (1915), inspired by Hudson Maxim's book Defenseless America and produced by British-born J. Stuart Blackton, was making more of a plea for increased armaments and war preparedness than peace. The film was strongly criticized by some contemporaries, including industrialist Henry Ford, for its not terribly subtle depiction of a "Germanic-looking" enemy shelling innocent citizens attending a peace rally in New York. In 1917, the film was re-edited and retitled The Battle Cry of War, with critics no longer assailing the strongly pro-military preparedness message.
Galvanizing support for American involvement in the war
The United States did not enter the war until April 1917, but the mood of the country began to shift significantly after May 1915 when the Lusitania was hit by a German torpedo and sunk off the Irish coast. The loss of 1,200 civilians, over 100 of whom were American, brought increased antagonism toward Germany, and that antagonism was reflected in the kind of films that picture-going Americans watched. While President Wilson won re-election to the White House in 1916, in part because he urged neutrality and "kept us out of the war," the nation was moving increasingly toward a pro-Allied stance.
Silent film historians, such as Kevin Brownlow and Anthony Slide, have reflected on the increased importance of the relatively new medium of film in shaping public opinion into strong opposition toward the German side of the war. The motion picture community was strongly pro-British, and the sinking of the Lusitania made their anti-German stance more popular. Now gone were the films of pacifism or neutrality, and in their place were films depicting English and French protagonists bravely fighting off the "horrible Hun."
World War I also created the first significant battleground for the war propaganda film. My Four Years in Germany (1918), based on the purportedly true story of German atrocities as published by a former American ambassador to Germany, as well as highly implausible propaganda films such as The Hun Within, Claws of the Hun and The Kaiser, The Beast of Berlin gave Americans a steady diet of reasons why the fighting was important and winning the war was imperative. Kaiser Wilhelm II, as the enemy of the day, was singled out for some particularly horrendous treatment, as seen in To Hell With the Kaiser in which Wilhelm makes a pact with the devil to control the world in exchange for his soul. At the end of the film, the Kaiser dies and goes to hell, where Satan abdicates his position to the more fiendish German monarch.
NARA [NWDNS-165-WW-232B(13)] | American film star Fatty Arbuckle putting up a poster for the 1917 Liberty Loan drive in Times Square, New York, organized to raise money for the war effort. |
Although the average films at the time portrayed Germans, and in particular German officers and aristocrats, as little more than savages, some films did attempt a more realistic depiction of the war. At the request of the British government to make an "authentic" history of the war, D. W. Griffith produced and directed Hearts of the World (1918). The film included a newsreel-like prologue of Griffith meeting with Prime Minister David Lloyd George, as well as pictures of the director setting up a camera on the battlefield. The power of the director, as well as the artistry of the principal actors, Lillian Gish and Robert Harron, made the film's main story transcend the genre, but its central theme remained the same: the "good" French and British will triumph over the "bad" Germans.
War's impact on American feature film genres
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| American Film Institute |
| Mary Pickford, "America's Sweetheart," co-founded United Artists in 1919 with D.W. Griffith, Charlie Chaplin and her husband, Douglas Fairbanks. |
By 1918, the number of feature films that either principally or in large part dealt with the war, either on the battlefield or as a homefront issue, surpassed 200 of the 845 features produced in the United States. Plots for the war-related films ran the gamut from homefront dramas, comedies and melodramas, to stirring battlefield or espionage adventures. In the comedy-drama Johanna Enlists, Mary Pickford, then the biggest female star in the world and known as "America's Sweetheart," portrayed a bored farm girl who becomes the center of attention when a regiment of soldiers camp on her family's property. Stolen Orders, released in the same year as Johanna Enlists, was a film typical of the convoluted espionage adventures popular at the time, with the addition of actual war footage and newsreels of Wilson delivering a speech.The early 1910s was an era that produced a large number of melodramas, and the increasingly popular theme of the tragic circumstances endured by a soldier, nurse or innocent farmer were well-suited to the war film. The war provided a suitable backdrop for melodramas such as A Daughter of France and The Little American, the latter in which Pickford shows her typically American grit when facing a firing squad in France, just as her German-American sweetheart, who enlisted in the German army, sees the error of his ways and renounces the Kaiser.
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| Thinking Point | |
| Do you think fictional or documentary films are better able to shape the opinions of their audiences? | |
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In addition to the large number of fictional films that relied on nineteenth-century plot devices such as coincidence, complicated storylines and exaggerated emotion the public also saw, for the first time, significant numbers of documentaries and newsreels of actual battlefield experiences. Beginning in early 1915, such films as History of the Great European War brought the war more vividly into the lives of civilians. Although the US government did not play a large role in the production of war propaganda films (as it would later do prior to and during World War II), it did make a few documentaries about the war, including 1918's Pershing's Crusaders, billed as the first "United States Official War Film." Revitalizing American hubris
As the war drew to a close, films increasingly portrayed a view of Americans that would be transported throughout the world: the take charge, down-to-earth, egalitarian American who could handle any situation and show the citizens of whatever country he was in that Americans could solve their problems. Douglas Fairbanks, the archetypal American star of the late 1910s through the mid-1920s, appeared in one such production that exemplified this type of film.
NARA [NWDNS-111-SC-16569] | American film star Douglas Fairbanks speaking to crowds in New York City to help aid the Liberty Loan drives during World War I. |
His Majesty, The American, made in 1919, starred Fairbanks as a flamboyant New York playboy do-gooder who goes to Mexico and makes short work of some of Pancho Villa's cohorts. He then goes to a mythical European country, routs some unsavory nobles and is eventually crowned king. Though silly by modern standards, the plot typifies a brand of cinematic nationalism that became popular both at home and abroad and started a trend that has remained popular for more than 80 years.
