I DARE SAY —
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’Win with Willkie’ slogan now of the embattled movies
Hollywood picks him as choicest male star in fight against Senate isolationists
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By Florence Fisher Parry
The movies, the best picker of personalities on earth, inevitably would get Mr. Willkie! He is, to date, their choicest male star. His role is the most important role they have ever assigned.
It can well prove to be one of the most important he has ever elected to play. For it is that of Legal Representative at a Senate hearing, the outcome of which can affect our whole system of democracy, raising as it does the great subject of freedom of speech, freedom of opinion, and the right to engage in free enterprise.
Last Tuesday, there began an official Senate investigation into alleged “propaganda” in movies and radio to engender a war spirit in their audiences. The investigation was incited by Senator Gerald P. Nye, whose claims are that the motion picture producers have a financial stake in a British victory, and that this is influencing them to put propaganda into their product designed to get the United States into war.
Pictures like Flight Command, Escape, I Married a Nazi, That Hamilton Woman, Man Hunt, The Great Dictator, Sergeant York are specifically cited as pictures that would bear investigation.
Wendell Willkie was engaged by the motion picture industry to represent it at this absurd and unjust hearing.
Just how seriously (and ably) Mr. Willkie is defending the movies’ interests may be gathered from the following:
It appears that the “investigators” complained that, in contrast to movie practice, radio was required to allot to each side of opposing “parties” equal radio time; to which Mr. Willkie retorted that, if this practice were extended to the pictures, then was he to assume that for every anti-Nazi picture produced, the movies would be required to make a picture defending Hitler?
Mr. Willkie further brought out the fact that, of the 1,100 feature pictures produced since the outbreak of the war, only 50 have had anything to do with the issues involved.
Low comedy
Now I do not know whether or not Mr. Willkie ever before attended any Senate hearing which touched on the movies; I do not know, as a matter of fact, how much Mr. Willkie himself knows about movies in general and the attacked pictures in particular.
But I do know that he will never be the same again after he leaves that investigation! There is something about a Senate investigation of the movies that has in it all the elements of a Gilbert and Sullivan comic opera. Nothing in the realm of farce comedy could approach it for sheer inanity.
It was my good (or bad) fortune to attend two of the Senate hearings on the Neely Bill (block booking) before it went to the House and Senate. The Senators who sat in on the hearing were some of our most distinguished Senators. With all due respect to their profound knowledge on other subjects, I can attest here that what they knew about the movies you could put in a small 5¢ thimble.
I was never witness to such an exhibition of complete ignorance of an industry. One of the Senators gravely admitted that he hadn’t seen a movie for over five years. Not one of the four Senators had seen ONE of the many pictures mentioned during the week’s hearings. Their questions were questions which any 10-year-old movie fan could answer. Yet they were gravely met to pass on a critical question affecting profoundly the very existence of the fifth major industry in the world.
During the testimony of one of the most important (and deservedly so) men in the entire picture industry, the Senator whose bill bore his name sat with his nose buried in a large book before him, and never listened to one word of the carefully piled testimony. A shrill little minority of small independent exhibitors was allowed to appropriate most of the time. The hearing was a shocking farce, and I devoutly prayed at the time that it was not a fair example of the usual Senate hearing.
Smear campaign
Be all this as it may, the movies are again the victim of an organized smear campaign politically inspired and designed to heckle and impair the functioning of one of the most powerful instruments of public opinion on earth. There is not a fair-minded moviegoer in America whose voluntary testimony would not dismiss the whole charge against the producers.
I am one of many moviegoers who happen to have seen all of the major pictures under indictment; and it would be as unfair to accuse them of containing war propaganda as to accuse the news broadcasters on our radio or the news writers on our newspapers of being war propagandists, or our book publishers of being war propagandists.
Flight Command, Dive Bomber are factual informative pictures designed to acquaint the laymen with the technicalities of flying.
Escape is a picturization of a bestseller which touched only casually upon the war.
That Hamilton Woman is a love story made over from an old movie. The fact that it tells of the romance of Lord Nelson is “purely coincidental.”
The Great Dictator resolved our fearful and troubled hearts into good healthy laughter.
Sergeant York is not a war picture in essence. It gives far greater accent to sequences not in any way related to war. It does not even HINT of the present war. It is a story of one man’s heroism in the last war.
If these pictures are “war propaganda,” better close your studios, producers; close your printing presses, publishers; close your stations, broadcasters; and free speech and free opinion scurry for cover! The witch hunters are at large again!
Just why the movies are the scapegoat again is anybody’s puzzle. They are always the scapegoat. The motion picture industry has put forth one of the finest efforts of the past two years, on meeting the crisis of war. Cut off from normal distribution, threatened with strangulation, it went right on with “business as usual,” and risked the profits of a lifetime in order to keep the movie theaters going.
With a spirit of unexcelled cooperation, the studios have assisted the government in an educational program which, far from inspiring war hysteria, has done more than any other agent to calm the public by informing it what is happening; what is going into our defense program; what we are spending our money for, paying increased taxes for, sending out boys off to.
Shame, hecklers!
Last week, I saw one of the greatest of these defense pictures: Dive Bomber. Photographed in inspired technicolor, produced in cooperation with the U.S. Navy (which afforded Warner Brothers unparalleled opportunity to set down the true picture of aviation in defense times), this picture could serve as a magnificent example of the service which the movies are rendering in letting us see what’s going on here.
That this and other superb efforts of the motion picture industry could be sued against the producers is as shocking as it is unfair.
WHAT, pray, would Senator Nye and his cohorts wish the movie industry to do? IGNORE as movie material the most topical subject ever vouchsafed it?
WHY THE MOVIES? Would this same Senate group recommend that the radio desist from giving the war news? The publishers desist from accepting the manuscripts of any authors who might dare to use the war as a background for fiction or nonfiction? The newspapers from allowing war news to make even the inside pages of their publications?
I assert: NOT ONE OF THESE is less culpable than the motion picture industry is; not one is less deserving of attack or Senate inquiry.
Senator Nye accuses the industry of “desiring a British victory” because it has a “stake” in it?
In God’s name, WHO HAS NOT? If feeling that a British victory is necessary to secure democracy on this earth is subject to Senate investigation, then, Senator Nye, you’d better begin calling more to your Senate hearing than the motion picture producers!
Since when has it been a matter of investigation for the free people of America to express sympathy for the war effort of the Allies? To devoutly pray for a British victory? To assert the “stake” we feel we have in Great Britain’s survival? To deplore and fear a Nazi world conquest?
What would the Senator from North Dakota have our movies espouse? A Hitler victory? Or would he be content if we but arbitrated that the movies devote one half of their war “material” to celebrating the benign effects of Hitlerism upon a subjugated world?
One pro-British film and one pro-Nazi film, equal footage to both? Is that the proposal, Senator Nye?