LITMIR.BIZ

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“soothing” Americans made anxious by the traumas of modernity.¹⁹

      In many instances, what was good business for Kodak and other companies was good public relations for the military, particularly in the wake of World War I. Kodak was hardly in the habit of embracing films of which the armed forces disapproved, and its military contracts often precluded precisely this gesture.²⁰ In the late teens, however, the nontheatrical circulation of Arthur Hurst’s “imported” British documentary War Neuroses (1918), which recorded the treatment of severely “shell-shocked” patients at the Royal Victoria Hospital in Netley and the Seale Hayne Military Hospital in Devon, raised concerns among American military officials even as it inspired new therapeutic regimens.²¹

      The use of film to directly address war trauma was plainly discouraged during the reign of such far-reaching regulatory organizations as the Community Motion Picture Bureau (headed by self-proclaimed “motion picture reformer” Warren Dunham Foster) as well as the far more familiar Committee on Public Information (CPI, also known as the Creel Committee), both of which were dedicated to censoring anything that smacked of an antiwar or anti-military stance. At the same time, however, cinema’s realist potential—including its capacity to record traumatic combat experiences—was widely celebrated in accounts of “war pictures.” Thus the difficulty of disentangling war trauma (potentially a source of negative publicity for the military) from discourses of realism (increasingly employed to tout the military’s image-making capabilities) characterized the state-sponsored development of film production, distribution, and exhibition during and in the wake of World War I.²²

      These tensions between realism and public relations played out in a number of ways. With journalists routinely critiquing the capacity of visual media to “give rather too rose-colored an idea of the soldier’s daily routine,” the military was compelled to employ strategic doses of realism—often in the form of direct references to combat—in its recruitment efforts.²³ “It is a fact that the Government has nothing to conceal from any prospective applicant as to any feature of the different arms of the service,” wrote Major R. C. Croxton in 1913.²⁴ And yet the War Department objected to Vitagraph’s Lifting the Ban of Coventry (Wilfred North, 1915) on the grounds that the film, which is based on actual cases of social discrimination in the military, offered “a most unfavorable impression of the Army,” forcing the National Board of Censorship to intervene with requested cuts.²⁵ American involvement in World War I would only intensify these censorial pressures, even as it offered new opportunities for a realist portrayal of combat.

      For the military itself, producing realist motion pictures without so much as alluding to war trauma proved remarkably difficult. The Army Signal Corps began making films in late 1917, at which point it was tasked with producing a “Pictorial History of the War” that would serve as both proto-documentary “record” and reliable recruitment tool.²⁶ But the CPI, with its close ties to private industry as well as its narrow conception of “acceptable propaganda,” became the sole distributing agency for Signal Corps films during World War I.²⁷ Committed to avoiding conflict with commercial film interests, the CPI’s Division of Films often handed Signal Corps “actualities” to the American Red Cross and various state councils of defense, which tended to screen them free of charge to patriotic societies, schools, and churches.²⁸ Despite the CPI’s injunctions against “demoralization,” at least one Signal Corps film produced during World War I—1918’s His Best Gift—dramatizes war trauma (in this case, combat-related blindness); its emphasis, however, is not on rehabilitation but, rather, on the need to purchase “war risk insurance.”²⁹

      At the same time that the Signal Corps, in close collaboration with the CPI, was generally skirting the issue of war trauma, several commercial films were addressing it directly, if with disastrous consequences. In 1917, two pacifist films, Civilization (Thomas H. Ince, et al., 1916) and War Brides (Herbert Brenon, 1916), were banned by the Pennsylvania Board of Censors, who argued that the films “tended to discourage enlistment” by focusing on the traumatic consequences of combat.³⁰ After attending a screening of the latter film in Kansas City, Army and Navy recruiting officers asked the War Department to “suppress the picture,” citing its “disturbing” dimensions.³¹ In Civilization, all soldiers are, according to a title card, “grim specters of death”—individual agents of trauma in the age of mechanized war.

      Remaining a key referent in interwar attempts to sketch the contours of trauma, World War I offered a sort of shorthand for films that sought to plumb psychological depths. Set in the war’s immediate aftermath, the Howard Hughes production The Mating Call (James Cruze, 1928) features men who confidently diagnose shell shock in veterans exhibiting any hints of emotional distress. For its part, In Paris, A.W.O.L. (Roland Reed, 1936) uses footage of World War I in order to suggest a “traumatic flashback” experienced by a convalescing veteran—an approach shared by Ernst Lubitsch’s 1932 melodrama Broken Lullaby, which additionally depicts the startle response of a traumatized man who mistakes the sounds of a celebratory parade for the sounds of battle.³² Unlike Lubitsch’s film, the somewhat more disturbing In Paris, A.W.O.L. was not given a general commercial release in 1936 and was, instead, screened in special engagements organized by its sponsor, the American Legion, which hoped to raise awareness about war trauma and its lasting effects on veterans.

      Hardly unique, Broken Lullaby and In Paris, A.W.O.L. were merely two among a number of trauma-themed films produced and distributed in the interwar period. These included George Cukor’s A Bill of Divorcement (1932), which explores the relationship between war trauma and other forms of mental illness, as its suffering protagonist (played by John Barrymore) reveals that his “latent insanity”—a hereditary trait that threatens to strike his daughter (played by Katharine Hepburn)—was merely “brought on by shellshock.” Stressing that war trauma, which is all too excruciating on its own, can also exacerbate preexisting conditions, A Bill of Divorcement looks forward to the military’s postwar documentary Shades of Gray (1947), which insists that combat fatigue can “inflame” inborn neuroses, as well as to the Hollywood thriller Niagara (Henry Hathaway, 1953), which makes an identical claim in its depiction of a Korean War veteran. Consider, as well, Franchot Tone’s performance of shell shock in John Ford’s The World Moves On (1934), in which one man’s callous comment—that “war is nature’s way of eliminating surplus people”—inspires the female protagonist, Mary (Madeleine Carroll), to offer a powerful denunciation of the military-industrial complex, which functions, in her acidulous reading, “so that the guns shan’t go hungry.” Presciently denouncing what seem to her to be welfare programs for the military, Mary goes on to declare that “war is a disease—homicidal mania, on the grand scale, brought on by fear and jealousy.” For its part, the contemporaneous mystery film Charlie Chan in Paris (Lewis Seiler, 1935) suggests the sheer intelligibility of war trauma—the production of common sense about the condition—in its depiction of criminals who disguise themselves as the same “unfortunate relic of the war,” a pitiable figure suffering from “shellshock.”

      In the 1930s, the peace, isolationist, and anti-interventionist movements were united by a common commitment to raising awareness about war trauma, and individual antiwar organizations often produced their own films for distribution to schools, churches, amateur movie clubs, and fraternal organizations. These included Must War Be? (Walter Niebuhr, 1932), a production of the Peace Films Foundation that enjoyed a broad nontheatrical circulation (and was directed by the former coordinator of motion picture photography for the Signal Corps); Dealers in Death: The Story of the War Racket (Burnet Hershey, 1934), which implicates the military-industrial complex in the production of war trauma (as the narrator puts it, “Profits increased in direct proportion to the ever-growing lists of dead and wounded—stock prices and casualty lists skyrocketed together,” creating “a pagan holiday for the dealers in death”); Lives Wasted (1936), a widely screened anti-war drama produced by the New Film Group, focusing on the plight of a “crippled” and otherwise traumatized veteran living in abject poverty; and a variety of shorts and features screened through the Peace Films Caravan, whose portable 16mm projectors enabled screenings in an array of public locations, from town

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