LITMIR.BIZ

Скачать книгу

of military documentaries in particular, the educational researcher Charles F. Hoban observed that “their use involved little or no expense to the user”; production, distribution, and exhibition costs were typically “borne by [the Army, Navy, Air Forces, and U.S. Office of Education], not by the user of the films.”³⁵ Corporations routinely acquired free prints for in-house use, including for explicitly “inspirational” and even “therapeutic” purposes. Businesses that had lost employees to combat were encouraged by the War Activities Committee to request filmed records of the deceased, such as John Huston’s San Pietro (1945), which featured men of the 143rd Infantry Regiment of the Army’s 36th Division, many of whom, after “playing themselves” for Huston, were killed in action in Monte Cassino.³⁶ Huston’s earlier documentary Report from the Aleutians (1943) was even abridged as a special “home movie” to comfort the father of one of its “stars,” a first lieutenant; with the blessing of the War Department’s Bureau of Public Relations, the Signal Corps covered the cost of Kodachrome processing (of “corded off footages”) by the Eastman Kodak Company.³⁷ Seven years later, the Army established a mere $30 licensing fee for each of a number of nonfiction films, which, sold to American television stations via a specialty distributor, were broadcast “over and over without further cost,” filling federally mandated public service time.³⁸

      This transformation of wartime documentaries into postwar television programs was widespread, and it represented the logical evolution of films engineered to be vehicles of military public relations—to bridge gaps between a professional-intellectual class (whose membership increasingly included psychiatrists and psychologists) and the so-called “common man” whose very ordinariness could be telegraphed through his traumatic symptoms. These, the influential Army Air Forces psychiatrist John M. Murray maintained, “could affect anyone”—even, he added, “Everyman” (thus evoking historian Carl Becker’s 1931 identification of “Mr. Everyman,” who, despite or perhaps because of his very “normality,” found himself “living history”).³⁹ Paramount’s glossy Lady in the Dark (Mitchell Leisen, 1944), in which Ginger Rogers’ high-powered magazine editor reluctantly undergoes psychoanalysis in order to resolve her romantic dilemmas, took a dramatically different approach to trauma, couching it as a distinctly bourgeois affliction—something reserved for an uppity “boss-lady”—and its box-office success seemed to portend a cycle of films predicated on the stylish trappings of the talking cure.⁴⁰ “Psychiatry in Technicolor,” read a promotional headline in Motion Picture Herald, which later claimed that the success of Lady in the Dark was “tantamount to a starter’s pistol signaling the opening of a new frontier for producers and writers to cross over and explore beyond”—a claim that David Bordwell endorses in Reinventing Hollywood, asserting that Leisen’s film singlehandedly “launched the therapeutic cycle.”⁴¹ But Lady in the Dark hardly broke new narrative ground in 1944, and its depiction of psychoanalysis can be traced back at least to the interwar period—and even to another Ginger Rogers film, the RKO musical Carefree (Mark Sandrich, 1938), costarring Fred Astaire as a psychiatrist who experiments with sodium pentothal. If the deeply derivative, altogether misogynist Lady in the Dark symbolized anything for filmmakers and psychological professionals fundamentally concerned with war trauma, it was a misplaced approach to mental illness—an advertisement for psychiatry as a wealthy woman’s pursuit, which films about “ordinary” yet “nervously wounded” men would have to counter, and quickly. The Austrian-American psychiatrist Jacob Moreno, whose work would influence that of Roy Grinker, John Spiegel, and many other doctors forced to confront war trauma, condemned Lady in the Dark as “abhorrent”—an albatross around psychiatry’s increasingly public neck, its commercial success demanding corrective depictions of trauma as anything but rarefied.⁴² Military documentaries about mental illness were, for Moreno and others, ideal ambassadors of psychiatric and psychological treatment. Their principal aim was to normalize trauma and psychotherapy as far removed from the sort of “feminine” exclusivity centered in a Technicolor extravaganza like Lady in the Dark, and their modest style was reinforced by their television appearances in the 1950s, which built upon earlier uses of the medium as an intimate therapeutic agent for “average Joes.”⁴³ In 1944, for instance, the Radio Corporation of America (RCA) purchased a series of newspaper ads touting television as “a daily reality” for thousands of servicemen then being treated in Army and Navy hospitals, where its subsidiary NBC telecast allegedly salubrious images of “the outside world.”⁴⁴

      While television stations were recycling them as nonprofit public service broadcasts in the postwar period, extending their strategic appeals to “everyday Americans,” military films were also serving as key instruments of private enterprise, helping to fill corporate coffers by legitimizing continued production and, moreover, the sort of alliance identified—as early as 1947—with the term “the military-industrial complex.”⁴⁵ Even the abovementioned “therapeutic telecasts” were intended to advertise NBC and RCA, which both insisted that the new medium was ready for massification despite concerns about broadcast standards. Such bold claims, which directly contradicted those of CBS and the FCC, depended upon the pronounced public relations value of media associated with veterans’ education and rehabilitation, even as they were clearly part of the process by which, as Herbert Schiller put it, “television prematurely was hurried into the economy by impatient equipment manufacturers and broadcasting networks, eager to sell sets and screen time.”⁴⁶ Anna McCarthy has documented the emergence of institutional advertising on American television, highlighting corporate sponsorship of public service programming, which was frequently designed to advance private interests via a liberal pluralist understanding of good governance.⁴⁷ Such interests were plainly compatible with those of the U.S. military during and after World War II, as “the future of advanced corporate capitalism” increasingly depended on “the efficient linkage of commercial objectives . . . and military conquest”—a “politico-economic structure” in a “powerful imperial system.”⁴⁸

      From the perspective of the increasingly robust military-industrial state, cheaply produced military documentaries were, in promotional terms, scarcely different from the two-and-a-half-million-dollar Lady in the Dark. Like the latter, whose tie-ins included a special fragrance by Dorothy Gray and a high-end men’s clothing line by The Kleinhans Company, military documentaries enjoyed numerous sponsors and generated at least as many commercial spin-offs. When the Allied co-production Tunisian Victory (Frank Capra et al., 1944)—which ads breathlessly described as “the real thing—filmed under fire!”—was exhibited at Loew’s Columbia Theatre in Washington, it brought with it a “mammoth military display” that took up the entire block and included trucks and Jeeps, as well as a large 40mm anti-aircraft gun and range finder in a “complete action demonstration.”⁴⁹ Reviewing Lady in the Dark alongside Wyler’s The Memphis Belle, critic Manny Farber seemed to miss this capitalist connection, arguing that the two 1944 releases “resemble each other only in that they are both color films.” In Farber’s reading, the style of Lady in the Dark “makes each shot look like the domestic interiors in linoleum ads,” relying as it does upon “the kind of costuming, interior decorating and makeup that occur most frequently in department stores’ windows.” He went on, “Scenes like the ones in the analyst’s office amount to displays of what the well dressed analyst and analyzee [sic] should wear, what the one should write with and the other lie on: a special pencil gadget that unhooks from the belt, and a great green-leather monster that curves so you don’t need pillows.”⁵⁰ The “smart, effective,” admirably “realistic” “opposite” of Lady in the Dark, Wyler’s The Memphis Belle in fact shares—and arguably even exceeds—the other film’s promotional imperatives, supplementing simple commodity fetishism with a more sophisticated form of institutional advertising designed, as Douglas Cunningham argues, to advance the political struggle for Air Force autonomy, precisely by presenting it in terms of anthropomorphic metaphors that made the titular “belle” seem in need of more appreciative (and more munificent) treatment.⁵¹

      If Lady in the Dark functioned to enrich Paramount while selling perfume and other fast-moving consumer goods, The Memphis Belle and other military documentaries had even

Скачать книгу