Movie-Made America by Robert Sklar

Author:Robert Sklar [Sklar, Robert]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-307-75684-8
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 1994-12-05T00:00:00+00:00

In the process of turning John Doe into a Christ-figure, Capra transformed the myth of his American hero into a defense of Christian morality. No longer is Shangri-La, the Tibetan retreat of James Hilton’s novel and Capra’s 1937 movie, Lost Horizon, the sanctuary for the Christian ethic: it has become the United States. After Pearl Harbor, the struggle between good and evil moved from the realm of an internal conflict into the titanic battle of fascism versus Americanism. And what was Americanism? It was the rewards of social stability—wealth, success and the girl for the hero; fellowship, happiness and trustworthy leaders for the rest of us. It was a religious faith in a secular social myth that found its embodiment in patriotism and American democracy.

Capra made the point vividly in The Negro Soldier (1944), a film he produced for the War Department in his capacity as head of wartime film propaganda for the Armed Forces. It tells its story through the device of a worship service in a black church; while its capsule summary of black history never mentions slavery, it conveys the overwhelming impression that the black congregation gives its witness and sings its hymns in worship of America.

Earlier in the war Capra had begun production of the famous “Why We Fight” series of films explaining war aims to new soldiers and sailors. Disney, too, though not in uniform, made a large number of wartime training and civilian propaganda films. The struggle against fascism transformed his bad guy, Donald Duck, into a patriotic taxpayer in a cartoon short for the Treasury Department, Der Fuehrer’s Face (1943).

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