One Hell Of A Great War 1932 Revisited
 |
| Wilmington, Delaware's V.F.W. Supplies Uniform and Drum Corps For Downtown Bally Parade |
The Big Drive (1932) Is Precode's Censor-Proof Bloodbath
 |
| NYC's Mayfair Theatre Barb-Wires Marquee To Slam Over Blood-Guts Content |
posted by John McElwee at 12:00 AM
9 Comments:
Do these features still exist?
What gets me is that the theater booked a Clark & McCullough with it! Of all things! Well, they got the senselessness of war and the senselessness of Bobby and Paul, anyway.
I thought it was interesting that there is no producer or studio credit in the newspaper ad, which usually means an indie, and I appreciate your mention of First Division. This was the United Artists of the minors, taking on promising features and shorts, and sparing the producers from scaring up states-rights bookings themselves. First Division's major claim to film history is the establishment of the very successful "March of Time" magazine shorts. The series moved to RKO and then Fox, but its original distributor was First Division.
I can't imagine anything more obscene than watching actual footage of men in combat "bayoneting each other in the gullet" presented for amusement.
I have an extremely high tolerance but that is out.
It makes a mockery of their sacrifice and the sacrifice of those killed filming such scenes.
Thanks for reporting on this, however.
I know nothing of the history of such films, but could this and the copycats you noted have been a precursor to the gory "traffic safety" films of a couple decades later?
Never heard of this compilation film. Unlike many, I admit that I would have attended -- It may be of questionable taste, but I do find a fascination in the otherwise unseen.
A few times I've seen genuine footage creepily interpolated into a fictional film; that feels worse than a shocker that at least does lip service to the reality. Real aerial and navel combat footage turns up in war movies; that it highlights hardware and not the human airmen and sailors mitigates it so long as one doesn't think too hard.
Hire a vet fake a seizure... I gotta give these guys credit for marketing ideas. Good for the VFW for wanting the movie to run uncensored -- give people the truth about war.
Dan Mercer explores WWI documentary footage:
A. L. Rule may have said that the footage in “The Big Drive” was “the McCoy,” but I suspect that that was part of the ballyhoo, like getting a “shell-shocked war veteran” to have a seizure in front of the theater.
Rule passed himself off as a “colonel,” though he was never more than a private in the American Expeditionary Force. Given that such a title was usually appropriated by those in show business or politics, it could hardly be said to be an honorary one.
In truth, the remarkable thing about most World War I combat footage is how devoid of it is of what would pass for dramatic thrills in the usual melodrama. There are torn-up battlefields, distant explosions, big guns being fired, troops sheltering in trenches, and dead bodies. With machine guns deadly at half a mile and shrapnel cutting down everything within a three hundred-yard radius, it was difficult to get close-up, blood-and guts-footage with the equipment of the time. Most compilations mix in the real stuff with shots from training or maneuvers.
There are also re-creations. For example, in 1919 a film came out entitled, “The Lost Battalion,” about members of the of New York 77th Division who had been cut off and surrounded in the Argonne Forest by the Germans. It was supervised by Major General Robert Alexander, commander of the 77th division, and features many of the soldiers who survived the famous action. Even the carrier pigeon, Cher Ami, that got a message out from the beleaguered battalion, despite the loss of an eye and a leg, was used in the film.
In his book, “The War, the West, and the Wilderness,” Kevin Brownlow says that, for all of its flaws, dramatic and otherwise, “The Lost Battalion” was an honest attempt to recreate history and deserves more than the obscurity it has enjoyed. He also notes the following:
“The atmosphere might have been stronger with an entirely nonprofessional cast. Few of the details seem wrong, although the Germans wear helmets of a most peculiar shape, and the battle scenes are thin in the surviving print (at the Library of Congress) because the close-combat footage was cut out and used as newsreel in a 1933 compilation, “The Big Drive.”
So much, then, for “The first actual hand-to-hand trench fighting ever shown!” Even so, you’ve provided a fascinating glimpse of American showmanship at its most ferocious.
I ask again...do these features still exist?
Post a Comment
<< Home