Jan 6 movie: Army Air Forces Training Films. TCM showed a series of short films made during the war by the Army Air Forces. This sounded like it would be really boring, but actually it wasn't at all.
First we saw a recruitment film starring Jimmy Stewart, who was apparently in the Army Air Forces at the time, though he never said what he did. I gather that some actors in the military didn't seek special treatment (for instance Clark Gable volunteered at age 41 and was a pilot in combat duty) but others had pretty cushy jobs (Ronald Reagan worked in the press corps and never left California). They never said when this film was made, but we guessed it must have been fairly early in the war. Stewart's pitch was basically that men should join the Army Air Forces because you made good money, got good training, and didn't need a college education to be an officer. The optimistic tone of the movie was a bit shocking. Stewart made the war sound like a grand adventure and constantly used sports metaphors (like referring to enlistment as joining an All-American team). It made me think of a British recruitment film I saw a long time ago, starring Leslie Howard. That movie was much more grim, all about how the Empire would band together courageously in the face of terrible odds and so forth. Stewart's tone was much more "go team! rah rah!" At least Stewart didn't use cowboy metaphors. I guess that was Reagan's thing.
After the Jimmy Stewart movie was a narrative film about how captured airmen should handle enemy interrogation. The men are separated and one by one they fall for every trick in the book, inadvertently giving up tons of critical information about an upcoming mission. There's a nurse who pretends to be sympathetic to them and lets the doctor yell at her so they'll think she's on their side, another who poses as a prisoner, and so forth. They don't even know anything official about the mission, but they know a bunch of seemingly useless details which the Nazis trick them into revealing and then piece together in order to figure out the mission and crush it. The movie ends with the commander of the failed mission explaining what happened, then turning to the camera and saying "Don't tell. Don't. Tell. DON'T TELL!"
At some point I realized that I had seen this movie before, but the first time I didn't realize it was an army training film. I thought it was just a movie with no-name actors.
After this was a documentary made at the time about the Army Air Forces film division. This was really boring and I only watched about half of it. We also did not tape "How to Recognize the Japanese Zero," starring Ronald Reagan. But there was a clip of it in the documentary which made me wish I had taped it. Apparently it was another narrative, about friendly fire because of soldiers who can't tell the difference between their own planes and the enemy's. Now that I think about it, I may have seen this one before too.
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