Celluloid Front

Hollywood was willing and eager to help. In the long pre-war days the world's biggest cinema industry piddled around making training films for the armed forces, an occasional hammy patriotic picture of its own, tried its hand at box-office propaganda and got smeared by U.S. Senate isolationists for its pains. After Pearl Harbor, Hollywood pleaded with Franklin Roosevelt's Government Films Coordinator, white-haired, volcanically patient Lowell Mellett, for an important assignment.

Last week, four months later, Hollywood at last got its marching orders. They called for little more than a short hike. For Government account, the industry will make 26 shorts on war subjects provided by Mellett. Having set a man to do a boy's work, Mellett returned to Washington.

Just over the border the Canadian National Film Board, with no Hollywood to call on, is shooting more than 100 pictures a year. Its full-time executive head, voluble John Grierson, who prepared England's slick Government film setup, was busy visualizing the war for Canadian citizens with a series of brilliant documentary pictures that fitted a carefully preconceived pattern.

For its own celluloid front, the U.S. still has no pattern except that which Mellett will provide when he gets around to it. Hollywood's and the Government's few war documentaries have been a hodgepodge of patriotic appeals, expositions on tank construction, sugar-coated shots of training troops, etc. These films have failed to keep the U.S. public informed on the progress of the war, to tell it why tires have to be rationed, to relate the vast complexity of global war to the individual citizen's job, etc.

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