Research, Analysis, and Memory

The Second World War was, it is agreed almost without argument, the largest and most consequential event of the twentieth century, perhaps even of modern times. Not surprisingly, it has been the subject of enormous literary output, including thousands of articles, books and, of course, movies. The catalog of books about World War II films has also continued to grow, with some authors seeking to place them in various historical contexts or to assess their accuracy, others cataloging them encyclopedically, and still others bringing to bear a variety of theoretical and critical perspectives. In this genre, the works of Robert Fyne are virtually unique: extended essays based on exhaustive research, analysis, and memory.

The wartime cinema-going experience was part of Fyne’s boyhood: several visits per week to one of the many nearby theaters where the programs changed frequently; the newsreels, comics and hastily-made B-movies; the main features in which leading Hollywood personalities fought against the enemy or experienced the stresses of life on the home front; and audience reactions ranging from rapt attention to derisive parody. Fortunately, Fyne was later inspired to look again at those productions and their exhibition, doubly motivated by his personal reflections and the perspective he had gained as a noted scholar. In The Hollywood Propaganda of World War II (Scarecrow, 1994) he examined American films produced during and specifically about the war, evaluating their success as efforts at soft propaganda and showing how they treated various aspects of the conflict.

In the first chapter of this new work, he summarizes the material of his earlier book. Then, in the six succeeding chapters, he extends his range to productions from 1946–2007. Proceeding chronologically, he also provides a framework that evaluates films with reference to conceptual categories, such as the period of “Victory and Memory, 1946–49” or the Cold War and Vietnam eras. Thus, he is able to assess the decade from the mid-1950s to the mid-1960s as a time of “revisionism” and to delineate the impact of cable television on the visual record in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. One of the most interesting and potentially useful features of the book is an annotated filmography of more than 200 titles

Fyne’s writing is extraordinarily fluid, creating a pleasurable narrative that entrances readers with its story-line and then, using a venerable tactic of the true raconteur, faces them with serious, even troubling, issues they cannot evade. He demonstrates his encyclopedic knowledge of the cinema as well as various interpretive schema, but his approach remains an intensely personal one. As he shares his own reactions to selected films—responses of both the youth and the experienced viewer—he reminds readers that being a member of the audience is never a passive affair, that modern spectators engage in a dialogue with what appears on screen no less than did the wartime ones. He is at his best raising questions, some directed at filmmakers, others at the watchers: “Can anyone doubt the influence of John Wayne, the tough American who never lost a battle?” “Did anyone on the staff watch this picture?” “How did World War II awareness fall by the wayside?”

His final chapter is a trenchant essay which suggests that, despite the pleasure he takes in viewing World War II movies both old and new, he is not optimistic that the reality created by future viewers of these films will reflect a sophisticated understanding of either the conflict itself or its representations on the screen. But, as in all of Fyne’s writing, the reader is never coerced, but rather is guided toward forming an independent judgment.