FILM PROPAGANDA

Wairarapa Times-Age, 11 September 1941, Page 6

FILM PROPAGANDA

ASSAILED IN UNITED STATES ALLEGED WARMONGERING. VIGOROUS REPLY BY MR WILLKIE. (By Telegraph—Press Association—Copyright) WASHINGTON, September 10. An allegation that four or five magnates in the motion picture industry held the power to feed the American people with propaganda engendering hatred against other peoples, was made by Senator Nye at the investigation by the Senate inter-State commerce subcommittee of alleged dissemination of war propganda by the industry. Senator Nye named the films “Convoy,” “Flight Command,” “Escape,” "I Married a Nazi,” “Lady Hamilton,” “Man Hunt,’ “The Great Dictator” and “Sergeant York” as films to be investigated. The senator tilted at newsreels, particularly the ’ “March of Time,” which he alleged was in some instances the purest kind of manufactured propaganda of the most brutal nature. He said that the motion picture producers had a selfish financial stake in a British victory, which influenced them to propagandise with films designed to bring the United States into the war. Mr Wendell Willkie, representing the industry, accused Senator Nye of desiring to create public prejudices against the cinema industry and thus attempt to force it to cease producing accurate factual pictures of Nazism. Senator Nye, he said, was obviously seeking to divide the American people into discordant racial and religious groups in order to disunite them over the United States’ foreign policy, which had been overwhelmingly approved by the Congress and the people.