THE FIGHTING LADY

New Zealand Listener, Volume 13, Issue 321, 17 August 1945, Page 18

THE FIGHTING LADY

(U.S. Navy-20th Century Fox)

HE other week I wrote with enthusiasm about a short documentary film called To the Shores of Iwo Jima. Since then I have seen two others of

the same sort. One of them, Battle of Britain, was an old film, and there is no point now in describing it in detail. It belongs to a series called "Why We Fight," produced for the American Office of War Information by Frank Capra, and it is enough to say that no more moving tribute to the courage of the people of Britain in the dark days of 1940 has come out of this war. I suppose I should have seen it before, but I hadn’t; for although Battle of Britain has apparently been widely shown to the Forces and also been given a number of special screenings to civilian groups, I can find no record that it, or the other films in this series, has ever been circulated for general exhibition in this country in the ordinary commercial way. In other words, perhaps one person in 1000 in New Zealand has had the opportunity to see Battle of Britain, whereas it should have been seen by at last one in 50. Something is wrong somewhere with our distribution system when this kind of thing happens. And it happens far too often. a ok te THE FIGHTING LADY, however, has been generally released, and by running two weeks as the main attraction at a Wellington theatre confounded those who contend that the chief reason why such films are not shown more often to the public is because the public does not want to see them. Of course, if one were to accept the average film showman’s idea of "what the public wants," The Fighting Lady would certainly seem to be box-office poison. It is simply the factual, made-on-the-spot account of about 14 months in the life of an American aircraft-carrier in the Pacific war. No blondes in the bomb-racks; no theme songs; no orations on the Four Freedoms; no love-versus-duty melodrama; no secret agent stowed away with a timebomb in his pocket. Not a trace, in fact, of the conventional material of screen entertainment; only the solid substance of real experience-the monotony

waiting for action; the complicated detail of life in a huge floating, self-contained community; the take-off of the planes for the attack; the incredible pattern of aerial combat, repeated and repeated with mounting fury and excitement. All this is presented in vivid technicolour, with the cameras shooting through the gun apertures of the planes, so that the onlooker in the theatre is right there in the thick of it, watching the bombs go down on little green islands in the bright blue sea, seeing the anti-aircraft fire come floating lazily up to meet him. * * * LL three of these documentaries I have mentioned-about Iwo Jima, Britain, and the air war against Japanare, I imagine, highly effective as war propaganda. But it is the post-war effect of such films that most interests me. The entertainment industry cannot remain entirely unimpressed by the documentary technique which has received such a fillip during this war; indeed in Britain we can already note its influence on the ordinary feature film. Productions like Battle of Britain and The Fighting Lady are, I believe, moulding the shape of the motion-picture for perhaps 50 years to come. The newsreel men who have been in action at the front with their cameras, and the directors such as Frank Capra, John Ford, and Robert Riskin, who have for the past several years been working for the Government, using the film as a dynamic medium for recording actuality, are not likely to be content to go back after the war to turning out nothing but escapist entertainment devoid of social responsibility. These men, I think, may influence the cinema in the future in the same way as the newsreel cameramen of the Russian Revolution became the architects of the great Soviet school of silent filmmaking. ;