Of course we’ll examine these films as works of propaganda. How could we not? I want my students to notice the ways they distort real life, to pay attention to how they attempted to manipulate their original wartime audiences, and to have an eye for what these stories leave out about the nations they advocate for. And of course we will historicize the films. Whatever timeless qualities they may have, however much they’re able to speak to us across the decades about things that matter now and have always mattered, it is vital that we view them as products of a particular time and place and the preoccupations and worldviews of creative people of that time and place. They’re artifacts of the English-speaking world in 1940-1943. They help us look backward, in the manner of historians, into that world.
But for me, to say that these films are propaganda is not to discredit them, and to highlight the 1940ness of them is not to call them irrelevant. There really are contemporary connections. It is not difficult to imagine that Ukraine and Gaza are laced with Mrs. Minivers, that soldiers in combat today struggle with their fears and misgivings as the pilots in Thirty Seconds Over Tokyo do. In our country today, many people feel besieged and threatened in the same way that the original audiences for these films did. Can such people take inspiration from these celluloid relics? On election night last November, a person despairing about the outcome cried out on social media, “What do we do now?” Someone replied, “Go down to the bar and tell the band to strike up ‘La Marseillaise’” (referencing that stirring moment of defiance in Casablanca). By itself that advice is a nice expression of why I think it is a good idea in these times to watch these films and reflect upon them.
One of my guides through preparation for this course has been the book Hollywood Goes to War, by historians Clayton R. Koppes and Gregory D. Black, an account of the testy but fruitful relationship between the film industry and the war effort. Last night I was reading about the struggle to produce a 1943 film called This Land is Mine. It stars Charles Laughton and Maureen O’Hara, both of them teachers at a school in a German-occupied village in France. When I got up this morning I watched the film. Laughton's character, Mr. Lory, is a mama’s boy, timid in the face of Germans and their French collaborators, while O’Hara is rather feisty. One of my favorite scenes is when, through gritted teeth, she instructs her students in tearing pages from their textbooks that the new regime wants removed. When the task is over she tells the girls, “When you leave the room I want you to give me all the pages that you’ve already taken out of your books. The day will come when we’ll paste them back where they belong.” Hell yeah, Ms. O'Hara! For me that scene perfectly exemplifies how a war era movie can speak clearly and meaningfully to our present plight.
With good reason, This Land is Mine is not regarded as a classic of the World War 2 World War 2 film genre. It’s perfectly fine, but flawed. It's too stagey, too cheesy, even when one makes allowances for the high stakes the film's creators were trying to answer to. The trajectory of the story, of course, is for Mr. Lory to gain the courage to resist, and on the way there he makes a number of tiresomely introspective, overlong speeches about the nature of the occupation and his own internal struggles. Still, I do enjoy a story about a milquetoast finding the nerve to do the right thing. One of Lory’s chief inspirations is the head of his school, Professor Sorel, whose calmly defiant participation in the underground eventually puts him in front of a Nazi firing squad. Witnessing that execution is what sends Lory over the edge into speaking out against the Nazi regime, insuring his own noble death.
Early in This Land is Mine there’s a heartwarming scene where the wise Sorel talks a dispirited Lory through a professional and personal crisis. I’ll never forget that scene, not because it is an all-timer (trust me, it isn’t), but because I watched it this morning, on this day of all days.
Because of an accident of classroom geography I’ve had many opportunities the last few years to talk one-on-one with Paideia’s founding Head of School, usually just to shoot the breeze, but from time to time to be a recipient of his wisdom. These chats - nothing in them to rival the melodrama of Professor Sorel encouraging poor Mr. Lory, but encounters to be treasured nevertheless. We recently talked about the content of my new short term course, especially Casablanca, one of his favorite films. I'm sure when I conceived that class part of what was going on in my head was the hope that he would think well of the idea, that I could explain it to him in one of our talks and and get a nod of approval.
Not long after watching This Land is Mine this morning I learned that I’ll never get to experience another one of those impromptu conversations with Paul Bianchi. He died at his home last night. The entire Paideia community is in grief, everyone for their own reasons, but all us mourning. He was "we shall not look upon his like again" special. As Paul’s successor astutely wrote in an email to the faculty today, “The vision, care, and love that are required to conjure a community of learning into existence rarely reside as fully in a person as they did in Paul.”
At one point in that scene where Professor Sorel tries to give Lory a boost, he says, “It’s a wonderful thing to be a schoolmaster.” I suppose it is, especially if you're a great one.
