When Cinema Went to War

            During the Second World War, studios across the world took up arms and fought the war through propaganda films. In America, Frank Capra left screwball comedies to make the Why We Fight documentaries, alongside directors turned propagandists John Ford and John Huston. Some films used propaganda through narrative, such as Casablanca or Hitchcock’s Lifeboat. In Germany Joseph Goebbels commissioned a series of war films showing Wehrmacht victories, and in Japan a young Akira Kurosawa began his career in cinema by directing war films commissioned by the emperor’s government. In 1944, in both Britain and in Russia, two of cinema’s greatest legends made films that didn’t show the war that they were in the midst of, but rather adapted well known histories into epics to show their struggle in a larger narrative. These allied filmmakers made films about two of their greatest monarchs – Henry V and Ivan the Terrible – to rile the blood of their countrymen into a patriotic fury. Both of these films remain beloved classics, each with a 100% score on rottentomatoes, and are a pleasure to revisit today. 

           Henry V was meant by Britain’s ministry of information to be a morale booster in the waning days of the Second World War, drawing connections between the D-Day invasions and the 1415 victory at the battle of Agincourt. Britain’s most popular actor, Laurence Olivier, was given his first directing job with an enormous budget, and set to work recreating Shakespeare’s play to fit more in line with the war in Europe. Darker elements of the play were dropped, such as his execution of traitors and threatening to allow his soldiers to rape and pillage, while other elements are kept in but made to look ridiculous, such as the bishops cynical schemes of the financial needs for war at the play’s beginning. The film has none of the mud or blood that Kenneth Branagh would incorporate in his 1989 post-Falklands adaptation; instead, Henry V is portrayed as a patriotic leader that unites all Britons as he delivers a mighty victory. In the play’s most well known monologue, Henry’s “these wounds I had on Crispin's day”, Olivier makes an arresting allusion to the glory of all soldiers: from Crispin’s day to D-Day. The film was an enormous success worldwide, and is seen not just as one of the finest pieces of propaganda, but indeed of all British cinema.        

        That same year on the side of Germany, Sergei Eisenstein’s Ivan The Terrible: Part I gave Tsar Ivan IV the Henry V treatment. In 1547, following a series of wars across a billion acres of land, Ivan became the first Tsar of all of Russia, thus becoming the father to the Russian state. Josef Stalin saw himself as a modern day Ivan, and commissioned an epic to be made about his reign, one where Ivan would be a stand in for Stalin. The film begins with the coronation of a young Ivan (Nikolay Cherkasov), while conspirators whisper their discontent nearby. “Two Romes fell, the third - Moscow - stands tall! Never shall there be a fourth!” shouts the crowned Ivan, as he begins to plot how he will unify Russia. There are a few epic battle scenes, but most of the film is about Ivan’s manipulative quest for power, such as when he fakes his own death to separate the loyalists from the sycophants in his inner circle. The film was a great success with Stalin, the Russian public, and the foreign audiences who saw it. Two years later Eisenstein completed Part II, which saw Ivan growing continually more paranoid; perhaps the depiction hit too close to home for Stalin, as he banned the sequel and immediately halted production on a third film. Part II was finally released in 1958, after Stalin and Eisenstein had both died.

             It is a hard task separating the layers of history involved in the making of these films. With both films, we have to remember we are watching and thinking of them in 2015; Henry V is a 1944 film adaptation of a 1599 play about events that took place in 1415, and Ivan the Terrible is a 1944 film about events that took place in the mid sixteenth century. Most people do not know the details of the lives of Henry V or Ivan the Terrible, and the facts were manipulated in effort to make propaganda, creating a tangled mess of history and fiction. Underneath all of it is Henry V and Ivan IV, real people who did real things, but have long since become quasi-mythical. Whenever history is turned from facts to narrative it has the ability to become propaganda, so it is always important to keep in mind what the films are trying to achieve.
             I would like to end by saying that Judith Buchanan, Professor of Film and Literature at the University of York, has given three public lectures now on Henry V, and I have attended every one of them, drawing inspiration for this article from her lectures. It would feel wrong not to credit her.