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...
Malcolm Coates