Written by Eugene O’Neill and featuring the narration of Henry Fonda, “It’s Everybody’s War” was a short dramatic propaganda film produced by 20th Century Fox and distributed by the Office of War Information in 1942. The film is notable because of how it integrates re-enactments with newsreel footage. Some of the visually interesting moments that it shows (at the 1:30 mark) some of the feeble pre-WWII training of soldiers including the use of “phony” equipment, the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor at 2:17, Manila bombed (5:40), POWs (9:36), idealized images of the United States throughout, with salvage drives, war bond sales, and industry working to save the nation.
The film is set up to show the chronological effects of the war on a typical American small town. Two years ago they sent off their company of the National Guard, but didn’t think they would actually go to battle. They first get sanguine letters home about training and being stationed in the Philippines, without a thought to the possibility of combat. Then the Japanese invade the Philippines. Over winter 1941 and 1942, one by one, many of the parents get telegrams from the government saying that their children have died. People start joining the war effort with bravado, but then slack off, taking days off work and wasting resources, until May 6, 1942, when Corregidor falls, and the rest of the company is taken prisoner by the Japanese.
The town then rallies, and more and more people go to work for war industries, go without luxuries to supply more materiel, and buy bonds. The next time that their company goes of to the front, they will have more planes, more tires, and better equipment, and they won’t have to surrender.
Eugene Gladstone O’Neill (October 16, 1888 – November 27, 1953) was an American playwright and Nobel laureate in Literature. His poetically titled plays were among the first to introduce into U.S. drama techniques of realism earlier associated with Russian playwright Anton Chekhov, Norwegian playwright Henrik Ibsen, and Swedish playwright August Strindberg. The drama Long Day’s Journey into Night is often numbered on the short list of the finest U.S. plays in the 20th century, alongside Tennessee Williams’s A Streetcar Named Desire and Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman.
O’Neill’s plays were among the first to include speeches in American English vernacular and involve characters on the fringes of society. They struggle to maintain their hopes and aspirations, but ultimately slide into disillusionment and despair. Of his very few comedies, only one is well-known (Ah, Wilderness!). Nearly all of his other plays involve some degree of tragedy and personal pessimism.
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This film is part of the Periscope Film LLC archive, one of the largest historic military, transportation, and aviation stock footage collections in the USA. Entirely film backed, this material is available for licensing in 24p HD, 2k and 4k. For more information visit http://www.PeriscopeFilm.com
