I’m currently watching seasons 6 and 7 of When Calls the Heart, which are set in 1916 and 1917. And they’ve yet to mention World War I, despite the fact that Canadians fought in it.
This got me wondering…while this oversight is jarring to those of us who are reasonably good at history, perhaps the years are less well known to the masses as the years that encompassed WWII. If so, it’d be even stranger for a creative work set during the first half of the 1940s to completely ignore WWII, right?
Can you think of any that do, though? By completely ignore, I mean make 0 mention of the war.
Brat Farrar by Josephine Tey. A wonderful book and a favorite of mine, but its timeline has been questioned by many readers wondering when it was supposed to have happened. It was published in 1949 and was set in the present (late 1940s).
The war is mentioned very peripherally (some very minor characters are said to have been killed in it) so it doesn’t really fit your 0 mention criterion. However, many key events in the book take place 8 years earlier, around 1940, including a major character supposedly running away from England to France as a young boy, on a day trip to Dieppe. He couldn’t have done this during WWII, but the book basically ignores the war. And unlike other books set in the late 40s, it doesn’t mention food rationing.
Off the top of my head, the only contemporary '40s movie I can think of that’s not directly connected to the war itself but still mentions it is His Girl Friday (1940). I was watching it the other night, and took immediate note when Cary Grant talked about “covering the war in Europe,” or words to that effect.
a separate peace basically ignored the war except for three parts …one where Phinney basically gives a version of the Vietnam war conspiracy war theory for ww2 the outcast joining the paratroopers and gets a section 8 discharge and right at the end where they’re in some ROTC type of thing but the wars almost over by then and the MC doubts they’ll have to go
Bit of a cheat, but Stella Gibbons’s Cold Comfort Farm (1932) is set in 1940, with a dashing hero flying his own autogiro, but no anticipation of the war to come.
It doesn’t seem that weird to me to not mention WWII if the plot doesn’t involve it at all. I would think most comedies, romances, gangster films, etc wouldn’t reference it.
How about “A Christmas Story”? The exact year is never stated but it’s definitely right around 1940.
Nope, the target time frame (it wasn’t specific) was late 1930s to early 1940s according to Jean Shephard and the director. It’s definitely not true to the author’s actual timeline, as he graduated high school by that time.
The film Brief Encounter (one of the greatest romantic films of all time, fact, for the record), set in England, was released towards the end of 1945, and filmed (in England) early 1945 whilst the war was still very much going on. It was even filmed up in Lancashire, away from major cities to avoid having to film during the blackout. There is no mention of the war at all – no soldiers on the trains, no blackout windows, no suggestion of rationing in the cafe they frequent - the war is completely avoided. It was based on a Noel Coward play from the 1930s, so I can sort of understand, but there’s no attempt otherwise to suggest it’s set in anything but contemporary England, when the war would have been everywhere.
Many of the great detective novelists were active during that time. If I were trying to hunt down examples, that’s where I’d be tempted to look. For instance, I don’t remember any WWII references in any of Rex Stout’s Nero Wolfe stories (but then, I may just not have read or remembered the right ones).
the only war i remember reading in Nero Wolfe was Wolfe was involved in some ww1 partisan group with the specifics never mentioned or if they were I missed it