I’ve watched quite a few old movies on AMC and TCM, and a lot of them are regular movies with wartime propaganda from WWII. I was wondering if there are any equivalent movies from Germany or Japan - I’m not talking about the straight propaganda ones that were like public service announcements, but movies with plots. I don’t recall every seeing any, but I’d think that there were at least some.
It would be interesting to see them, especially since the American WWII era movies I’ve seen featured really strong stereotypes of the enemy people - I’d like to see how we were portrayed in their movies.
Ditto to what Tuckerfan said. There were a few worthwhile movies made in Germany, Italy, and Japan during World War 2, but they weren’t war movies.
Of those that dealt with the war indirectly, Germany’s Ohm Krüger (1941) used the Boer War (1899-1902) to portray the British as clever, duplicious villains who massacred women and children.
I’m not just talking about war movies. For instance, I saw a pretty bad B-movie where a gangster joins the army to get out of going to jail and spends all his time goofing off at the local base, but then somehow gets involved in some plot with a Nazi spy operating out of a local botannical garden or something like that. It wasn’t a war movie, but it was definitely propaganda. Some of the ‘message’ parts made you cringe.
Neither am I. The Nazi government controlled the film industry and the flicks they cranked out are reportedly horrifically bad. The Germans largely stopped going to see them before the war even broke out, they were so awful. Why? Because every one of them had to glorify the Nazi party and the German way of life under the Nazi’s. This made for some pretty dull movies. Generally, the villian was always a Jew.
Neither am I. The Nazi government controlled the film industry and the flicks they cranked out are reportedly horrifically bad. The Germans largely stopped going to see them before the war even broke out, they were so awful. Why? Because every one of them had to glorify the Nazi party and the German way of life under the Nazi’s. This made for some pretty dull movies. Generally, the villian was always a Jew.
Some German war or propaganda movies released 1939-1945:
D III 88 (1939). War film about military fliers. Feldzug in Polen [Campaign in Poland] (1939). Documentary. Die Rothschilds [The Rothschilds] (1940). A key film of Nazi anti-semitism, a historical drama portraying the rise of the Jewish banking dynasty in Napoleonic Europe. Jud Suess (1940). 1737 popular revolt against the Duke of Wuerttemberg and his financial advisor, Suess Oppenheimer, a Jew. Bismarck (1940). Historical drama about the “iron chancellor” Otto von Bismarck, 1862-1871. Sieg im Westen [Victory in the West] (1941). Documentary in two parts, showing historical justification of the war, and the campaign on the Western front. Stukas (1941). War drama about dive bombers over England. . . . Reitet fuer Deutschland (1941). Patrioitic drama set in World War I. Ueber Alles in der Welt [Over Everything in the World] (1941). Adventure drama about Germans abroad at the outbreak of war. U-Boote Westwaerts [Submarines Westward] (1941). War drama. Der Grosse Koenig [The Great King] (1942). Historical drama set during the Seven-Year War, showing how the desire for victory must overcome hunger, death, and despair. GPU (1942). Suspense thriller about the Russian Secret Service. Junge Adler [Young Eagles] (1944). A fun-loving young man finds his courage training in an aircraft plant. Kolberg (1945). Historical drama about the self-defense of the German city of Kolberg in 1807 during the Napoleonic Wars.
Triumph of the Will and Olympia are important films by Leni Reifenstall. She’s still kicking (literally, she took up diving and waterskiing at age 70 or so!), though not making movies.
Olympia is the world’s first notable coverage of the Olympics and was done in a high artistic style. She used many original and difficult shots, and the importance is compounded by the ironic fact that the last Olympics were done in… L.A., where no one really was interested in making such a film.
They actually had a copy of Jud Suess at the video store I used to go to in Austin, but I never rented it.
I read a book once (Sharks and Little Fish by Wolfgang Otto) about the lives of some U-boat crewmen. At one point, after the crewmen have been through some real battles, they go to see a movie on shore leave. The movie is about U-boats, and there’s a scene where a boat’s being attacked with depth charges. In the movie the sound of depth charges exploding outside the submarine is just a tiny little ‘ping’ compared to the deafening roar that you hear in real life. The sailors are so pissed off by this that they get up and walk out of the movie.
For what little it’s worth, I’ve heard that most Japanese films, thinly disguised propaganda or otherwise, from before 1946 just don’t exist anymore (with the big exception being the best known version of The 47 Ronin). Too much devistation and too little distribution of what films existed from what I understand. Of course that’s just a little bit I’ve culled from various things on Akira Kurasawa I’ve read/seen that mention the pre-war state of the Japanese film industry but I noticed that no one had checked in yet on the Pacific side of the Axis yet…