All This and World War II (1976)

Director: Susan Winslow

I've become increasingly frustrated with Disney's accusation of 21st Century Fox, as so many titles will likely be sat on as not being part of the House of Mouse's image. They are not good arbiters of preservation as even their digital preservations of films like Cinderella (1950) have been accused as practically altering the original work, so this is significant as particularly in the seventies 20th Century Fox produced some very idiosyncratic titles. They made the likes of The French Connection (1971) and The Omen (1976), but also oddities like Alan Arkin's only directorial feature Little Murders (1971) or Brian De Palma's musical Phantom of the Paradise (1974). Or anything Robert Altman made for them that wasn't M*A*S*H (1970) but also 3 Women (1977), based on a dream he had, and Zardoz (1974), the John Boorman sci-fi lunacy involving floating stone heads vomiting out guns, penis obsession and Sean Connery in kinky bright orange belts and nothing else. All This and World War II is a candidate for something that managed to be even weirder than Zardoz to have been bankrolled by the studio, and if Fox didn't destroy it themselves Disney are not the kind of company to let the public access these oddities freely.

Beatlemania is why it even exists. The Beatles were a cultural juggernaut in the sixties, a band who even when they stopped perfuming live and become more experimental in the late sixties still generated so much goodwill. Films with the band and based off their work in the sixties - A Hard Day's Night (1964) to Yellow Submarine (1968) - eventually bleed into the seventies when they disbanded in 1970, even a documentary about the notoriously antagonistic recording of Let It Be that lead to it in 1970. They had some diminishing returns, an early Robert Zemeckis film I Wanna Hold Your Hand (1978) more respected than say, Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band (1978) where Donald Pleasant sang I Want You to the Bee Gees. All This and World War II is much more notorious in a way as, whilst many don't know its existence, it never got a release since its 1976 theatrical release.

The documentary tells the tale of World War II, from the late 1930s as Nazi Germany invaded countries and Britain's attempts at a treaty through Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain fell through, to the involvement of the United States in the forties. This material is told through archival footage and films owned by 20th Century Fox itself, such as Tora! Tora! Tora! (1970), a Japanese-American collaboration telling the tale of the Pearl Harbour attack from both sides. This is not necessarily a bad idea, as you do see a lot of the period in detail. You see just how offensive and ridiculous some of the propaganda in old films were outside the context of the Japanese being the US' enemy, as white actors portraying Asian figures is practically surreal and barely accomplished, and aspects of how life was in the States particularly at the time which add layers to the time period that you don't normally get. It provides real documentary footage of fascination, even those offensive films a curious touchstone when the USA felt it needed to villainize the Japanese the rally against them as enemies in real combat.

The film gets bizarre as this is scored to Beatles songs. There were plans to use the actual songs, but with the prospect of being able to release a soundtrack album, which did happen and lasted longer in public consciousness, the production got a who's who of mainstream seventies music. Even Status Quo, the English personifications of Dad Rock, cover Getting Better alongside songs by Rod Stewart, Tina Turner, Bryan Ferry etc. Even Elton John covers Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds, a song recorded before and ironically with John Lennon playing on it under a pseudonym.

The issue, and where All This and World War II falls off the rails, is that most of the song choices are utterly inappropriate. Sun King arguably makes sense as a double pun on the Japanese army, with their first ever emperor Jimmu said to be a direct descendant of the sun-goddess Amaterasu, and the Rising Sun on their country's flag, whilst Keith Moon singing When I'm Sixty Four is fun in the knowledge Paul McCartney wrote that song in mind to the type of music from an early era like this, but most aren't like this and fail. That I Want You is never used for a recruitment segment is a missed opportunity, nor Back in the U.S.S.R. when Soviet Russia enters the war, is just the tip of the iceberg.

From http://www.midnightonly.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/01/allthis2.jpg

Instead having I Am The Walrus covered by Leo Sayer over the Pearl Harbour attack or the Americans in the Pacific War in combat is absolutely perplexing, as you now have to consider "the Eggman" (written by Lennon as pure nonsense to trick listeners) are now armed. Only a few times do the combinations work. Rod Stewart barking Get Back to Hitler in the Nazis' losing finale, with footage manipulated to make him and the goose-stepping soldiers dance, is one of the only successful moments¹. Most don't work because the lyrics are tonally inappropriate, the film making a misguided error to presume the chorus is all that matters, not that you still have to hear everything also. So Come Together is used for the involvement of the Japanese, whilst She's Leaving Home is used for the women working out in jobs or for the war effort.

The point of the documentary is a real question mark. It mainly comes off as nostalgic on the surface but streaks of subversion are found which undercut the entire work. It has a passage, significantly, which deals with the internment of Japanese Americans by their government which is a black eye historically for the States, a really bleak sequence of people being forced into camps, really racist language in newspaper extracts, and even signs of Japanese kanji or phrases from stores and cafes being removed and replaced. It's the best sequence but tonally alien to the film's whole.

That this production changed hands, director Susan Winslow not the original figure in that seat, probably explains a lot. Even some of the footage is jarring too. The aftermath of the Pearl Harbour bombings, and the initial footage showing the USA joining the conflict, inexplicably has a ventriloquist dummy enlisting in the army in a surreal publicity segment. Most of the film visuals tell a succinct tale under ninety minutes, but the juxtaposition with the music is at odds. Even if the documentary was meant to be very subversive, some of the tonal choices throughout do jar from everyone which does, with the former usually more frequent than the successes.

The result was, as mentioned, a film pulled after two weeks of a theatrical run. The soundtrack was much more successful, whilst All This and World War II fits the strange catalogue of films made in the seventies which were nostalgic for the times between the 1920s and 1940s, where Mae West's last film in her eighties was the car crash Sextette (1978), and old stars were repacked into TV and variety shows. This is a film, even with flashes of subversion, which is undeniably about the nostalgia of the era even if its accidental. The film also reminds you of how different a time the forties was, as stars like Jimmy Stewart are shown enlisting in the war effort, and even dealing with the racist propaganda films a peculiar nature is found of there once being a saneness to dressing a white man up and trying to pass him off as Asian as Charlie Chan's cameo attests to.

And the time capsule footage can be compelling, enough that this should've been made available.; even a minor tangent like the art painted onto airplanes, including some that would be too saucy to show outside colour footage that looks like home film recordings, has something of immense reward for me in terms of new details of the era. Seeing the ordinary world of the era, in among the celebrities and fictional war films, including a much appreciated James Mason cameo as a Nazi, is a virtue even if the film is structurally mishandled and the project misguided.

Abstract Spectrum: Bizarre/Haphazard/Nostalgic

Abstract Rating (High/Medium/Low/None): None

From https://i.ytimg.com/vi/nx_Wa-hpbjI/hqdefault.jpg

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1) Done later but done better, in its opening credits set to disco funk, of the wonderfully titled and awesome Czech sci-fi gem Tomorrow I Will Scald Myself with Tea (1977), a film deserving of a much wider fanbase and actual availability in the English language territories.