Robert Fyne (Ph.D., New York University), the author of “The Hollywood Propaganda of World War II”, raises an extremely curious subject, providing intriguing and rather important information about Hollywood’s part in determining the American Home Front customs, social behavior, and moral values. This book is a source of important knowledge for historians, social commentators and common film watchers. The book has a detailed filmography which is of a great value for those being intrigued by Fyne’s discoveries and statements.

Fyne discusses the issue of Hollywood’s movies promoting specific level of confidence and positive feelings to the Home Front. The author states that every single movie produced during the Second World War, the sum total of which is more than tree hundreds, bore a certain amount of propaganda value, being full of praises to accomplishments and successes of American fighting men. They have become constant reminders of Old Glory, mom, apple pie, and the St. Louis Browns, maintaining the clear idea of how all this eternal attributes of American society would come out of the war unscathed and triumphant. All those movies have they own particular methods of delivering a supreme message, yet they all actually did in a way.

Professor Fyne does not only reveal the existence of propaganda, but also makes a close insight into the nature of one. How successful was Hollywood production in its strive for influencing the impact the war had on American society? Due to the author’s profound study and examination of the matter, we happen to observe the true motifs of many of those WWII movies, facing numerous stereotypes, misrepresentations, falsifications and prevarications. Such topics as World War I impact, the diverse strategies toward the Italian, German, and Japanese military forces, the glorification of the Soviet armed forces, the representation of the Chinese nationals, the optimistic B-comedies, musicals, and Westerns, plus the American GI’s inside dissatisfaction with his fictional photoplay image are under discussion in the present book.

The book is extremely enjoyable. If you are not ignorant about American classic movies, you would surely care about the book. It goes into observation of such legends of US cinematography such as “Sergeant York”, “A Yank in the RAF”, “Sahara”, “Flying Tigers”, “Wake Island”, “Gung Ho”, “Air Force”, “Mrs. Miniver”, “Dragon Seed”, “Days of Glory”. Some of those films are really great, some are rather foolish and boring, yet they all have become an inalienable part of American history of World War II by now. What is truly great about the book is how it clarifies the true reasons that stand behind these films’ production. Professor Fyne tells about the Office of War Information (OWI) that was established with the purpose of keeping an eye on movies’ contents, probably affecting each film’s plot by setting specific frameworks and instructions Hollywood had to follow. The Office was founded by government, and did actually provided standards for war films industry to monitor Hollywood’s activities and to carefully watch and check a situation in order to see how films created to feed American society with particular information and ideas did reached their goal.

The book discusses such intriguing question as ‘why was Italy referred to as a nonbelligerent?’, ‘why were Austria, Finland, Bulgaria, Hungary, and Rumania never touched on?’, and ‘why was there no division of Russian ethnic groups?’, ‘why were Japanese described as someone hardly more than monkeys, while the Germans were simply depicted as dull buffoons, but not as violent racists? The book is very informative and rather unusual, which makes it a truly wonderful reading that I would recommend everyone to go through.