Shanghai, Shambl

You are going to be shocked, but this is war

UNCENSORED

This brief caption, flashed on the screen, was all the warning U. S. cinemagoers had last week before the usually innocuous newsreel plunged them into such a bloodbath of visual horrors as few of them had ever imagined. Shown throughout the U. S. these were the first frankly gruesome newsreels of the Shanghai shambles to reach the U. S. Hundreds of feet of this hastily, dangerously made record had been ground out by cameramen under fire or within a few minutes after shellburst or bomb-explosion. They tell, as pitilessly as only the camera can, what war means to the flesh it tortures. Mobs stream to shelter from an air raid. After a shellburst in a crowded street, corpses bright with blood and rows of grimy bodies, barely distinguishable from the dusty wreckage, clutter the smashed sidewalk. Stinking human garbage (the street-cleaners have tied handkerchiefs around their mouths and noses), big chunks of it insufficiently wrapped, is dumped on open trucks. Later, as the trucks are unloaded, the still-warm, flexible dead are flopped out like a big catch of fish. . . .

Strong stuff for even a medical audience, these newsreels were, from the stand-points of both horror and history, in many respects the most remarkable ever shown. For if the utter freakishness of the new usage of fighting wars in town instead of in the country has vastly increased the peril of noncombatants, it has at the same time advanced the efficiency of news coverage of the hostilities a hundredfold. For instance: on the afternoon of Aug. 14, three Chinese bombers flew over Shanghai's Bund, accidentally or intentionally slipped two bombs out of their bomb-racks and blew in the fronts of both the Cathay and Palace Hotels, which face each other across teeming Nanking Road. Two hundred and twenty people were killed and mangled. And had the ghastly scene been directed in a Hollywood studio, the cinematography could scarcely have been handled better. The MARCH OF TIME'S Cameraman Harrison Forman, an aviator, explorer and author just down from Tibet, was sitting inside the Cathay when the terrifying explosion took place. The Hearst News of the Day's, Shanghai man, a daredevil called "Newsreel" Wong, was behind the counter of his camera shop, two blocks away. Universal's, George Krainukov, who had just had his camera shot out of his hand in the Chinese evacuation of Peiping, was also almost within hailing distance of the tragedy. As a consequence, the films these three got of the Cathay-Palace Hotel tragedy--most horrifying of last week's collection--have all the historic immediacy of the Hindenburg fire films.

Judged by the progressive destruction of a Lincoln Zephyr which, rammed head on into the curb, burns throughout Forman's, Wong's and Krainukov's films, Wong was the first man on the scene. (Presumably Forman lost time by having to rush upstairs from the Cathay bar to get his machine.) But, according to the best guesses of U. S. newsreel people, Wong must have been turned back by the police after making his first shots, for it is Krainukov whose camera turns in the most gruesomely inclusive report of the bombing.

The bomb which blew up the Great World Amusement Palace, and 500 refugees with it, fell so soon after the Nanking Road explosion that apparently no Shanghai newsreel man got on the scene before the awful debris had been cleared. But Wong, Forman and Krainukov were once more on the spot to film the gore when a bomb from either the Japanese or Chinese shattered the roof of Sincere Co.'s department store nine days later. Somewhat surpassed by his competitors in both the explosions, MARCH or TIME'S Forman scooped the pair of them with three other remarkable shots of the Shanghai shambles. He filmed a Japanese plane dropping a bomb on the native quarter, was the only one permitted aboard the Augusta after she was struck by a one-pounder. Better than that, almost miraculously he happened to be taking a night view of the Augusta when she was hit.

All Far Eastern newsreel men have not had the amazing professional opportunities of Forman & colleagues. Paramount''s Henry Kotani, a 40-year-old Japanese, went north at the beginning of the hostilities, was last week marooned somewhere behind the Japanese lines. Paramount ordered a West Coast man to hop for Shanghai. Hard luck of a different kind befell Fox Movietone's Bonney Powell. The Japanese found he was an intelligence officer in the U. S. Naval Reserve, and have had him under surveillance ever since the occupation of Tientsin.

Last freak in a wildly freakish situation which made the Shanghai pictures available to the world was the fact that the Chinese censors, who are among the world's most vigilant and who do not like -""even so moderately seamy a subject as the city's houseboat dwellers to be filmed for export, were as demoralized as the rest of the population when the shooting began. Photographer Forman was able to throw his cans of film to a departing friend as her tender pulled away. A Clipper brought his pictures to the U. S. in time for the MARCH OF TIME'S current issue, released this week. Wong and Krainukov put their films on the Clipper a week later.

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