Documentary Films

As a medium of entertainment, the cinema's development has been fast if faulty. As a means of recording history, its development has been practically negligible. Outside of THE MARCH OF TIME and exceptional newsreel shots, the cinema has largely failed to record most of the great events of the last decade. Last week, the simultaneous release of two documentary films served to suggest the possibility that the cinema in general might at last be waking up to its non-fiction possibilities.

Crisis concerns last summer's developments in Czechoslovakia. Photographed by Alexander Hackenschmied, assembled by Herbert Kline, with an accompanying commentary written by Vincent Sheean and recited by Actor Leif Erikson, it examines from a frankly anti-Nazi point of view what happened between Hitler's invasion of Austria and the Munich conference. It sets out to show that the Czechs in their difficult predicament did much better than they were done by. Prime difficulties of recording history on film are that: 1) history neglects to follow a shooting schedule, and 2) that the most significant happenings are often the least pictorial.

Much of Crisis is thus devoted to shots of urchins playing in summer camps, Jewish refugees from Germany and Austria saying "Thank you" to Czech benefactors, orators addressing crowds. Nonetheless, pieced together with considerable skill and photographically first-rate, the picture is a reasonably coherent photographic appendix to last summer's headlines. Effective sequence: Czech soldiers lugging cannon up a mountainside for the defense that was never undertaken.

The 400,000,000 concerns Japan's invasion of China. It was made by Joris Ivens and John Ferno, whose Spanish Earth was the best documentary film of 1937, and whose trip to China last year was financed by screen and literary celebrities like Lillian Hellman, Ernest Hemingway, Dashiell Hammett and William Osgood Field. Equipped with an accompanying commentary written by Dudley Nichols and recited by Actor Fredric March, The 400,000,000 sets out to show that China not only deserves to win its war but has a chance to do so, reaches a climax with the Chinese recapture of Taierhchwang.

Considerably more dramatic than Crisis in its subject matter, The 400,000,000 is photographically more exciting. Its principal defect is diffuseness in narrative method, overenthusiasm for old newsreel shots. Effective sequence: farmers, summoned by a Chinese Paul Revere on a horse, picking up rifles as they leave their rice fields to go to war.

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