The Fight for Peace (Warwick). When first issued for a short run in 1938, this brutal, literal, newsrealistic record of the war-torn peacetime between World Wars I and II looked like 63 minutes of unnecessary nightmare. Scripter Hendrik Willem van Loon, having cleverly piled up the horrors of four revolutions and four wars, rammed home his main point —that war is beastly—with more armless, legless, headless corpses than had ever appeared on a screen before. The mechanical, impersonal accuracy of lens and film was sickening. Though critics praised the picture, audiences stayed away. But for fascinated fans who saw it again last week, World War II had given the film new, terrible, urgent meanings. Pyramids of women's and children's bodies in Shanghai recalled Warsaw; mangled bodies in bombed Madrid forecast London or Paris.
Compared with what was coming, the opening shots were almost idyllic. Beside savagely marching, stiffly saluting Nazis, Fascists, Reds, the blotchy, jerky old jingo shots from World War I looked like throw-backs to a simpler, sweeter time. Beside tough Dictators Hitler, Stalin, Mussolini, the sword-rattling Kaiser and autocratic Tsar looked like kindly, slightly fuddled grandfathers. Beside the Communazi conquerors of Poland and the Moscow pact-makers (shown first as outlaws, later as dictators over a combined 240 millions of lives) the Versailles Treaty-makers (Clemenceau, Lloyd George, Orlando) looked unworldly and Utopian.
Unforgettable were shots of coolies heaping into trucks corpses like flopping fish; bodies with faces blown away bobbing down muddy Soochow Creek; mangled flesh being shoveled out of shell-shattered ruins. Unforgettable were the despairing faces of old Spanish women. Most unforgettable of all: a blood-covered, four-year-old Chinese child, sitting bolt upright like a doll on a deserted railway platform, behind him the charred beams of the station.
Though the picture ends with President Roosevelt pleading for peace, peace was the last thing The Fight for Peace encouraged. Audiences tough enough to stick it out until the last bomb-burst were as dazed as some survivors of the air raids they had just seen, or as fighting mad as others. For The Fight for Peace shared this much with great art—though it was unable to tell its audience what to do for peace, it let them see with their own eyes what Poet T. S. Eliot meant when he wrote: "I will show you fear in a handful of dust."