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For the last three years, the Hardy pictures have finished in or near M.G.M.'s top ten box-office pictures of the year. The formula that put them there is almost as certain as taxes: the assumption that 85% of the U.S. is God-fearing and oldfashioned, and likes to be reminded of it.
Ardent Hardyites, like fans of the more compelling comic strips, have come to accept the Hardys as real people. They write Actor Stone, in his capacity as Judge Hardy, for legal advice which he is unable to provide; they complain that their sons won't dress for dinner when Mickey doesn't; they bawl out the judge for giving him too much spending money, etc., etc.
This special interest has forced Producer Carey Wilson to keep a Hardy family Bible, in which he records the family's genealogy, ailments, income, etc., in detail. The correspondence that Wilson, Stone and Mrs. Hardy (Fay Holden) have to keep up is enough to give them secretary's cramp. So was the Judge's encounter with a forthright Midwest housewife who spotted him having a spot of whiskey at a Los Angeles hotel. She told him indignantly that such conduct didn't suit a man of his principles.
This Is Blitz (Warwick Pictures; United Artists) is a Canadian documentary film that both Hollywood and the U.S. Government would do well to scrutinize: it is an exciting, instructive account of blitz warfare, its cause and cure.
Blitz is a propaganda film dedicated to the principle that the way to kill the fear of blitz is to show people just what a blitz is. The movie is really an illustrated editorial, in which patient, intelligent narration is skillfully illustrated by camera shots. The sequences themselves are a neat compilation of captured German war films, Allied newsreels, and shots made by the Canadian Government film unit.
The organized, calculated devastation of blitz warfare is told to perfection by the Nazi military cameramen: the patient preparation of the campaign, backed by nine years of organized espionage; the propaganda barrage as zero hour approaches; the bombers annihilating bridges, factories, railroads, fuel dumps, the parachutists seizing airports; the Panzer pincers, followed by motorized infantry, surrounding the enemy; the artillery pounding him to dust; the systematic annihilation of everything inside the ring.
Some of these shots are familiar; most of them are not. Others, such as the look on the faces of Poles being selected for execution by fifth columnists of their own race, are indescribable. Having carefully explained the blitz, the narrator announces that the only defense against this attack is overwhelming counterattack. The picture then illuminates the Allied marshaling of forces for that attack.
Blitz is the work of voluble Scotsman John Grierson, now Film Commissioner of Canada, the pioneer of British documentary makers, and of one of his apter pupils, young (30), Cambridge-grooved Stuart Legg. With Grierson producing, Legg directing, editing and writing the commentary, the pair have turned out 24 documentaries, each one designed to make a major aspect of the war clear to Canadians. Now that United Artists is distributing the series in the U.S., it may perform the same service for Americans, who badly need it.