Attack! Battle of New Britain

A typical war-time documentary about the battle for part of a South Pacific Island. It's in black and white, an hour long, narrated mostly by the reassuringly everyday voice of Lloyd Nolan, and made for a popular audience.

New Britain, like Guadalcanal and New Guinea, is in a tropical rain forest climate. It's thick jungle and it rains often, so there are no grand vistas, nothing darting across open fields. Everything moves slowly. Even combat is close and the enemy is masked by broad-leafed vegetation. To make sure we get the point, we can hear the cry of the kookaburra. New Britain may be a bit outside its range but not as far as Tarzan's African jungle.

There is some combat footage but most of what we see is behind the front lines -- the surgical tents, the stringing of telephone wires, the unloading of supplies. The action scenes are exciting and interesting in their own right, and they include the Air Force and the Navy.

The strategic situation is made clear by a few simple graphics, maps with moving arrows, so we're never lost.

Nolan's commentary is never dry or elevated. It's often sentimental and sometimes brief. If we see the soldiers or Marines drop and begin firing, Nolan may comment, "Enemy strong point." British actor Leo Genn adds some remarks.

The score is drawn from varied sources: the Marine Corps hymn, Gershwin, Rachmaninoff, the Air Force hymn, Adeste Fidelis (on Christmas day), Debussy, passages from the score of "The House On 92nd Street," Onward Christian Soldiers, and Anton Dvorak.

The film didn't win any awards. There were dozens of documentaries like this that were ground out. But, my God, what a terrible war they illustrate.

This is really an impressive war documentary made up of completely live action footage. These are real soldiers and this is a real invasion. Once you've seen this you can understand what all those war films have been trying to achieve. However, there are the unpleasant shots of dead Japanese soldiers and injured Americans and some blatant racism in the form of the 'nips' to the 'fuzzy-wuzzy' natives of New Britain. But it is extremely educational and does what a narrative simulated war film can not do. In my opinion anyway. You do have to put up with the blatant propaganda too but this actually helps put the documentary in it's war era context, providing an insight into social and political opinion of the time.

"Not ghosts from Pearl harbor but American boys - Tom, Dick and Johnny. The boys who used to play baseball in the vacant lot on Saturday afternoons, the youngsters who drove jalopies and sang the popular songs. You may have wondered sometimes if they'd amount to anything. Well, here they are giving all they've got." This piece of narration is typical of the documentary and can be annoying at times. The footage is amazing though and definitely worth a look.

In charge of shooting this film under Capra, and contributing much of the narration was Jesse L. Lasky, Jr. (here uncredited). He went on to write many Cecil B DeMille films (8 in all). While his father, Jesse L. Lasky was producing the films 'Mark Twain' and 'Rhapsody in Blue', Jesse served three and a half years in the South Pacific and his job in Combat Photographic was to make films for the American public to better understand what was happening to their boys fighting overseas. If the writing seems florid for today's taste, it was evocative then. Jesse came home heavily decorated, and after the war went back to work writing films in Hollywood. Pat Silver-Lasky