Army Champions

I am usually a fan of these Pete Smith films, but this one is really quite dull. His normally tongue-in-cheek commentary is replaced with something altogether more contrived as we see an array of guns at the disposal of American soldiers that get steadily bigger and more accurate as this repetitive ten minutes rumbles on. There are the usual "best in the world" superlatives, of course, and it all looks like a dawdle when nobody is shooting back so I suppose it might just work as a morale-booster for a domestic audience getting used to FDRs new armaments policy, but as a film it's archive you might have seen before coupled with an off-form commentary.

Pete Smith doesn't display much of his trademark snark in this Academy-Award-nominated short, in which he tries to convince the audience that the sort of physical training that American youths got in high school sports will enable them to fight in the forthcoming war.

1941 saw the first peacetime draft -- my father went into the army well before Pearl Harbor -- and all the studios were preparing for war by turning out short propaganda pieces like this. The Academy was responding by handing out a lot of Oscars for non-fiction short subjects.

Pete offers some straightforward information, a couple of jokes and a bit of double-talk, in which Bouncing Betties become Leaping Elizabeths. It's fast, it's furious and the visuals are all undercranked to make the recruits look faster and more formidable. Very slick.