Reviews of silent film releases on home video. Copyright © 1999-2024 by Carl Bennett and the Silent Era Company. All Rights Reserved.

World War I Films of the Silent Era (1916-1975)

Contents: The Secret Game (1917), The Log of the U-35 (1917), Fighting the War (1916) and The Moving Picture Boys in the Great War (1975).

Couched in the pacificism of Woodrow Wilson’s administration, the United States of America sat complacently back and observed the European war for more than two years. Kaiser Wilhelm II of Germany hammered at nearby countries and invaded others until pacificism was no longer a viable political position. The American Congress declared war on Germany on 6 April 1917. American soldiers left for Europe, and at home the American film industry willingly became a propaganda arm of the U.S. government. In the name of patrotism and freedom, actors fought enemy soldiers in trenches and spies at home and abroad, all to bolster domestic morale and confidence in our might and rightousness against the hated Hun. A barrage of war pictures and documentaries flickered proudly on American movie screens throughout 1917 and 1918. This collection of three silent era films and a modern documentary will give viewers a representative impression of what those films were like and what they intended to convey to American audiences.

Fighting the War (1916) is a two-reel film, released by the Mutual Film Corporation, that was produced by Donald C. Thompson, a 26-year old American documentary filmmaker. According to the DVD packaging, Thompson shot this film from February through June 1916 (while America was still a passive Great War onlooker) after having arrived in France with British forces on a Canadian passport. The film is straight reportage, with no discernable political position.

After a plain main title, the film jumps right into the images of the European war, with footage of Algerian and Scottish troops moving to the front lines of the Battle of Verdun. The footage captures troop movements and preparations, munitions handling, equipment transport, large artilliary guns, life in the French trenches, enemy gas measures, observation balloons (probably full of hazardous hydrogen), French and British aircraft, and actual battle footage on the ground and in the air. It must have been a thrill for 1916 audiences to see aerial footage, taken by Thompson, of a French town and the French countryside from 10,000 feet. Among the surprises for World War I laymen is the French Army’s use of compressed air machinery for rapid tunnelling under the German trenches, presumably to lay explosives. Also seen are French trenches reinforced with 40 feet of concrete, which could possibly survive to this day since they were so massive it seems improbable that money would have been spent after the war to demolish them.

The Log of the U-35 (1917) originated as a German war propaganda film, comprised of footage shot in April through May 1917 by German submarine commander Lothar von Arnauld de la Perrière during a wartime excursion in the Mediterranean Sea. A number of ship sinkings were documented, a few of them shocking in their destructive finality. The commander’s footage was assembled and distributed as the propaganda film Der Magische Gürtel (1917), a copy of which was captured by British forces. The film was copied and, in turnabout, used to fire anti-German sentiment in England and America. As noted in the DVD liner notes, the presentation here is a compilation of the 1919 British edition and the 1920 American edition of the film.

— Carl Bennett