War Comes to America

The seventh and final film of Why We Fight. Capra's name is on it, with Anatole Litvak co-directing. The other six instalments were about the enemy and the fronts; this one is about America. It starts with immigration, summarises how the country was built and out of whom, and then arrives at its real question: why did a country that spent years refusing to enter the war enter it. Its most interesting move is the use of opinion polling. The film shows, year by year through the 1930s, what Americans said about going to war, and lets you watch the opinion turn. That is unusual for propaganda: it tells the audience that their own minds changed. Walter Huston narrates. Like the rest of the series it is assembled from captured footage, newsreel and archive material. Who it is for: viewers curious about how an American self-image was manufactured. Who it is not for: anyone expecting critical history. Segregation, anti-immigrant politics and internal division are either absent or dispatched in a sentence; the country is presented as united and innocent.