World War I Sweetheart, Mary Pickford
[2K Monochrome Wallpaper — Prints best within 103 x 58 cm / 40 x 23 inches]
By 1918, the number of feature films that either principally or in large part dealt with The First World War, either on the battlefield or as a homefront issue, surpassed 200 of the 845 features produced in the United States. Plots for the war-related films ran the gamut from homefront dramas, comedies and melodramas, to stirring battlefield or espionage adventures. In the comedy-drama Johanna Enlists, actress Mary Pickford, then the biggest female star in the world and known as "America's Sweetheart," portrayed a bored farm girl who becomes the center of attention when a regiment of soldiers camp on her family's property. Stolen Orders, released in the same year as Johanna Enlists, was a film typical of the convoluted espionage adventures popular at the time, with the addition of actual war footage and newsreels of U.S. President Woodrow Wilson delivering a speech.
The early 1910s was an era that produced a large number of melodramas, and the increasingly popular theme of the tragic circumstances endured by a soldier, nurse or innocent farmer were well-suited to the war film. The war provided a suitable backdrop for melodramas such as A Daughter of France and The Little American, the latter in which Pickford shows her typically American grit when facing a firing squad in France, just as her German-American sweetheart, who enlisted in the German army, sees the error of his ways and renounces the Kaiser.
In addition to the large number of fictional films that relied on nineteenth-century plot devices such as coincidence, complicated storylines and exaggerated emotion the public also saw, for the first time, significant numbers of documentaries and newsreels of actual battlefield experiences. Beginning in early 1915, such films as History of the Great European War brought the war more vividly into the lives of civilians. Although the US government did not play a large role in the production of war propaganda films (as it would later do prior to and during World War II), it did make a few documentaries about the war, including 1918's Pershing's Crusaders, billed as the first "United States Official War Film."
Codi von Richthofen,
The Red Baron Gallery ©
World War I Sweetheart, Mary Pickford
[2K Monochrome Wallpaper — Prints best within 103 x 58 cm / 40 x 23 inches]
By 1918, the number of feature films that either principally or in large part dealt with The First World War, either on the battlefield or as a homefront issue, surpassed 200 of the 845 features produced in the United States. Plots for the war-related films ran the gamut from homefront dramas, comedies and melodramas, to stirring battlefield or espionage adventures. In the comedy-drama Johanna Enlists, actress Mary Pickford, then the biggest female star in the world and known as "America's Sweetheart," portrayed a bored farm girl who becomes the center of attention when a regiment of soldiers camp on her family's property. Stolen Orders, released in the same year as Johanna Enlists, was a film typical of the convoluted espionage adventures popular at the time, with the addition of actual war footage and newsreels of U.S. President Woodrow Wilson delivering a speech.
The early 1910s was an era that produced a large number of melodramas, and the increasingly popular theme of the tragic circumstances endured by a soldier, nurse or innocent farmer were well-suited to the war film. The war provided a suitable backdrop for melodramas such as A Daughter of France and The Little American, the latter in which Pickford shows her typically American grit when facing a firing squad in France, just as her German-American sweetheart, who enlisted in the German army, sees the error of his ways and renounces the Kaiser.
In addition to the large number of fictional films that relied on nineteenth-century plot devices such as coincidence, complicated storylines and exaggerated emotion the public also saw, for the first time, significant numbers of documentaries and newsreels of actual battlefield experiences. Beginning in early 1915, such films as History of the Great European War brought the war more vividly into the lives of civilians. Although the US government did not play a large role in the production of war propaganda films (as it would later do prior to and during World War II), it did make a few documentaries about the war, including 1918's Pershing's Crusaders, billed as the first "United States Official War Film."
Codi von Richthofen,
The Red Baron Gallery ©