Show-Business at War

Esther Johnson’s film uses local archive footage to convey the story of Sunderland's involvement in the First World War, from the men who fought in the fields to those who stayed behind to work in the region’s shipyards and munitions factories.

September 3rd, 1939. Britain and France declare war on Nazi Germany, only two days after the Wehrmacht invades Poland. This day, the sad date when the fate of the world changed forever, the Phoney War began: eight months of uncertainty, preparations, evacuations and skirmishes.

They raised children, baked cakes... and built world-class fighter planes. Sixty years ago, thousands of women from Thunder Bay and the Prairies donned trousers, packed lunch pails and took up rivet guns to participate in the greatest industrial war effort in Canadian history. Like many other factories across the country from 1939 to 1945, the shop floor at Fort William's Canadian Car and Foundry was transformed from an all-male workforce to one with forty percent female workers.

Stan Laurel and Oliver Hardy are stopped by narrator Pete Smith for the purpose of showing the audience how much wood and wood by-products the average person carries.

This early public information film puts out an appeal for more women to take up munitions work - showing training centres, opportunities for work in the aircraft industry as well as the tempting prospect of a fun social life. (source: British Film Institute)

The Devil works with Adolf Hitler to cause inflation in the United States.

In the midst of World War II, Sherlock Holmes rescues the Swiss inventor of a new bomb-sight from the Gestapo and brings him to England, where he quickly falls into the clutches of the evil Professor Moriarty.

In 1943, several people enter, re-enter, and exit the difficult life of a Midwestern family whose patriarch has been called up to war, leaving behind his wife and two teen daughters.

At the height of World War II, the Germans begin dropping a new type of booby-trapped bomb on England. Highly skilled but haunted bomb disposal officer Sammy Rice must overcome his personal demons to defeat this new threat.

Blind detective Duncan Maclain gets mixed up with enemy agents and murder when he tries to help an old friend with a rebellious stepdaughter.

This serious Pete Smith Specialty series entry encourages industry to hire people with disabilities to help with the war effort. As a boy, Ben Helwig was blinded in an accident while playing baseball. He eventually acquired a guide dog and now works in a defense plant.