I've got some weird movies on my watchlist. I swear, I'm not just making them all up though. There's a method to the madness. The Battle of New Britain, for instance is pulled from the 1944 National Board of Review Best Of list. From 1940-1944 the decided to name best Documentaries, which they then stopped doing until 1987. It's an interesting snapshot though. Those years overlap almost perfectly with WWII, and the list of documentaries each year serves as a list of the biggest American war propaganda films of each year. I'm curious to have seen more of these movies as an academic exercise*, but I can say that The Battle of New Britain, despite only being an hour, was a slog. It's a pretty boring movie. For understandable reasons, the footage is pretty choppy. I wasn't prepared for some of the casual racism of it all. "Japs" isn't a tier one slur, but they say it so much that I really became aware of how much that has fallen out of use. I was gobsmacked when the film called the natives on the island "fuzzy wuzzies". I'd never heard that term before, but my immediate reaction was "I don't think you can say that."
*Notice the use of past tense there. I'm not looking forward to watching them. I'd just like to have them in the rear view.
So, this is a cool snapshot of war times, but I feel I could've gotten just as much out of a 5-minute newsreel.
Verdict: Strongly Don't Recommend
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