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Filtering by Tag: John Ford

What the Movies Taught Us About World War II Aviation

Chris Klimek

I wrote this fun piece for my day job. It appears in our May 2015 issue of Air & Space / Smithsonian, now on sale at Barnes & Noble and other fine booksellers and newsstands, as well as the National Air & Space Museum. It's our 70th anniversary of V-E Day issue, which – because it'll be out in time for the Arsenal of Democracy Flyover on Friday, May 8th (the actual anniversary) – includes pull-out Spotter Cards you can use to identify the silhouettes of the two dozen vintage warbirds that'll be buzzing over your head a few minutes past noon if you come down to the National Mall on that day.

For the record, I do think William Wyler's The Best Years of Our Lives is the greatest of the films I surveyed – if not the greatest flying movie – save for Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger's 1943 masterpiece The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp, which I had occasion to mention only fleetingly. (The photo at the top of this post is of Roger Livesey and Anton Walbrook in that film.)

Mark Harris's book Five Came Back was an invaluable resource for me while writing this story.

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categories movies
tags movies, World War II, Smithsonian Air & Space, aviation, John Ford, John Huston, Frank Capra, Michael Powell, Emeric Pressburger, William Wyler, Mark Harris

Memorandum No. 56: Watch Sex Hygiene, the movie wherein John Ford directed Superman and Batman

Chris Klimek

"Most men know less about their own bodies than they do about their automobiles."

John Ford, who made Stagecoach and The Searchers and The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance and who won the Academy Award for Best Director four times – not for any of the first-rate pictures I've just named – also made a sex-ed film for G.I.s in 1942, the same year he collected his third Best Director Oscar for How Green Was My Valley.

Okay, maybe that's only funny to me. Anyway, if you think it's worth 26 minutes of your life to learn how not to catch syphilis from – in the charming patois of Sex Hygiene – "a contaminated woman," you can watch this not-so-casually misogynistic but highly informative short above. Even if you're already fully briefed on how to protect yourself from the predatory vaginas of dirty, dirty whores, this film has at least two other things to recommend it.

1) It features the greatest reaction shots ever captured on film.

2) Eisenhower-era TV Superman George Reeves and Robert Lowery, who played Batman in the 1949 serial Batman and Robin, appear together briefly in an early scene, so if you want a preview of what next year's Batman v. Superman: Dawn of Justice will be like, well... it will probably be like this, at least in hair-gel terms.

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categories movies
tags John Ford, World War II, venereal disease, sex education, Mark Harris, Smithsonian Air & Space