ABSTRACT
One of Hollywood's basic problems during the war years was the same one that had bedeviled the film industry before Pearl Harbor. Hollywood by and large knuckled down well to the problems facing home front industries in general and propaganda media. Although there were to be excursions into the territory of propaganda, Hollywood mainly contented itself during the war years with pictures of heightened reality and pictures of no reality whatever- both of which it was extremely good at. Indeed it was revealed at the end of the war that the Japanese had resorted to the propagation of outrageous lies in the attempt to stem the flow of inspiration emerging from Hollywood. Since American soldiers were not fighting in Europe in 1942 Hollywood films which dealt with the Nazi enemy were a mixture of warnings against fifth columnists at home, paeans of praise for the occupied peoples of Europe or stories of daredevil Americans behind enemy lines.
