Show-Business at War

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.

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.

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.

A idealistic shipyard worker interests a beautiful Hollywood star in staging a musical tribute to the war industry, but they disagree on some important issues.

Borneo, 1941, during World War II. When the Japanese occupy the island, American writer Agnes Newton Keith is separated from her husband and imprisoned with her son in a prison camp run by the enigmatic Colonel Suga.

Ine Onoda, the eldest daughter of a poor family of farmers, raises a colt from birth and comes to love the horse dearly. When the horse is grown, the government orders it auctioned and sold to the army. Ine struggles to prevent the sale.

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

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.

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.

A debutante, a serviceman's bride and a girl from a military family join the Women's Army Corps.

Army sergeants Dave and "Fixit" spend a three-day pass in Pasadena, where they meet Janet and Cora, two young women who work in a parachute factory.

A WW-II defense plant worker gets knocked out and dreams about helping the war effort in various ways, including solving a crime.

In this WW II musical, a group of lovely college co-eds, realizing that there is a shortage of single young men, decide to begin rationing their dates so that all of them can have some fun. This is beneficial for the campus wimp who suddenly finds himself the hottest property on campus.

During World War Two, Daffy Duck owns a junkyard which collects scrap metal to use in building weapons to continue the Allied fight against the Axis powers. Hitler reads about Daffy's scrap pile and about Daffy's stated intent to win the war with junk and, after throwing a fit and chewing a carpet like a mad dog, orders Daffy's scrap pile destroyed.

The little-known Hunan Suining County is an ordinary but full of magical places. As the theoretical point of the rocket wreckage launched by the Xichang Satellite Launch Center, it has greeted the rocket wreckage from the sky dozens of times in the past 20 years since 1990. This mysterious and dangerous “out-of-town visitor” broke the poor and peaceful life of the 160,000 locals in the jurisdiction. 2008 is China's "Olympic Year" and "Aerospace Year." The people of Suining, like the people of the whole country, are looking forward to the Olympics to pay attention to the Olympics and are proud of the growing strength of the comprehensive national strength including aerospace strength. They also have to bear the fate of falling from the sky.