Louis De Rochemont

BBC Four’s new documentary takes us on a journey through more than a century of animation. It examines the creative and technical inventiveness of some of the great animation pioneers who have worked in Britain – trailblazing talents such as Len Lye, John Halas and Joy Batchelor, Joanna Quinn, and Bristol’s world-conquering Aardman Animations.

An aging actress travels to Rome with her husband; after he suddenly dies during the flight, she begins a passionate affair with a young gigolo.

A multi-studio effort to show the newsreel audience the progress of the Hollywood war effort.

A multi-studio effort to show the newsreel audience the progress of the Hollywood war effort.

Bob Sharkey, an instructor of would-be spies for the Allied Office of Strategic Services, becomes suspicious of one of the latest batch of students, Bill O'Connell, who is too good at espionage. His boss, Charles Gibson confirms that O'Connell is really a top German agent, but tells Sharkey to pass him, as they intend to feed the mole false information about the impending D-Day invasion.

U.S. spies catch a Moscow-born U.S. citizen helping spies, and they force him to counterspy.

When a kindly priest is murdered while waiting at a street corner in a quiet Connecticut town, the citizens are horrified and demand action from the police. All of the witnesses identify John Waldron, a nervous out-of-towner, as the killer. District Attorney Henry Harvey is then put on the case and faces political opposition in his attempt to prove Waldron's innocence.

The US Government tries to track down embedded Nazi agents in the States.

A newly promoted plant supervisor finds himself in the position of having to announce a layoff of his fellow workers.

An FBI agent works with a refugee scientist and the Coast Guard to crack a Soviet spy ring in Boston.

A sweeping survey of General de Gaulle’s Free France government-in-exile and the French underground resistance movement. From bold acts of sabotage in Vichy France and fund-raising events in New York to the activities of the Free French forces in the South Pacific and Equatorial Africa.

The Italian Communist Party in 1948: a force for progress and reform or the last refuge of a desperate population and a threat to the rest of Europe?

On July 10, 1936, the Time Corporation released the seventh episode of the second year of its newsreel series The March of Time, which included a controversial sequence titled “An American Dictator.” This segment, purportedly a journalistic exposé, centered on the rise to power and political career of then Dominican head of state Rafael Leónidas Trujillo Molina. The content of the short piece accused Trujillo of committing many politically motivated crimes, including murder, and caused a brief diplomatic crisis between the United States and the Dominican Republic. - Naida García-Crespo

On July 10, 1936, the Time Corporation released the seventh episode of the second year of its newsreel series The March of Time, which included a controversial sequence titled “An American Dictator.” This segment, purportedly a journalistic exposé, centered on the rise to power and political career of then Dominican head of state Rafael Leónidas Trujillo Molina. The content of the short piece accused Trujillo of committing many politically motivated crimes, including murder, and caused a brief diplomatic crisis between the United States and the Dominican Republic. - Naida García-Crespo

Postwar Farms (MARCH OF TIME) will interest not only farmers but also those numerous urbanites who wonder wistfully how they might make out on five acres and a prayer. General answer: there is a chance for small farmers, through rural electrification and cooperatives, but not too gay or sure a one. Few or none of the returning soldiers who look forward to farming can be absorbed on the land; and the small farmer at best is threatened by the expanding immensity of 20th-century big-business farming. Most impressive—and to many, most depressing—shots in the film show the implacable march of incredibly proficient machines across vast acreages of California and New Jersey, with human beings assuming a relationship to the soil almost as impersonal as work in great factories, or in the bull pens of great companies.

Life during wartime for Sweden meant a carefully balanced neutrality in order to avoid the fate of Norway. This newsreel explains the concessions Sweden made to the Nazis in order to remain neutral, while highlighting the ways in which the country was also helping the Allies and defying Germany.

From the ruins of Monte Cassino to the malarial swamps of the Pontine Marshes, this newsreel depicts the full extent of Italy’s devastation in early 1945. Reports on the Ardeatine massacre – a Nazi atrocity in which over 300 Italians were shot in reprisal for a Partisan attack on an SS regiment.

Justice or revenge? As Allied tanks rolled across Europe in October 1944, clearly in no mood for reconciliation or forgiveness, this film demands punishment for Germany as well as hoping for a lasting peace settlement. Includes footage from the entire conflict, as well as staged sequences.

Where’s the Meat tells in considerable detail where it is, where it isn’t and why it won’t be. There are glimpses of black markets and worried men in Washington, of sharp practices in stores and on the range, and of the small local butcheries which have crammed quick-freeze lockers with millions of pounds of meat, much of it bought point-free, on the hoof. The obvious conclusion: with the demand for meat almost twice the visible supply—despite the slaughter of cattle not fully grown—the best that can be done is not going to be good enough, for some time to come. The film’s approach to the problem, accordingly, is humorous as well as instructive. Best bits of humor: glaring samples of the sycophantic treatment accorded that “pampered citizen,” the local meat-retailer; almost lascivious shots of steaks and chops in all their old-fashioned glory, which might well be forbidden on grounds of mental cruelty to carnivorous America.

A successful invasion of Nazi-occupied Europe depended on intelligence from behind enemy lines. This report uses a mixture of dramatized reconstructions, captured Axis film and footage shot by the French Resistance to reveal life in Nazi-occupied Europe.

The history of the Corps, from Colonial times to the present day (1942, that is). The film's midsection details the arduous training procedure of the Few and the Proud at Parris Island and elsewhere. Finally, wartime newsreel footage is adroitly blended with dramatized re-enactments to illustrate the contributions - and the utter necessity-of the marines in WW II.

The Teachers’ Crisis (MARCH OF TIME) puts the pointer on one of the biggest U.S. problems—education. By narrative, charts and acted episodes, the film dramatizes the fact that, with public school enrollments bigger than ever before, and constantly growing, the U.S. has fewer public-school teachers than it had in 1939. Of these teachers many are pitifully ill-trained “emergency” amateurs. (The film shows the too common spectacle of a teacher unable to work a problem she has given students.) Still others are psychologically unfit to teach (the film shows a stupid teacher calling a pupil stupid).

A tour along the Dalmatian coast, presenting the history, landmarks and cultural significance of the region.

The U.S. looks for lessons in the Spanish Civil War as it prepares for future conflicts

Fashion Means Business (MARCH OF TIME) compactly investigates that heavy, nervous industry which whets woman's desire to improve, with various fabrics and gewgaws, upon the pelt God gave her. The film ranges, within 18 minutes, from the elegant fountainheads of Parisian and U.S. design, to those frenetic dress foundries along Manhattan's Seventh Avenue in which as many as 100 identical garments are cut in a few swerves of power-driven super-scissors. There are also instructive glimpses of the machinery which stamps a season's fashions upon a whole continent at once: the fashion magazines, the provincial fashion editors, the out-of-town buyers. Respects are also paid to I.L.G.W.U., a strong, shrewd union which realizes that management's Golden Goose needs feeding as well as bleeding.