| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 104.3

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 104.3 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Canada and the United States

Leslie Midkiff DeBauche. Reel Patriotism: The Movies and World War I. (Wisconsin Studies in Film.) Madison: University of Wisconsin Press. 1997. PP. xviii, 244. Cloth $50.00, paper $15.95.

In June 1916, as war engulfed Europe, Cecil B. DeMille coolly contemplated the probability of bloodshed on American shores. "I am taking every precaution possible," the film director wrote in a letter, "but, of course, a scene like this, will have its toll of injured, so if you happen to hear of my sending a good many men to the Hospital, don't become unduly alarmed" (p. 8). Eleven months before the United States entered World War I, DeMille was warning his producers about the hazards of employing 1,000 actors in full costume and weaponry (including "eight pieces of old artillery throwing roundstone balls") to recreate the 1429 storming of Les Tourelles for his feature film Joan the Woman (1916). Leslie Midkiff DeBauche neither comments on DeMille's reflection nor juxtaposes the sanguinary pursuit of Hollywood spectacle with the concurrent carnage on the battlefields of Europe. If DeBauche is overly clinical in her descriptions of and judgments about an industry characterized by excess, her book nonetheless astutely deciphers the imaginative and often devious ways the film industry, in a formative point in its development, turned support of the war into legitimation for its everyday business practices. . . .

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