WAR FILMS

Wairarapa Times-Age, 6 January 1942, Page 6

WAR FILMS

KEEN OVERSEAS DEMAND. £1,000,000 PROGRAMME. So keen is the demand abroad for war films made on the spot that British film producers have put in hand a £1.000.000 production programme, and a stream of films short and long is flowing across the Atlantic to the United States and Latin America. Among other plans for keeping up the output of British films, now threatened by service calls on stars, technicians and studio space, is a “pooling” scheme, to allow all these facilities to be shared out among the various producers. Moreover, the leading American film companies hope to make films in Britain with their own technicians, and so “unfreeze” the credit, worth about £5,000,000, they have built up there from film booking receipts.

Films now being shown or on their way overseas include “The Big Blockade,” part fictional and part documentary; “Ships With Wings,” about Britain’s Fleet Air Arm; “49th Parallel,” the adventures of a Nazi submarine crew fighting its way across Canada; topical Will Hay comedies like “The Black Sheep of Whitehall” and “The Goose Steps Out”; Tommy Trinder in “The Foreman Went to France”; “London is Burning,” showing the world’s largest city in flames; and, greatest of all, “Target for Tonight,” the film showing real-life airmen and irlanes executing a raid on Germany. A large number of “shorts” are also on their way.