Cinema, Also Showing Sep. 27, 1943

Arctic Passage (RKO-Radio) is a documentary short about the building of the Alaska Military Highway. It is the eleventh and one of the best of RKO’s This Is America series (Private Smith of the U.S.A., Air Crew, etc.), which are among the liveliest and best of U.S. fact films. In 20 minutes this show manages to give a vivid impression of one of the toughest rush-construction jobs ever undertaken—the building of 1,500 miles of road by 12,000 men in seven months.

Onetime newsreel cameraman-Larry O’Reilly, first U.S. studio photographer to cover the Highway, brought home and boiled down some 30,000 ft. of scoop. His honest excitement both on location and in the cutting room give the film its crisp, uncommon energy. Most notable is O’Reilly’s success in depicting two essential opposites simultaneously: 1) the obstinate, difficult bucking of tremendous obstacles (mud, wilderness, green crews who had to be trained on the spot); 2) continuous, violent, swift movement northwards (with the camera leaping from planes to trucks to trains to boats to bulldozers). It is this ceaseless, driving movement—which was the essence of the project—that imparts a quality of great valor to the workers, their machines, their lonely towns and camps, the prodigious country they work in.