Cinema: Land of Liberty

Last week Hollywood made its contribution to the U. S.’s two World’s Fairs—A 14-reel, 2-hr. 17-min., free-show cinerama of U. S. history pieced together from Hollywood historicals, newsreels, shorts and travelogues of the last 25 years, it was put out by the Hays office with the title: Land of Liberty. To compile it, 53 large and small cinemakers contributed 2,000,000 feet of film. The earliest: a newsreel of the Kaiser (1914); the latest: The Bill of Rights, a Warner Bros, short to be released in August. From this vast batch, Hays office experts and recruits from studios culled 1,000 excerpts from 125 films, and in the last two months Veteran Producer Cecil B. DeMille and Historian James T. Shotwell have worked side by side in Hollywood putting the pieces together with proper commentary and fanfare.

The result is skimpy where Hollywood has done little prospecting (Colonial days), rich where Hollywood has found the pickings good (Reconstruction, World War, etc.), authentic chiefly when the newsreel camera has the screen. More reliable as a history of Hollywood enterprise than as history straight, Land of Liberty recalls the cinema great from Griffith (America) to Disney (Building a Building), not forgetting Mae West (Belle of the Nineties) or the MARCH OF TIME. It opens with Roosevelt II rededicating the Statue of Liberty, scurries back 400 years to show why the early colonists left Europe, hits the high spots from then on. Main omissions: Depressions I & II.

At the New York World’s Fair, Land of Liberty plays daily at the Federal Building; at San Francisco’s, in the California Building. No competition for such Fair attractions as Treasure Island’s Dnude Ranch or Flushing’s Sun Worshippers, Land of Liberty is worth sitting through, if only for the kick of watching Liberty marching to Hollywood’s double-quick tune.