Show-Business at War

Esther Johnson’s film uses local archive footage to convey the story of Sunderland's involvement in the First World War, from the men who fought in the fields to those who stayed behind to work in the region’s shipyards and munitions factories.

September 3rd, 1939. Britain and France declare war on Nazi Germany, only two days after the Wehrmacht invades Poland. This day, the sad date when the fate of the world changed forever, the Phoney War began: eight months of uncertainty, preparations, evacuations and skirmishes.

They raised children, baked cakes... and built world-class fighter planes. Sixty years ago, thousands of women from Thunder Bay and the Prairies donned trousers, packed lunch pails and took up rivet guns to participate in the greatest industrial war effort in Canadian history. Like many other factories across the country from 1939 to 1945, the shop floor at Fort William's Canadian Car and Foundry was transformed from an all-male workforce to one with forty percent female workers.

Stan Laurel and Oliver Hardy are stopped by narrator Pete Smith for the purpose of showing the audience how much wood and wood by-products the average person carries.

This early public information film puts out an appeal for more women to take up munitions work - showing training centres, opportunities for work in the aircraft industry as well as the tempting prospect of a fun social life. (source: British Film Institute)

In the midst of World War II, Sherlock Holmes rescues the Swiss inventor of a new bomb-sight from the Gestapo and brings him to England, where he quickly falls into the clutches of the evil Professor Moriarty.

In 1943, several people enter, re-enter, and exit the difficult life of a Midwestern family whose patriarch has been called up to war, leaving behind his wife and two teen daughters.

At the height of World War II, the Germans begin dropping a new type of booby-trapped bomb on England. Highly skilled but haunted bomb disposal officer Sammy Rice must overcome his personal demons to defeat this new threat.

Ine Onoda, the eldest daughter of a poor family of farmers, raises a colt from birth and comes to love the horse dearly. When the horse is grown, the government orders it auctioned and sold to the army. Ine struggles to prevent the sale.

A idealistic shipyard worker interests a beautiful Hollywood star in staging a musical tribute to the war industry, but they disagree on some important issues.

Blind detective Duncan Maclain gets mixed up with enemy agents and murder when he tries to help an old friend with a rebellious stepdaughter.