Very odd and hastily assembled propaganda film made at the
outbreak of World War II that combines stock documentary footage with new
dramatic scenes featuring stars like Ralph Richardson and Merle Oberon. But the material isn’t just mixed together to
make it look like the actors are involved with real events; it’s presented in
unrelated segments, starting with a lengthy dissertation, bordering on
science-fiction, about the enlightened, utopian, pacifist nation England was in
the 1930s, and the war that was thrust upon it by Germany. In this post-post-modern era, people usually
fly off the handle when they identify something as propaganda, refuse to see
anything else about it, and either denounce it or ridicule it. But this attitude conveniently absolves us of
having to deal with the fact that propaganda and art are not always mutually
exclusive. Eisenstein’s Soviet films,
Leni Riefenstahl’s Nazi-era epics, and John Huston’s American wartime
documentaries all have a quite obvious ideological slant, but I’m not aware of
anyone succumbing to the political philosophy behind these films against their
will, so why are we so horrified by them?
The unabashed hyperbole and patriotism of The Lion Has Wings neither annoyed nor embarrassed me. I merely enjoyed the film as a product of its
time; the sincere reaction to a national crisis on the part of the united
British film community under the leadership of the great producer Alexander
Korda, who pulled his crew from The Thief
of Bagdad (1940) to rush this into production.
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