Damn Yankees

An American friend recently told me a horror story about one of his ex-pat British acquaintances pulling their kid out of school in Iowa after he had been taught that World War II began on December 7th, 1941, with the bombing of Pearl Harbour.

This seemed to me to be business as usual: you only have to glance at recent history as portrayed by Hollywood movies to know that in Uncle Sam's eyes, we're all just bit-players in an unfolding American drama. But whereas we all used to be appalled by such cavalier misrepresentations, most of us have now grown so used to them we don't even notice them anymore.

Take, for example, the case of Objective, Burma!, Raoul Walsh's acclaimed war epic in which Errol Flynn and his apple-pie eating buddies parachute into Burma (unsurprisingly) and thereby single-handedly win the war.

Despite being granted an uncut A certificate in 1945 by the British Board of Film Censorship, the movie provoked such uproar among British audiences (many of whom were actually at Burma) that an international diplomatic incident ensued, resulting in Objective, Burma! being effectively barred from UK distribution for six years.

Hooray for direct public intervention! To paraphrase what Wes Craven once said about Last House on the Left, government censorship may suck, but if audiences take it upon themselves to storm the projection box, then that's community action!