Total War in Britain

For a film that's credited as being based on a statistical report, this is a surprisingly engaging experience. Good use is made of cartoon-style graphics to illustrate the points being made -- an appreciative laugh was raised in the audience when black flights of German bombers flew over the map towards London, only to encounter two solitary white-hat defending planes and turn tail as rapidly as they had come -- but the figures are genuinely impressive ones, depicting an economy turned round in the space of a few short years into the dedication of 'total war'. Three-quarters of all British food was imported pre-war, and this was transformed into near self-sufficiency. Five million women mobilised into the workplace, into skilled engineering jobs they had never considered doing before. The film does its job in bringing the statistics to life and putting faces on the figures, using what I suspect is largely stock footage (a number of shots can be clearly recognised from earlier Ministry of Information releases!), and even to a modern eye is sometimes genuinely moving; I found myself less comfortable with the more overtly triumphal section at the end. I suppose Our American Allies doesn't inherently make for such a good story as Britain At Bay...

I can't help wondering just why this film was made, however. It's basically a potted history of the war that seems almost aimed at subsequent eras, yet it was being used to publicise a story that must surely have been well-known to wartime audiences: perhaps it was felt that the statistics documenting the strain on Britain and celebrating the efforts of her populace -- which are, after all, the intended content of the film -- needed some narrative context?