I Never Forget a Face

I Never Forget a Face (1956)

** (out of 4)

Somehow this later day Warner short picked up an Oscar nomination. What we basically have is Dwight Weist and Ward Wilson narrating a bunch of footage from the 1920s as they explain who the people are that we're looking at. I'm going to guess that the majority of this footage came from either newsreels or some sort of short from that era. We get to see several familiar faces including the likes of the Duke of Windsor, Warren G. Harding, Franklin D. Roosevelt, Al Jolson, William Jennings Bryan, Thomas Edison, Henry Ford, John Burroughs and Richard Byrd among many others. I think this short is mainly going to appeal to history buffs who will get a kick out of seeing the famous faces. There's some nice footage from the Rebublic National Convention in 1920 and some very good shots of Roosevelt. The most interesting thing will be for fans of INHERIT THE WIND as we get quite a bit of footage from the actual trial, which allows us to see the real people involved with the historic case. Still, the narration adds very little and this just seems like a cheap way to get a short subject out there just as they were basically dying off.