Underplayed Gems

The Big Lie (1951)

The Big Lie poster
Genre
propaganda film
Country
United States
The 3D catalogue: film cases on wooden shelves, with the cat sitting at the counter next to its greeting.

The catalogue in 3D

The film shelves have a room of their own that you can walk around in. The cat behind the counter is the AI Catbot, and they pick real films from the same catalogue when you tell them what you feel like watching. Nothing is for sale, here or in there. Go in from here and this film is already out on the counter, with more like it waiting on the shelf next to it.

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How it feels

This film was made by the U.S. Army to argue that the Soviet Union was as dangerous as Nazi Germany. It uses a side-by-side comparison of the two regimes, showing similar events like forced labor and political shows. The goal is to convince viewers that communism and fascism are essentially the same threat.

propagandisticdocumentary-stylecomparativepatrioticdidacticarchival-footage-heavymanipulative

What happens

The Big Lie is a 1951 anti-communist propaganda film produced by the US Army. It aimed to portray the Soviet Union as an aggressive totalitarian empire much like the recently-defeated Nazi Germany, and indeed begins with a quote by Adolf Hitler: "The great masses will more easily fall victim to a big lie than to a small one". The film links the communist and Nazi ideologies by showing scenes of forced labor, sham elections, kangaroo courts and parades held by the armed forces or by regime-controlled youth organizations: in each case a swastika-shaped wipe introduces an example from Nazi Germany, followed by a hammer-and-sickle-shaped wipe to introduce an equivalent example from the Soviet Union. (from Wikipedia, CC BY-SA)

More like this

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