David Charleston, once a world renowned journalist, now lives alone maintaining the Thunder Rock lighthouse in Lake Michigan. He doesn't cash his paychecks and has no contact other than the monthly inspector's visit. When alone, he imagines conversations with those who died when a 19th century packet ship with some 60 passengers sank. He imagines their lives, their problems, their fears and their hopes. In one of these conversations, he recalls his own efforts in the 1930s when he desperately tried to convince first his editors, and later the public, of the dangers of fascism and the inevitability of war. Few would listen. One of the passengers, a spinster, tells her story of seeking independence from a world dominated by men. There's also the case of a doctor who is banished for using unacceptable methods. David has given up on life, but the imaginary passengers give him hope for the future.
In September 1942, the film company Nipponeigasha released Sora no Shinpei, a 55-minute documentary on the training of the Japanese army’s paratroopers. The movie was supported and supervised by the Army Aviation Headquarters and clearly belongs to the genre of kokusaku (national policy) films that fully complied with the government’s wartime ideology. The film followed a group of young soldiers through all stages of their training, starting form initial gymnastics, parachute packing, leaps from a mock-up aircraft and a jump tower up to their first deployment out of a flying aircraft. The movie and its eponymous theme song became widely popular. It was even screened in the occupied territories with the local audience reportedly waving their hands and stamping their feet to greet “the saviors” descending from the sky.
Set in the shadows of wartime Paris, this 1940s drama directed by Albert Herman stars Lola Lane, Noel Madison and Howard Banks. When a Soviet secret agent discovers her uncanny resemblance to a dead Nazi spy, she infiltrates the enemy and works to save U.S. ships from German submarines. Assisting her on her mission are French underground agents, along with an American serving in the British armed forces.
The East Side Kids find a young girl in the apartment of a man who has just been murdered. Believing her to be innocent, they hide her in their clubhouse while they try to find the real killer. The killer, however, used a baseball bat as his murder weapon, and the bat has the fingerprints of one of the gang on it.
Sailor Popeye, faced with many menial tasks, fastens a couple of mops to the prop of his plane, substitutes water for bullets in his machine gun and goes about cleaning the deck of the ship.
This short film in support of the war effort focuses on the training and missions of Army Air Corps Captain Hewitt T. Wheless just after the U.S. entry into World War II.