Main Street on the March! is a 1941 short film (20 minutes) directed by Edward Cahn and produced by John Nesbitt.
It is a quasi-documentary about the run-up to World War II. The film shows the regular people of a regular small American town. Their sleepy small-town life is disturbed by reports of war in Europe, and worse, a Nazi victory over France. The people of the nameless town do their duty, pitching in for the preparedness effort. That preparedness, as supported by Franklin Roosevelt, includes a massive build-up of the American armed forces: building hundreds of new ships, building tanks, building planes, and drafting million of men into an army that once numbered only 160,000 and did tank exercises by writing "TANK" on the side of random trucks. Finally, war comes with the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, but thanks to Americans on main streets all over the country, the United States is ready.
This film was originally meant to be propaganda for building up the armed forces, but when the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor while it was being made, the ending was changed to show America going to war.
Tropes:
- An Arm and a Leg: Nick, who owns the local steakhouse, lost an arm at Belleau Wood in 1918.
- Everytown, America: Deliberately evoked with a generic town and a generic Main Street. The narrator says that in San Francisco the street would be Market Street and in Chicago it would be Michigan Avenue.
- Extra! Extra! Read All About It!: How a newsboy sells a newspaper with the headline "FRENCH DEFENSE CRUMPLES."
- It's Raining Men: Stock footage of U.S. paratroops in training jumps.
- Narrator: John Nesbitt produced many short films for MGM in this era, and most of them were just like this, having action but little to no dialogue. Instead, Nesbitt always narrated the story.
- Sleeping Single: A random shot of a married couple in separate beds listening to a news bulletin.
- Stock Footage: Quite a lot of stock audio, in the form of Neville Chamberlain's resignation speech, a Churchill speech, a couple of Roosevelt addresses, and several recordings of news broadcasts from the European war in 1940. There's also live-action stock footage of Roosevelt giving a speech, as well as arms factories in production.
- Talking Heads: Three men—General George Marshall, Admiral Harold Stark, and civilian head of war production William Knudsen—address the camera and give amazingly stiff little talks about the need to support the war effort.
- Time-Passes Montage: Radio broadcasts mixed with newspaper headlines and stock footage mark the disastrous turn of the war in Europe in the spring of 1940.
