World War I (The Great War) Era Films

The pacifist mood began to change and the eventual US entry into the war in April of 1917 provided Hollywood with one of its greatest sources of plots - and profits. This was evidenced by the new hit song of the time, George M. Cohan's The propagandistic films served mostly as recruitment tools, and as emotional tirades against the enemy, distastefully suggesting that heroic American involvement would bring about victory, and serve as a crusade to 'make the world safe for democracy'. Americans were persuaded to buy 'liberty' war bonds, often by movie stars, to help finance the war.

Hollywood director D. W. Griffith's Hearts of the World was a sentimental, propagandistic film to encourage US entry into the European conflict of the first world war - it included actual battle footage filmed on location in 1917 on the outskirts of the war itself (with the cooperation of the British War Office and the French Government). Griffith's film expressed the effects of the war on a recruit, and displayed the viciousness of the Germans in the person of actor/director Erich von Stroheim, who played the part of a ruthless, cold-blooded, hateful officer - a "beastly Hun." The semi-documentary My Four Years in Germany (1918), the first real hit for Warner Bros' Studios, was presented as fact - it presumed to show the first-hand experiences of James Gerard, the American ambassador to Germany from 1913-1917, including his witnessing of innumerable and cruel German "atrocities" that were greatly exaggerated in re-enactments, although they appeared true when mixed with actual footage.
http://www.filmsite.org/warfilms.html