A nice little short subject, sometimes rerun on TURNER CLASSICS, it gives Edward Arnold his one chance at playing Satan. Coming only a year after Arnold faced Satan (Walter Huston) in ALL THAT MONEY CAN BUY, here Arnold had his chance to be compared to Huston, Laird Cregar (HEAVEN CAN WAIT), Claude Rains (ANGEL ON MY SHOULDER), and others. It's also his only chance to be seen wearing a full beard on camera (pointed at the tip, and with eyebrows reminiscent of Eric Campbell's opposite Chaplin, but subtler).
We see Arnold in an office behind a large desk, not quite as fashionable as Cregar's but (under the circumstances) respectable. He rises from his desk and introduces himself as the Devil, and explains how he can help people with all sorts of goodies like armaments, propaganda machines, goose stepping soldiers. Soon there is a phone call and he answers, and it is his good chum Adolf, asking for more assistance to defeat the Allies. And Arnold soon is explaining that he can help by encouraging economic suicide - inflation.
The idea (seen dramatized in the short) is how by hoarding or buying to much and encouraging manufacturers to continue doing "business as usual", the public undercuts the war effort. It is an interesting theory, and has some validity. Presented here, with Esther Williams in her first role as a housewife caught in the realities of wartime economics, it is thoroughly understandable.
Today, of course, it is Arnold's wonderful chuckly Devil that makes us like the short. As has been said on several of the other reviews, it is an interesting time piece of our own propaganda machine at wartime at work.
Curiously, although Hollywood did not know it, the issue of "guns or butter" (as it was referred to by Herman Goering) was playing an odd role in of all places Germany. While the U.S. and England were sacrificing much to help their armed forces (and Japan even more), Germany acted as if nothing was happening until late in 1944! Albert Speer mentioned in his memoirs that the German economy was still producing luxury items until late that year - apparently it was in an effort to keep the German population under the assumption everything was going well (despite the heavy bombardments? - Hitler and his advisers had blinders on much of what they were observing). It was only when France (not Italy but France) was lost, and Hitler nearly killed in an assassination plot, that the Nazis started a belt-tightening policy that really was tight.
We see Arnold in an office behind a large desk, not quite as fashionable as Cregar's but (under the circumstances) respectable. He rises from his desk and introduces himself as the Devil, and explains how he can help people with all sorts of goodies like armaments, propaganda machines, goose stepping soldiers. Soon there is a phone call and he answers, and it is his good chum Adolf, asking for more assistance to defeat the Allies. And Arnold soon is explaining that he can help by encouraging economic suicide - inflation.
The idea (seen dramatized in the short) is how by hoarding or buying to much and encouraging manufacturers to continue doing "business as usual", the public undercuts the war effort. It is an interesting theory, and has some validity. Presented here, with Esther Williams in her first role as a housewife caught in the realities of wartime economics, it is thoroughly understandable.
Today, of course, it is Arnold's wonderful chuckly Devil that makes us like the short. As has been said on several of the other reviews, it is an interesting time piece of our own propaganda machine at wartime at work.
Curiously, although Hollywood did not know it, the issue of "guns or butter" (as it was referred to by Herman Goering) was playing an odd role in of all places Germany. While the U.S. and England were sacrificing much to help their armed forces (and Japan even more), Germany acted as if nothing was happening until late in 1944! Albert Speer mentioned in his memoirs that the German economy was still producing luxury items until late that year - apparently it was in an effort to keep the German population under the assumption everything was going well (despite the heavy bombardments? - Hitler and his advisers had blinders on much of what they were observing). It was only when France (not Italy but France) was lost, and Hitler nearly killed in an assassination plot, that the Nazis started a belt-tightening policy that really was tight.