It was April 21, 1898, the day the United States declared war on Spain. Soon thereafter thousands of New Yorkers sat in makeshift theaters at vaudeville houses watching the Vitagraph Company’s version of the seizure of a Spanish government installation in Havana by US Army troops, an event that was still weeks from taking place. The flickering images rallied moviegoers towards flag waving and a sense of victory. Forget that the whole film production was fiction. The film Tearing Down The Spanish Flag is cited as the beginning of a relationship between motion pictures and propaganda. Anti-German propaganda films would … Continue reading War Flicks