Cinema: Revival: Oct. 9, 1939

The Fight for Peace (Warwick). When first issued for a short run in 1938, this brutal, literal, newsrealistic record of the war-torn peacetime between World Wars I and II looked like 63 minutes of unnecessary nightmare. Scripter Hendrik Willem van Loon, having cleverly piled up the horrors of four revolutions and four wars, rammed home his main point —that war is beastly—with more armless, legless, headless corpses than had ever appeared on a screen before. The mechanical, impersonal accuracy of lens and film was sickening. Though critics praised the picture, audiences stayed away. But for fascinated fans who saw it again...