the house on 92nd street

I too read this film as a propaganda film - it promotes both gender-appropriate behavior (and morals) and a pro-America mentality. The things that really tipped the film into propaganda for me were the music and the scripting/narrator. I've found in a few films this semester (Primary comes to mind as one) that the music - what kind and when - is very influential. The opening scene of House on 92nd street uses an instrumental version of "My Country tis of Thee" as the camera moves from a long shot of the White House to closing in on the FBI building which unmistakably is meant to stir a patriotic sentiment. The narrator is Reed Hadley, who at the time had a very recognizable voice and narrated government training films, etc. His voice was recognizable as informed and authoritive and in house on 92nd that voice is definitely all-knowing, all-seeing, and leaves little room anywhere for interpretation, or misinterpretation, of the images we are seeing. The film promotes an ethice sameness/whiteness - as we tour the FBI building there is no discernable ethnic or racial variety among any of the employees, whereas the enemy, the Germans and those Americans who help them have qualities, such as an accent, a swagger, a style of dress, the puts them outside of the white anglo-saxon protestant mold we see at the FBI. The women at the FBI, and by extension in American, are relegated to secretarial roles, where they catalog and manage volumes of information exclusively generated by the male FBI employees. The women have no agency or imperative in the information, no personal relationship to it - and while managing and cataloging this information is an important and necessary role, it doesn't have to, in it's nature, be done by women alone - and there is no reason why these women could not also be scientists or investigators, and no reason why men could not work filing and managing the data - no reason, or course, besides sexism. I kept thinking about "Rosie the Riveter" during these scenes of women working at the FBI - about the fact that during world war II the government pushed for women to leave their roles of working in the home and recruited them to work in factories and in other roles normaly occupied by men (thus the "we can do it" Rosie the Riveter campaign) and alot of women enjoyed this opportunity to work outside of the home, have their own income, and to build a new skill set. When the war was over, however, the government urged women to leave these jobs and return to being housewives or secretaries or other jobs that were considered "women's work". I wonder if any of this was in the atmosphere during the making of this film.