The Autobiography of a Jeep

Just nine minutes long, The Autobiography of a Jeep (1943) remains a charming, clever, and educational documentary short about the 2200-pound workhorse whose name comes from the words "general purpose." The film was produced by the Office of War Information, a federal agency created in June 1942 by combining other agencies via executive order. The OWI had a domestic branch and an overseas arm, and its mission was to use press, radio and motion pictures to enhance the public's understanding of the war, to coordinate the transfer of war information, and to serve as the point of contact between the government and the film and radio industries. In truth, the OWI didn't simply inform -- it created propaganda to build support for the war effort, most notably through its motion picture department. As OWI director Elmer Davis said at the time, "The easiest way to inject a propaganda idea into most people's minds is to let it go in through the medium of an entertainment picture when they do not realize that they are being propagandized." The Autobiography of a Jeep is a good case in point. We see a jeep's design, "birth," testing, mass production, and final use in various climates during the war. We hear the jeep, too, in the form of entertaining voice-over narration from the jeep's perspective that lends surprising emotion. The jeep is nervous during the testing phase, astonished when deemed successful enough to mass-produce, and proud when shuttling soldiers and dignitaries in and out of battle. President Franklin D. Roosevelt and King George make quick appearances with the jeep, as do such celebrities as Claudette Colbert and Laurel and Hardy. (The jeep recalls, "All of a sudden I found that I was a popular kind of character. I was meeting movie stars and we went out driving together.") Mostly, though, the film presents the jeep as a key contributor to the war effort and as aligned with the typical soldier. "Wherever you see one of us, the other won't be far behind," the jeep declares. "The American soldier and I got along fine, like a rider and his horse. We got to be pals." The jeep even seems to personify a soldier himself, starting as a nervous, underdog-like recruit, then easing his way into a military role via hard work, and enjoying the fruits of victory; if we all work hard and persevere, the film tells audiences, we can win this war. Many Hollywood professionals put their filmmaking expertise to use in serving the country during World War II, and the OWI certainly welcomed its own share of craftsmen. Distinguished screenwriter Philip Dunne (How Green Was My Valley, 1941) served as production head of the OWI's film unit, and two of his lieutenants were Irving Lerner, a documentary filmmaker who would go on to direct some narrative features including the cult film noir Murder by Contract (1958), and Joe Krumgold, a writer and documentarian. Lerner and Krumgold were the key creative forces behind The Autobiography of a Jeep. In an oral history interview, Dunne later said that the film "was [Krumgold's] idea, to have the jeep tell the story in the first person... But the guy who made it a good picture was young Gene Fowler, the cutter. Just the way he put it together, the humor in the cutting, the use of the film. He really made the picture." Fowler, who already had a solid career as a Hollywood editor, said in his own oral history interview that he was sent to Washington to head the OWI's editorial department, "but they hadn't [yet] told Irving Lerner, who was then the head, that he was being replaced." As a result, Fowler said, he was sitting around waiting for this to be ironed out when he came upon "thousands of feet of footage of jeeps sitting in a pile of film cans. Maybe somebody else was gathering the film to do a picture, I have no idea, but anyway it was all there... We ran it all. And then we got the idea of making The Autobiography of a Jeep... We [thought] it should be made silent, that it should be as self-explanatory as a silent picture. It was cut that way. "We started out to make a one-reel picture out of it, and it turned out to be a very full one reel. I took the music and cut it together on a single track. I think we figured a hundred and twenty-five music cuts in the reel. We ran it for the powers that be and they decided, by George, they were going to put some narration to it, which I didn't think they should. "Nobody back then really knew how to make documentaries. We had to learn almost from scratch. And the thing we learned is that you didn't write wall-to-wall narration, because pretty soon people start getting hypnotized by it and don't hear it anymore. I think that's one of the troubles with Jeep." The Autobiography of a Jeep was shown to civilian and military audiences, domestically and internationally. Philip Dunne later said it "was probably our biggest hit... When we showed it in France [soon after the Allied invasion], audiences shouted, 'Vive le Jipp!'" By Jeremy Arnold SOURCES: Douglas Bell, An Oral History with Philip Dunne (AMPAS Oral History Program) Douglas Bell, An Oral History with Gene Fowler Jr. and Marjorie Fowler (AMPAS Oral History Program) Paul M. Haridakis, et. al, War and the Media: Essays on News Reporting, Propaganda and Popular Culture Clayton R. Koppes and Gregory D. Black, What to Show the World: The Office of War Information and Hollywood 1942-1945 (Social Science Working Paper for the California Institute of Technology, 1976; held at the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences)