Hearst Metrotone News

Like the best USIA films, The Wall distills political events into an emotionally clear and compelling ideological "story". In 1962 Walter de Hoog gathered footage from U.S. and German newsreel sources and crafted this taut short film about the first year of the Berlin Wall. Straightforward, keenly balanced narration portrays Berliners as "accepting the wall but never resigned to it". The extraordinary footage of the first escapes was propaganda enough-- His challenge was to make the politics human.

Short film which documents Marian Anderson's singing performance at the Lincoln Memorial.

Made during Prohibition and consists of a group of Federal agents destroying a cache of liquor.

People give their opinion to the report on the unpopular Dry Law.

Significant events from 1934, in the United States and abroad, are covered in newsreel format.

In an on-camera interview, Ohio working girl Mary Clowes explains that she is offering her hand in marriage to whoever can provide $10,000 to support her parents, who have since lost their farm and who, following the deaths of her two brothers, rely on her as their lone source of financial support.

Short newsreel on why personal thrift feeds the Depression.

A Hearst Metrotone prohibition newsreel.

This plea to reduce the growing numbers of imprisoned youths, with its warning from the celebrated warden of Sing Sing prison, is drawn from the October 1, 1934, issue of Hearst Metrotone News. The segment’s dynamic visuals, on-camera personal appeal, and extended length make the story atypical for a newsreel, but the form’s usual breathless pace is applied to a cautionary fable: the too-frequent “road” of youth from school through unemployment, homelessness, and crime and on to the gates of the penitentiary. -National Film Preservation Foundation

Newsreel story about the California “Bum Blockade”, a scheme which fell apart after 2 months.

President Harding and his wife paying tribute to a group of Indians (Fragment of a longer piece)

G.W. Wickersham, head of Commission, sums up it's findings for Metrotone.

Newsreel on the end of Prohibition.

A Hearst Metrotone News reel.