Rare post-WWII movie highlighting soldiers dealing with shellshock now online
“The guns are quiet now,” is the first line in John Huston’s 1946 short film, “Let There Be Light,” which focuses on World War II veterans dealing with what we’d today call post-traumatic stress disorder…
Huston, himself a veteran and director of such films as “The Maltese Falcon” and “Treasure of the Sierra Madre,” filmed soldiers being treated at Long Island’s Mason General Hospital for what at the time was called shellshock.
A fully restored version of Huston’s original film is available for free online viewing for three months on the National Film Preservation Foundation’s website. And in a time when modern veterans of Iraq and Afghanistan are dealing with similiar issues, many believe that the 65-year-old footage can still be relevant.
“If you listen to the dialogue, it could have been recorded yesterday,” Melville told msnbc.com. She hopes that younger veterans will find something to relate to in the film, and says that that interested viewers can not only watch it online, but download the entire film and add it to their own websites, as the footage is in the public domain.