Watch Inflation For Free

The story-telling is good with flashbacks.The film is both funny and heartbreaking. You smile in a scene and get a soulcrushing revelation in the next.

The thing I enjoyed most about the film is the fact that it doesn't shy away from being a super-sized-cliche;

There's no way I can possibly love it entirely but I just think its ridiculously bad, but enjoyable at the same time.

Like the great film, it's made with a great deal of visible affection both in front of and behind the camera.

Inflation (1942) *** (out of 4)WW2 propaganda short features Ester Williams in a small role in her film debut. The film tells the story of how Adolf Hitler calls the Devil (Edward Arnold) and asks to make American's start spending more money so that their war efforts can be washed down the toilet. Mr. and Mrs. Smith (Stephen McNally, Williams) begin a shopping spree not knowing what they're doing to the country and their souls. It's rather amazing to see how far these shorts would go in terms of the war and one can't imagine any actors doing something like this today. Arnold wasn't the biggest star in Hollywood but he did have countless lead roles at MGM and was a fairly well known face. He is quite good in his role of the Devil and you can tell he's having fun. Williams is pretty much centered in a thankless role but she isn't too bad.

In this wartime short subject Edward Arnold looks like he's having a grand old time playing Mephistopheles planning with one of his number one supporters over in Germany the economic destruction of the USA through Inflation. I wonder if the folks at MGM from Louis B. Mayer on down knew that among Adolph Hitler's other interests was one in the occult. He may really have been trying to communicate with the devil, especially as the war started going against Germany.Arnold between chuckles on the phone to Hitler gives us a short economics lesson about how the evils of inflation can cripple the American economy and thus the effort on the home front to back our troops in battle. Actually not a bad lesson to learn right now as we are going through an inflationary cycle at the moment.Inflation is also significant as the screen debut of young Esther Williams. The former swimming champion and Olympic hopeful until the 1940 games were canceled had signed an MGM contract and went through the usual preparation back then that contractees had to go through. This short subject where she plays Mrs. Joe Smith American opposite Stephen McNally was a trial run so to speak. But Esther doesn't get near a pool.Anyway though to see Arnold ham it up and love every minute of it, put Inflation on your shopping list if it won't bust the budget.

Five months after WWII's Pearl Harbor, Americans were cautioned by President Franklin D. Roosevelt to curb their spending and to buy war bonds while he encouraged paying off debts and mortgages in a responsible manner.To thwart this common sense talk, we have EDWARD ARNOLD as The Devil, spreading his own version of what Americans should do so that they will be defeated by the enemy. In a phone call from his friend Adolf, he outlines his own plan after advising one of his associates to "put more heat on the 7th level".In an illustration of encouraging spending, we see Joe Smith (STEPHEN McNALLY) and his young wife (ESTHER WILLIAMS) going on a buying spree using credit for things they can't really afford. After admonished by storekeeper HOWARD FREEMAN, who turns on FDR's radio speech when the couple want to buy a new radio, they see the error of their ways.It's a sardonic morality tale, benefiting mostly from the relish with which Arnold plays his Devil role. His laughter is full of dark menace as his huge close-ups convince us that he wants his evil plan to work, happily engaged in causing a "Roman holiday of spending" and encouraging a man to cash in his $300 war bonds.In the end, of course, the Devil is outmaneuvered by smarter Americans who refuse to get caught up in black marketing, hoarding and cashing in their bonds--and the American spirit wins.Good little propaganda film spotlights Arnold at his best--or should I say "worst" (as The Devil).

A nice little short subject, sometimes rerun on TURNER CLASSICS, it gives Edward Arnold his one chance at playing Satan. Coming only a year after Arnold faced Satan (Walter Huston) in ALL THAT MONEY CAN BUY, here Arnold had his chance to be compared to Huston, Laird Cregar (HEAVEN CAN WAIT), Claude Rains (ANGEL ON MY SHOULDER), and others. It's also his only chance to be seen wearing a full beard on camera (pointed at the tip, and with eyebrows reminiscent of Eric Campbell's opposite Chaplin, but subtler). We see Arnold in an office behind a large desk, not quite as fashionable as Cregar's but (under the circumstances) respectable. He rises from his desk and introduces himself as the Devil, and explains how he can help people with all sorts of goodies like armaments, propaganda machines, goose stepping soldiers. Soon there is a phone call and he answers, and it is his good chum Adolf, asking for more assistance to defeat the Allies. And Arnold soon is explaining that he can help by encouraging economic suicide - inflation.The idea (seen dramatized in the short) is how by hoarding or buying to much and encouraging manufacturers to continue doing "business as usual", the public undercuts the war effort. It is an interesting theory, and has some validity. Presented here, with Esther Williams in her first role as a housewife caught in the realities of wartime economics, it is thoroughly understandable.Today, of course, it is Arnold's wonderful chuckly Devil that makes us like the short. As has been said on several of the other reviews, it is an interesting time piece of our own propaganda machine at wartime at work.Curiously, although Hollywood did not know it, the issue of "guns or butter" (as it was referred to by Herman Goering) was playing an odd role in of all places Germany. While the U.S. and England were sacrificing much to help their armed forces (and Japan even more), Germany acted as if nothing was happening until late in 1944! Albert Speer mentioned in his memoirs that the German economy was still producing luxury items until late that year - apparently it was in an effort to keep the German population under the assumption everything was going well (despite the heavy bombardments? - Hitler and his advisers had blinders on much of what they were observing). It was only when France (not Italy but France) was lost, and Hitler nearly killed in an assassination plot, that the Nazis started a belt-tightening policy that really was tight.