A Call for Arms! (1940)

Overview

"What a life for a couple of nudes!" Two dancers find a new way of doing their bit for the boys in this frothy wartime propaganda short. Lord Kitchener's famous finger persuades Joan and Ireen, dancers in a 'Non Stop Nudes' revue (not that we see anything that warrants that title), to make a radical career change. Swapping their skimpy costumes for dowdy munitions factory overalls, they join a growing domestic army of women keeping the machines rolling. Belfast-born Brian Desmond Hurst was essentially a feature film director, whose best-remembered work is the Dickens adaptation Scrooge, but whose credits also included the war films Dangerous Moonlight (1941) and The Malta Story (1953). The Call for Arms was one of three propaganda shorts he made between 1940 and 1941, the most memorable being Miss Grant Goes to the Door, in which a pair of village spinsters outwit a Nazi paratrooper.