This film is part of Free
The Leopard's Spots
A chilling message for a nation at war: don't trust the enemy, even after the fighting stops
Overview
"Once a German, always a German." The unpalatable lesson of this chilling propaganda film from the last months of WWI is that hostility towards the enemy should extend into peacetime. Director Cecil Hepworth dissolves from a scene of two German officers savagely attacking a baby in a Belgian street to the same pair on civvie street, now door-to-door salesmen in an English village. The question is, will the housewife they approach be taken in?
Cecil Hepworth was one of Britain's best film directors in the early silent period. Alma Taylor, who plays the housewife in this film, was among his regular leading actors. The well-known Ministry of Information of WWII had two short-lived predecessors during WWI: 1917's Department of Information and 1918's Ministry of Information.
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