Sons of Liberty (1939)

There’s quite a decent cast assembled here for this tale of an early American fundraising exercise. It’s all about Haym Salomon (Claude Rains) whose family had been bounced around Europe for years before he finally left Poland in search of the usual liberty etc. that clearly didn’t exist anywhere at all in Europe. Initially, he volunteers to spy for George Washington but he’s not so very good at that and is captured. Before they can hang him, though, he escapes and then finds himself at the centre of a campaign to plug the strained finances of an army facing an open rebellion if their wages aren’t paid and their bellies aren’t filled. With the British ever vigilant, he has his work cut out if he is to convince his Jewish brethren to invest in the precarious future of their embryonic nation and keep the money from their enemies. Unlike so many other of these downright jingoistic short features that were made in the 1930s, this one has more of a story to it and it goes some way to suggest that the war of independence was nowhere near as straightforward as Hollywood had hitherto suggested. There’s a lot to pack into twenty minutes, but though it is still a bit sentimental, it’s also somewhat more substantial and watchable enough.