War Film a Morale Dilemma : Movies: ‘December 7th’ was deemed a propaganda failure and shelved. It screens tonight at Saddleback College to open ‘The Road to War’ series.

Anyone who approaches the Saddleback College-National Archives film series, “The Road to War,” with visions of John Wayne laying waste to enemy hordes is likely to be disappointed.

The six-movie program is not particularly interested in perpetuating the glorified jingoistic images Hollywood often turned to during the World War II years. What’s more important here is “putting things in perspective, from both a historical point-of-view and a creative one,” said Lloyd Evans, Saddleback’s dean of social and behavioral sciences and one of the series’ organizers.

“It’s tied to the 50th anniversary” of the bombing of Pearl Harbor and America’s entry into the war, he said, “and we try to look at who and what we were during that time.

“(The series) represents a mixture of things, both as entertainment and as a document of the whole era, both the good and the bad. We hope it can be revealing . . . (John) Ford’s ‘December 7th,’ for instance, has never been released in its full-length version before.”

“December 7th,” offered tonight, is a good place for “The Road to War” to start. Considered perhaps the greatest propaganda failure of World War II, it rarely has been seen in its original 85-minute form.

Ford, one of Hollywood’s great directors, known for such movies as “The Grapes of Wrath” and “My Darling Clementine,” had assembled a naval reserve film unit in 1940 that was to be dispatched if war broke out. After Pearl Harbor, Ford was ordered to make newsreels from various locations, including Hawaii. Busy with other projects, Ford assigned the Pearl Harbor disaster to Gregg Toland, the cinematographer of “Citizen Kane” and “Wuthering Heights.”

Toland quickly expanded the project from a newsreel to a full-length film, incorporating actual footage of the attack mixed with many staged scenes shot months after the bombing. The final product was presented to the Navy for inspection and promptly denounced as bad for morale.

Adm. Harold Stark, the chief of naval operations at the time, wrote the lines that put “December 7th” in storage: “This picture leaves the distinct impression that the Navy was not on the job, and this is not true.” Later, the film was pared down to 20 minutes of battle scenes and presented as patriotic testament to the courage of the men who endured the surprise onslaught.

In keeping with the series’ aim to be comprehensive, “December 7th” will be followed by a Japanese newsreel of the Pearl Harbor attack. “It should be intriguing to see what their perspective on that important event was (and) how it differs from ours,” said Evans.

Evans said that the Laguna Niguel regional office of the National Archives, a repository of valuable records of the U.S. government, asked Saddleback about a year ago to present the program. The films themselves are on loan from National Archives headquarters in Washington. The series will be offered elsewhere in the United States, but Saddleback is the only California location, Evans said. All screenings are free.

Following “December 7th,” Janis Ivan’s “The 400 Million” will be shown Jan. 24. The 1938 documentary details China’s war with the Japanese. Frank Capra used footage from the film in his “The Battle of China.”

The series moves in a more entertaining direction on Jan. 31 with Alfred Hitchcock’s “Foreign Correspondent.” This 1939 thriller is set in London on the eve of World War II and features Joel McCrea on the trail of a Nazi spy ring.

A portrait of life in Germany from 1933-39 is captured in “Swastika,” which will be shown Feb. 7. The 1973 film was compiled from newsreels and other footage the National Archives accumulated after the war.

“The Good Fight” will screen Feb. 13. The 1984 movie focuses on the involvement of the Lincoln Brigade, a unit of American volunteers, in the Spanish Civil War.

The program closes Feb. 21 with a nod toward Hollywood. “Confessions of a Nazi Spy,” released in 1939 and starring Edward G. Robinson as a U.S. agent who infiltrates the Nazi underground, represents one of the first American studio attempts to portray the Nazis as villains.