BOOTLEG FILES 819: “Easy to Get” (1947 U.S. Army educational short).
LAST SEEN: On YouTube.
AMERICAN HOME VIDEO: None.
REASON FOR BOOTLEG STATUS: The film has some serious issues.
CHANCES OF SEEING A COMMERCIAL DVD RELEASE: Perhaps in an anthology of military-produced films.
You may have noticed that there are relatively few films beyond the pornographic genre where men freely and fully exposed their penis on camera. One of the first – if not the first – non-pornographic films where the penis gets front-and-center exposure is a strange short educational film called “Easy to Get,” which was produced by the U.S. Army in 1947 for exclusive screening for its Black soldiers.
Back when this film was made, the U.S. military was still racially segregated – it wasn’t until a year later when President Harry S Truman signed the executive order to end the disgraceful practice of separating military personnel on the basis of race. While the military created educational films designed exclusively for its armed forces, it was rare for productions to be aimed solely at the segregated Black fighting forces.
“Easy to Get” was about venereal disease and was part of a wide campaign designed to educate soldiers on how to avoid coming down with syphilis and gonorrhea – this film represented a segment of that campaign designed to illuminate the Black soldiers on how easy it was to fall contract venereal disease.
However, the film offers a bizarre consideration that clean-cut, good-looking Black soldiers should stay away from all women when they are off-base and at liberty – in this film, a soldier who hooks up with a pretty and seemingly innocent young girl (played by Ruby Dee in her first film performance) and another soldier who unapologetically hires a prostitute both turn up in the physician’s office with the same dismal diagnosis.
Mikita Brottman, one of the few film scholars to consider “Easy to Get,” considered the hideous fate awaiting those who ignored the Army’s warning to stay away from all women.
“The horror show that follows – the film’s superego – displays the consequences of such undisciplined behavior,” Brottman wrote on the Medicine on Screen blog. “One soldier, a former athlete, now has knees like basketballs; another collapses and dies suddenly at a luncheonette counter; a third can’t remember three words in a row because ‘the syphilis germs got into his brain.’ In close-up we see the swollen, oozing genitals of a guy who ‘rubbed whiskey on his rod after a pickup.’ Nastiest of all, one man passes the disease to his wife, who gives birth to a monster spawned from undisciplined desire – a cretinous gargoyle with a misshapen skull, half a nose, and eyes rolling back in its head.”
“Easy to Get” also offers in-depth views of both a healthy Black male penis being disinfected against venereal disease with a prophylactic treatment and the members that become infected and worse once that nasty disease takes root.
The film wraps up by reminding its Black male soldier audience to live up to the inspirational examples of boxer Joe Louis (seen in newsreel footage from his fight against German box Max Schmeling) and the Olympic track stars Jesse Owens and Ralph Metcalfe (seen in footage bootlegged from Leni Riefenstahl’s documentary “Olympia”). And for a complete out-of-nowhere denouement, the film offers Paul Robeson in a dramatic plea for the Black soldiers viewing the film to avoid the temptations could lead to lethal infection.
Aside from Robeson and Dee, “Easy to Get” features Hollywood character actor as an Army doctor. The film was directed by Joseph Newman, who would go on to helm the 1955 sci-fi classic “This Island Earth” along with a host of entertaining B-grade movies and episodes of “Twilight Zone.”
“Easy to Get” fell out of favor due in the late 1940s as the military began to desegregate and Paul Robeson was blacklisted for his espousal of Communist principles. As a government film, it is in the public domain – but its frankness in detailing venereal disease treatment and its misogyny in insisting women are solely to blame for soldiers getting sick has made it one of the least popular titles in its genre.
For the curious, there are multiple postings of the film across online video sites. If you must see it, proceed with caution – and keep your pants on, too!
IMPORTANT NOTICE: While this weekly column acknowledges the presence of rare film and television productions through the so-called collector-to-collector market, this should not be seen as encouraging or condoning the unauthorized duplication and distribution of copyright-protected material, either through DVDs or Blu-ray discs or through postings on Internet video sites.
Listen to Phil Hall’s award-winning podcast “The Online Movie Show with Phil Hall” on SoundCloud and his radio show “Nutmeg Chatter” on WAPJ-FM in Torrington, Connecticut, every Sunday. His new book “100 Years of Wall Street Crooks” is now in release through Bicep Books.