https://peertube.dngr.us/videos/watch/a1639b5b-3b84-4055-a740-0951ca17872e Made by RKO Pathe as part of the WWII industrial incentive effort, "Conquer by the Clock" presents a hectic montage of images of productivity, set to the click of time clocks, the hum of industrial machinery, and the clattering of guns. In wartime America, three 8-hour shifts and 24 hours of work were necessary in munitions plants, shipyards, and other vital factories. In 1943, the film was nominated for an Academy Award. The film shows the activities in a munitions plant at the 3:30 mark, with rifle cartridges being manufactured. A lazy employee goes off to have a smoke, and as a result a bad batch of bullets is missed. In the end this proves to be a fatal mistake for a soldier in the field, whose rifle misfires in combat and he is killed. It also shows the owner of a wartime plant who goes to watch a baseball game instead of overseeing the loading of a vital survival kit aboard a lifeboat, resulting in the inadvertent death of two men. Overall, the film encourages American workers to make the best possible use of their time in a war where industrial production and combat are synchronized on an international level. Encourages American wartime workers to "keep their sleeves rolled up." Describes the volume of industrial and agricultural production that can be accomplished in a single day: enough rifles for a battalion, 1000 acres of corn converted to 30,000 bushels of food." The film calls tired workers, in effect, "saboteurs". Narration admonishes workers for the death of soldiers through inadequate equipment or supplies. Utterly melodramatic. Urges workers to move production forward relentlessly. Says that "the clock" is what will win the war. The film was directed by Director Slavko Vorkapich (1895-1976), the acknowledged master of "montage sequences" -- image combination and superimposition techniques that infused often quite ordinary movies with moments of abstraction. With Robert Florey and Gregg Toland, he made the early American experimental film The Life and Death of a Hollywood Extra (1928); later, he made his famous contribution to Ben Hecht and Charles MacArthur's Crime Without Passion (1934). Besides Conquer by the Clock, he made six other This Is America short subjects for RKO-Pathe, including Private Smith, U.S.A., Women in Arms, Lieutenant Smith and New Americans. Motion picture films don't last forever; many have already been lost or destroyed. We collect, scan and preserve 35mm, 16mm and 8mm movies -- including home movies, industrial films, and other non-fiction. If you have films you'd like to have scanned or donate to Periscope Film, we'd love to hear from you. Contact us via the link below. This film is part of the Periscope Film LLC archive, one of the largest historic military, transportation, and aviation stock footage collections in the USA. Entirely film backed, this material is available for licensing in 24p HD and 2k. For more information visit http://www.PeriscopeFilm.com Source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x9TZBdcIl-c Mirrored from Periscope Film (https://www.youtube.com/@PeriscopeFilm) Fri, 12 Jun 2026 03:28:20 GMT https://validator.w3.org/feed/docs/rss2.html PeerTube - https://peertube.dngr.us https://peertube.dngr.us/lazy-static/avatars/41a6fee9-7f57-42d0-a5fc-5db4f1af2e31.png https://peertube.dngr.us/videos/watch/a1639b5b-3b84-4055-a740-0951ca17872e All rights reserved, unless otherwise specified in the terms specified at https://peertube.dngr.us/about and potential licenses granted by each content's rightholder.