1942 - SEX HYGIENE, directed by John Ford

It's pretty easy to take cheap shots at the military's legendary VD film directed by John Ford, here it goes. 

The symbolism of the pool balls.

The film is presented as a lecture film being given to the troops so it has kind of surrealist approach using film within film to fracture the traditional narrative style.  There is a scene where our boys are in the mess hall shooting pool when one of them announces that he wants to have more fun than just sitting around shooting pool, Ford cuts to a closeup of the pool ball rolling ominously down the table.
Later we see the soldier stumbling out of what is obviously a "den of prostitution" as they used to say.  He picks up his already lit cigar that has been placed near a statue of a naked woman.

Future 1st TV Superman, George Reeves.

Cutting back to the film within a film, the narrator is a very solemn doctor who speaks in a very grave tone about VD, the doctor is actually played by the actor who would appear in They Were Expendable as the general giving John Wayne and Robert Montgomery their fighting orders.

There are lots of shots of medical personnel handling a diseased penis which are kind of gross and strangely homoerotic at times and they go on and on.

John Ford, hopefully not directing Sex Hygiene.

Clearly the point of Sex Hygiene was to scare the hell of soldiers about STD's.  The film does seem to recognize that soldiers do have sex, so it spends a lot of time reinforcing the necessity of getting treatment if something is wrong "down there."

It's very easy to be smug about a film over 60 years old, but the military was faced with the difficult task of somehow communicating about sexual diseases with the soldiers.  Obviously the fascination today is the involvement of the 5 time Academy Award winning director John Ford filming this.

30 minutes