Stricken Peninsula is a 1945propaganda film made by theArmy Film Unit and theBritish Ministry of Information for theDepartment of Psychological Warfare to highlight the British Army's reconstruction work in southern Italy in the immediate aftermath ofWorld War II. The film was directed by Paul Fletcher and was narrated byWilliam Holt.[1][2] A contemporaneous review of the film by theDocumentary News Letter (DNL) praised it as "salutary and excellent. The realities of the war's aftermath presented with considerable artistry".[3]
A score for the film was composed by the British composerRalph Vaughan Williams, but it is now lost. A reconstructed score arranged by Phillip Lane and performed by theBBC Symphony Orchestra was broadcast onBBC Radio 3 in March 2016.[4][5] TheDNL reserved their criticism for Vaughan Williams's score feeling that it was "execrable" and that "One is conscious only of obtrusive and disagreeable noise intruding between the audience and a moving story". This was the last of the British propaganda films that Vaughan Williams scored. Jeffrey Richard in his 1997 bookFilms and National British Identity wrote that Vaughan Williams's score could "stand on its own" as "an atmospheric and economical but musically sophisticated and multi-layered evocation of the various facets of post-war reconstruction".[3]
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