Good Luck, Mr. Yates

A pretty average wartime movie, but one that gets a mention in Tim Pat Coogan's biography of "De Valera: Long Fellow, Long Shadow".

In 1943, as Prime Minister of Eire, De Valera, made a famous/an infamous St Patrick's Day broadcast to celebrate "The Ireland Which We Dreamed Of": "cosy farmsteads, ... fields and villages ... joyous with sounds of industry, with the romping of sturdy children, the contests of athletic youths and the laughter of comely maidens, whose firesides would be forums for the wisdom of serene old age."

This fantasy (remembering what was going on at Stalingrad, North Africa, the Battle of the Atlantic and Guadancanal) provoked the US Minister in Dublin, David Gray, to write to President Roosevelt: "Meanwhile the Censor is loose again. The American flag was recently cut out of a film called 'Good luck Mr. Yates' ... Meanwhile I am surrounded by mountains of turf, some two hundred and fifty thousand tons, all brought from the interior with American gasoline. If I go nuts can you blame me?"