The New Lot

After The Young Mr. Pitt, Carol Reed expressed his patriotism more directly, in a series of training films for the British army. His first effort was The New Lot (1942), a forty-four minute short on the nature of military life. The English understandably regarded initiation into the unfamiliar and unsettling world of the army as a serious challenge, fraught with psychological difficulties. Reed was assisted in the production of The New Lot by the Department of Army Psychology. The finished product seems to have surpassed everyone's expectation, both as an educational tool and in terms of its intrinsic merit.