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DATE: 1943

LENGTH: 13 min.

CATEGORY: Educational & Instructional, Animation, Sound, Color

DIRECTOR: Uncredited

PRODUCER/PUBLISHER: Office of Malaria Control in War Areas, United States Public Health Service

Summary

This “filmograph” (sequential drawings with a soundtrack) was part of a larger public health campaign against malaria that anthropomorphically represented the female Anopheles mosquito—Annie O. Pheles—as a deadly criminal. The plot features a young novice reporter at “Scoop Magazine” who tries to make good by getting a story on a “dangerous female killer” he comes to call Anne the Awful. Criminal at Large also features a lesson on mosquito entomology: diagrams of eggs, larva, and pupa; the difference between male and female adults; the role of the female mosquito in the transmission of malaria organisms; and the difference between different species of mosquito.


Supplementary Materials

Stills from Criminal at Large


Other Films Featured in the Essay

Explore thirteen films considered in the “Public Health Films Go to War” essay.


In the Collections of the National Library of Medicine

Prints & Photographs Collection

These posters, produced by or for the U.S. military in conjunction with campaigns that also employed films, come from the Prints and Photographs collection of the National Library. Explore these and more from the NLM’s Images in the History of Medicine.

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