This inspirational short film developed by the U.S. Army helped a lot of disabled veterans in dealing with their current situation without their members, and among them there was Harold Russell, best known for his Oscar winning role in "The Best Years of Our Lives". Russell was a military who lost both hands during a training exercise and later on watched this film, which presents a WWI veteran who also lost his hands and how he deals with daily routine while using metal hooks. Russell's short film "Diary of a Sergeant" uses clips from this short film to show how significant the experience of seeing it made his life more positive and helpful.
"Meet McGonegal" presents Charles McGonegal, a war veteran dealing with common situation in every person's life such as dressing himself up, eating and drinking but from a limited perspective since the man instead of hands uses of hooks to perform those actions. Through a long rehabilitation process he managed to master his use with the hooks, performing every possible action and living a normal life. So, with this film you get a sense of how life and science/engineering development was back then. Today, disabled veterans and others have access to more advanced prosthetics that look similar to hands, arms and legs.
But despite the usual 'commercial kind of thing' the film had to use to present, with some distortions on the way, I praise its effort to instate and bring quality and positive effort in the lives of many people out there during the period and again including Mr. Russell, who went to deliver one of the greatest film performances of all time in William Wyler's classic. As evidenced in "Diary of a Sergeant", Russell was all down and out with his life, then this movie was shown to him and a different perspective was brought to him. Like McGonegal, he mastered his hooks for a great time, participated in a great film and won some awards for it (2 Oscars actually and for the same role), graduated from college and led a successful life, always carrying that great big smile of his. So, when a film carries such a heavy weight to the point where an individual moves to accomplish something new and finds a different meaning to his or her life, I guess you gotta approve it in any way. We aspire that films can be exactly like that sometimes. To make a difference in people's lives. This one certainly did. 9/10