The New York Times' City Room blog explores "Lady Life Guards," an "oddly racy newsreel" made around 1940 about female lifeguards on a beach in Brooklyn. The video made the rounds on blogs this week after being featured on blog Sheepshead Bites. The Times' Andy Newman describes it as "a gently leering 10-minute tour de force of visual double-entendre and soul-stirring call-of-duty gee-whiz."

The film was uploaded to YouTube last week by a user who found it in the Library of Congress's Prelinger Archive at archive.org.

(thanks, Michael Roston!)