Hollywood and the Nazis, 1938-1945

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Chapter 1

Hollywood and the Nazis, 1938-1945

The American movieNazi drew its initial presence and force from the sheer enormity of Nazi destructive impact on the real world,the Nazis’ own projection of their dark drama onto the movie screens of that world, and the emigration of much German, European, and Jewish talent to Hollywood in the 1930s. The Hollywood image of the Nazi was also not just a creature of the European and then American war against Hitler, but a presence before, during, and beyond the Second World War in a wide variety of movies and genres. Even movies explicitly about the Nazi treated him in more dimensions than has been appreciated in terms of authorial intention, filmic discourse, audience reception, and social and political contexts. The Nazi in American movies is the product of more than a single vision, but is a blurred creature—or creatures—of double vision on the part of both film makers and film viewers. This double vision is comprised of American fears and desires as well as German realities. To be accurate and useful, Hollywood discourses on the Nazi therefore must be seen in the broader and longer contextual latitudes and longitudes of American film, culture, and history.

In the 1930s Hollywood largely avoided the subject of Nazism in order not to lose a lucrative though shrinking German film market; the ensuing war in Europe addedHollywood concern with not compromising American neutrality. There was also Hollywood fear of widespread isolationist sentiment in the American movie audience, which is why many prewar Hollywood antifascist movies emphasized national defense and not war.[1] The Production Code Administration, set up by the industry early in the decade to ensure the “decency” of its movies, was a possible and actual means of controlling discourse. The German Consul in Los Angeles regularly protested to the PCA about prospective violations of the Code’s own requirement that the “history, institutions, prominent people and citizenry . . . be represented fairly.” While such German interference did not prevent movies from being made, it did add to the taming of Hollywood’s reflection of and elaboration on politics as well as on sex and violence. However, for a variety of reasons that comprise much of the subject matter of this book, the Nazi still strutted his stuff in powerful, malevolent, thoughalso richly ambiguous manner in Hollywood productions. One example of the limits of PCA taming is I Was a Captive of Nazi Germany (Alfred Mannon, 1936). In July 1936 the German Consul (founder in 1933 in New York of Friends of Hitler) formally protested against any approval by PCA of this movie “on the grounds that it does not fairly represent the German Government or its people.” PCA chief Joseph Breen informed Malvina Pictures that a seal of approval was unlikely. Mannon replied that the story is based on the experiences of a female journalist in Germany, portrays the German people as “wholesome,” does not depict brutality, presents only well-known facts about Nazi actions, and that censors in New York and Pennsylvania have already passed the film. Mannon also argued that the German Consul, who has not even seen the movie,is exceeding his legal authority. Three days later the Breen Office gave I Was a Captive of Nazi Germany a formal Certificate of Approval.[2] This decision does not showHollywood was not sensitive to German concerns, but that other factors could and did play roles. In this instance, however, Breen could be content that the movie was mediocre second billing fare made by a small production company. It would have minimal public impact and in fact saw limited release and only in the United States. Movies from the large studios for a national and international audience of course attracted more scrutiny.

It was also the case that there were of course multiple American publics, that is, constituencies with different views on world events and varying abilities of working their influence on what appeared in Hollywood movies about the increasingly fraught world in the 1930s. The civil war that raged in Spain from 1936 and 1939 was particularly fraught with dangers for Hollywood. Once again censors as well as moviemakers confronted difficulties in doing their jobs. In Spain a socialist Republican government, materially supported only by the Soviet Union, faced a revolt by the Church and a conservative military armed by Fascist Italy and Nazi Germany. Blockade (1938) is one of several movies that illustrate the difficulties Hollywood faced when dealing with a war that in movie terms turned out to be the short preceding the main feature of 1939. Liberal producer William Wanger, Communist screenwriter John Howard Lawson, and German émigré director William Dieterle collaborated on Blockadefor United Artists as part of a campaign to oppose fascism and defend democracy in Spain. The Breen Office, concerned about movie distribution both at home and abroad, insisted that Blockade not only not take sides in the conflict but that it avoid identifying “the warring factions” or actual incidents and locations.[3] Even with these strictures in place, the movie was protested and boycotted by The Knights of Columbus for its “glorification of the Spanish Reds” and just as vigorously defended by the Hollywood Anti-NaziLeague and other leftist groups.[4] Clearly, hardly anyone was unaware of the sentiments of the creators of Blockade. Breen himself was Catholic and notoriously anti-Semitic and had launched his campaign against the film on that basis as well. But Hollywood filmmakers had long ago learned how to suggest—whether it be sex, violence, or politics—what they wanted to say without saying it. And like sex and violence anytime, the Spanish Civil War in the 1930s and the controversy over it was such a large part of public consciousness in America—or at least literate public consciousness—that the great majority of reviewers and certainly very many or even most viewers of Blockade and other movies about the war in Spain knew what was being shown and said. Once again the Nazi, here in the guise of fascism in general, did his dark dance on the screen. However, even though Breen and traditional American moral judgments were to become increasingly limited in both time and space, the cost in the case of Blockade was the diminution of an intelligent political film into what the New York Times labeled “a glib spy melodrama.”[5]

A similar though less drastic fate befell Frank Borzage’sThree Comrades(1938). Based on a novel by Erich Maria Remarque, the movieconcerns three German veterans of the First World War who are caught up in the economic and political problems in Germany in the 1920s. Remarque, himself a German veteran and a strident opponent of Hitler, focuses on the violent clash between Nazis and Communists ten years after the war. The Breen Office, prompted once again by the protest of Los Angeles German vice consul George Gyssling and knowing the predominantly anti-Nazi sentiments of Hollywood, urged that the movie notmention either Nazis or Communists and that it remove scenes of book burnings and anti-Semitism. As a result, Three Comrades refers to and portrays brief scenes of political violence only as backdrop for a love story set in 1921, which made the movie seem to many badly out of date. But again it wasn’t that simple. The leftist press in the United States, riding a wave of support due to the unemployment spawned by the Depression, vigorously protested censorship of Remarque’s story.[6] Moreover, while there are no identifiable Nazis in Three Comrades, the surly mobs that clash in the streets are comprised of men all dressed in working class garb, which registers them in the American viewing eye as Communists, another distinct but conveniently scary imago of present and future. In contrast to these nameless comrades, the three German Comrades are played sympathetically by handsome and wholesome American actors Robert Taylor, Robert Young, and Franchot Tone.[7] So ennobling are these portrayals that the film played uncut in Japan during the Second World War.

Europe at War, 1939-1941

By the end of the decade the atmosphere of first Nazi threat and then Nazi war was havinga significant impact on Hollywood. Three pictures of 1939, Victor Fleming’s The Wizard

of Oz as well as The Hunchback of Notre Dame and Conspiracy,are striking examples of this turnaway from relative inability to face at least some of the actualities and implications of the Third Reich. The intimidating modern deco design of the Wizard’s palace in Oz reflects the Nazi propaganda film Triumph of the Will (Triumph des Willens, Leni Riefenstahl, 1935), while the Wicked Witch of the West lives in a dark mountaintop castle that evokes in Gothic fashion Hitler’s aerie at Berchtesgaden. Shedispatches winged monkeys that recall Nazi air attacks in the recent Spanish Civil War (which Hollywood continued to treat skittishlybecause of the clash there between Communism and Catholicism) and for audiences from late 1939 on the blitzkrieg of German aerial terroracross Europe.[8] Dieterle’sThe Hunchbackof Notre Damewas filming in Hollywood when Germany invaded Poland in September 1939. Addressing the ideological and moral threat of Nazism, the long first scene is a defense of freedom of thought set around the great technological advance of the fifteenth century, German Johann Gutenberg’s movable-type printing press. The drama centers on a Gypsy girl railed at by black-garbed High Justice Frollo in the language (“You come from an evil race”) of Nazi anti-Semitism, while her people stream into Paris in ragged caravans suggesting persecuted Jews of medieval and modern Europe. For its part, the independently producedConspiracy(Lew Landers, 1939) constructs an allegory for Hitler in the person of a Central American dictator that again would have recalled for some Nazi support for General Franco in Spain.

The Hunchback of Notre Dame did not represent much of a break with Hollywood’s general avoidance of the subject of Nazi persecution of the Jews. The conveniently available indirection of its reference to anti-Semitism is evidence of this. Aside from worrying about the German cinema market, Jewish studio heads in particular worried about provoking the Nazi regime and making the situation worse for German Jews.[9] Once America was at war the priority for Hollywood under newly imposed and self-imposed censorship was promotion of a united American war effort. Such trepidation was prefigured in the ongoing Hollywood tradition of avoiding Jewish characters and stories in order to appeal to a largely non-Jewish American movie audience and to sidestep widespread American anti-Semitism. One additional reason for this reticence was the viewpoint of the PCA’s Joseph Breen. Like his predecessor, Indiana Republican and Presbyterian Will Hayes, who institutionalized Hollywood self-censorship in 1922, Breen regularly bent over backwards to ensure that the movies were “fair” to the Nazi regime and its “controversial” racial policies. For Breen, this was the obverse of prejudice manifest in his word choice in 1938 regarding “a half-Jew girl” in the preliminary script for Foreign Correspondent (Walter Wanger, 1940). Such American anti-Semitism, increasingly yoked to anti-Communism, would continue to be a concern for Hollywoodin the late 1940s and on into the following decade.[10] It was also the case that wartime in particular called for the powerful villains already a staple in movies rather than powerless (and “racially” alien) victims.

But the war in Europe, even given the fact that many hands with different grasps on the world situation went into making movies, had begun to turn Hollywood decisively—though belatedly—toward anti-isolationist moviemaking. Englishwoman Phyllis Bottome’s novel, the source for MGM’sThe Mortal Storm (Frank Borzage, 1940),portrayed Hitler’s Germany as misogynistic as well as anti-Semitic. A conservative studio had sought to avoid German reprisal by using the word “Germany” only in a short written prelude and substituting “non-Aryan” for “Jew”in the dialogue. This circumlocution was standard Hollywoodpractice until 1941. In 1940 British Conservative politician Alfred Duff-Cooper observed in the French paper Le Soir that in Doctor Ehrlich’s Magic Bullet (William Dieterle, 1940) there is no mention of the fact that the German Ehrlich was also Jewish. Breen complained to Paris Soirthat “it is clearly indicated in the picture that Dr. Ehrlich was a Jew.”[11] But this identification is made only indirectly in the film and without the use of the words “Jew” or “Jewish.” This represented both censorship and creative evasion of censorship, just as would be the case in The Mortal Storm. Two liberal producers—and a change of directors—retained enough of the novel’s anti-Nazismthat the Nazis banned all MGM films. The Mortal Storm also displays the sexism common in American culture at the time since the movie shifts the focus from Nazi persecution of a young Jewish medical student to that of her non-Aryan professor father. In the film Freya, while educated and intelligent, is merely the love object for Hans, a farmer and pacifist played by American icon James Stewart. As in Three Comrades, good Germans are good—i.e., what the Nazi is not— because they are like Americans. In the book Hans is a peasant and a Communist, the lattertabooin American movies until the Nazi-Soviet Pact of 1939 ended in 1941, spawning movies—at government insistence—in support of our new Russian ally like Mission to Moscow (Michael Curtiz, 1943), The North Star (Lewis Milestone, 1943), and Song of Russia (Gregory Ratoff, 1944). In all of these movies suitably awful Germans play second fiddle to cheerful and resilient“Amero-Russians.” America was too distant from Russia in geography and ideology to appreciate the viciousness of Nazi racial warfare on the Eastern Front. In these movies, therefore, the complaint is more against war and its effects on all civilians everywhere and anytime. Within these contexts, Nazis in Hollywood Russia are like the Nazis in The Mortal Storm, a predictably arrogant and ignorant lot. Their chief representative in The Mortal Storm,in turn like his few prewar Hollywood brethren, is played by Robert Young with a distinct lack of real venom or menace.[12]

War movies generally did notdo great box office; even the Nazis found established movies genres more useful.[13] So Hollywood too diluted content and continued to make movies attractive by means of character-driven drama and romance. Reprising 1930s antifascist Republic Studios Westerns, the Nazi wouldinvade and inhabit traditional genres in comedies such as Rio Rita (S. Sylvan Simon,1942) and adventures likeTarzan Triumphs (Wilhelm Thiele, 1943); German émigré Ernst Lubitsch would mix comedy and historical commentary in To Be or Not to Be (1943). The Production Code Administration, worried about repercussions in South America, urged the makers of Rio Rita to change the locale from Mexico to the United States. In Tarzan Triumphs Jane writes from London about “the horrors of war and the brutality of the Nazis.”[14] There were also movies about Nazi Germany that cast their villains in familiar movie roles as gangsters (The Hitler Gang [John Farrow, 1944]), sexual predators (Hitler’s Children [Edward Dmytryk, 1943])that bothered Hollywood morals censors, or comic bumblers. Representative of the last is Desperate Journey (Raoul Walsh, 1942)—“not a story at all [but] a continuous chase”—in which downed American fliers in Germany hijack Hermann Göring’s railway carriage, one of them remarking “Pull up a swastika and sit down.” Such male body humor bravado—like Nazi spies in America as reassuringly ludicrous—embodied the cultural overconfidence that the U.S. Army’s WhyWeFight series was designed to fight.[15] But even these government documentaries used Hollywood genre conventions to depict Germans and their Axis partners as beatable though dangerous enemies of strength, resolve, and ruthlessness.

Wartime American censorship, imposed and self-imposed, would be a new factor in shaping movie characterization of the enemy. This censorshipdid not occur in a cultural, social, or commercial vacuum. The portrayal and perception of the Nazi was dependent not just on the time, place, and personnel of the movie’s setting, making, and viewing, but also the presence or absence of Others related to specific American concerns. As Sabine Hake observes, Nazi racism called up for Americans their own history of racial prejudice and oppression. The new Office of War Information promoted racial sensitivity: a Sudanese soldier in Sahara (ZoltanKorda, 1943) killing a Nazi who called him “inferior”; peaceful and exotic Arabs in Thiele’s Tarzan Triumphs andTarzan’s Desert Mystery (1943) replacing the usual barbarous Arabs andjabbering Negroes. But the racially denigrated Negro persisted: simpleton in Busses Roar (Ross Lederman, 1942), minstrel in Casablanca (Michael Curtiz, 1943), and Uncle Tom in Lifeboat (Alfred Hitchcock, 1944). Still, American racism was projected onto the Japanese but not onto European and Caucasian Germans. Unlike the Japanese, between whose militaristic government and people no distinction was made because of their “race” and their sneak(y) attack on Pearl Harbor, Germanswere oftendistinguished from Nazis. German soldiers could be and were portrayed as “efficient, disciplined, and patriotic.”[16] But since Germans were Caucasian, so too were Nazis, the face of whose persecution of “racial inferiors” was therefore uncomfortably close to Americans’ own. Such portrayals and perceptions were aggravated by America’s own evolution into a world power, what in Europe after 1945 was called “Coca-Colonization.” The Coca-Cola Company had provided GIs with free Cokes, building a dominant domesticand worldwide market. All in all, there emerged an American double vision of the Nazi present and past that incorporated the evil Other—Freud’s Doppelgänger or Jung’s “shadow”—that is, a double residing within an idealized American identity. This dual and dueling “attraction and revulsion” vis-à-vis the Nazi was symptomatic of an idealized yet ever more challenged democratic American identity.[17]