Hollywood's War with Poland 1939–1945 (review)

Since the 1970s, and especially over the past two decades, critical studies devoted to "Hollywood's Image of …" various ethnic or racial (or religious, or sexual, or even regional) minorities have become a familiar element in most academic publishers' film lists. Some of this work has been startling and revelatory, although even the best examples have often been stronger on cultural theory than traditional historiography.

Mieczyslaw Biskupski is a historian, not a sociologist. His work tends to avoid the more fashionable ethnic studies buzzwords, and when the need arises he generally prefers alien to other. In writing about the image of Poles and Poland offered by Hollywood films during the Second World War he argues from facts, drawing on script drafts, private correspondence, Office of War Information files and similar primary materials, many of which I have never seen cited before – and certainly not in a book like this. Yet from whatever angle he approaches it, Hollywood's War with Poland is still the most eye-opening account of cinematic otherness since the early work of Tom Cripps.

One reason for this is the Alice-in-Wonderland nature of his subject in the first place. Poland had a relatively large population, and by 1939 a highly visible Polish-American community was scattered over much of the country, from Connecticut to Texas to Wisconsin – not to mention New York and New Jersey. The War had begun in Poland, and Polish forces continued to fight with the Allies on several fronts while simultaneously operating Europe's largest and most effective underground resistance movement. One would expect that wartime Hollywood would have taken full advantage of a situation like this, but Biskupski can find only three examples: To Be Or Not To Be (United Artists, 1942), In Our Time (Warner Bros., 1944) and None Shall Escape (Columbia, 1944). Instead, he notes as an example, Hollywood busied itself releasing five films focusing on our Norwegian allies alone within just a few months of 1942-43.

Films involving Polish characters or referring to relevant geo-political issues were equally scarce. Sometimes Poland would be made to disappear entirely, as in Goldwyn's North Star (1943), where the Wehrmacht is seen as advancing directly from Germany into Russia, avoiding the whole messy business of the Soviet occupation of eastern Poland. Since Hollywood always goes for the obvious, the preference for films about Norwegian freedom fighters or the Czech underground (Victor Laszlo?) is puzzling, to say the least.

But just because the number is so limited, Biskupski can explore each title in detail, a luxury that would not have been possible if Hollywood had produced more than a handful of such films. Others have noted the peculiar character of In Our Time, a straightforward attack on the government of an allied nation which grossly misrepresents not only the political situation in 1939, but the entire course of the September campaign. Biskupski goes back to the literary source (or sources; it's a complicated business) and on through each of the script drafts, reporting how and why certain things came to be left out and other material inserted instead.

Was this ill treatment simply the result of ingrained social prejudice, a problem hardly unique to the Polish-American situation? Or was it payback, on the part of Hollywood writers and producers, for Poland's "considerable anti-Semitic prejudice, which became more marked and more pervasive in the 1930s?" Those would be the easy answers, and Biskupski allows that they certainly infected the prevailing cultural climate. But he also sees something else: a unique conspiracy between the Communist Party members and fellow travelers responsible for writing many of these films, and State Department bureaucrats, acting through the OWI's film arm, the Bureau of Motion Pictures (BMP), who shared a common interest in marginalizing Poland and effacing or distorting its role in several of the war's most politically embarrassing issues.

The OWI, of course, left behind a considerable paper trail, and Biskupski makes good use of it...