Hollywood and Hitler, 1933–1939 by Thomas Doherty (review)

The story begins in 1930, with the Berlin premiere of All Quiet on the Western Front, one of the most powerful antiwar films ever made. The evening itself was uneventful, except for the numbing silence at the end. The next showing caused a riot, with cries of “Judenfilm” because it was released by Universal, whose founder, Carl Laemmle, was a German Jew, as was his son, Carl, Jr., who was then production head. The incident marked the beginning of the torturous relationship between Germany, soon to be known as “Nazi Germany,” and Hollywood, brilliantly recounted by Thomas Doherty in his tension-wracked narrative of an industry struggling to do business with a country whose growing anti-Semitism, which even extended to Jewish personnel in the studios’ branch offices in Berlin, portended the eventual collapse of the German market. After Hitler became chancellor of Germany and Josef Goebbels, Minister of Popular Enlightenment and Propaganda, the bureaucracy tripled: permits, certificates, and the censor’s imprimatur. The studios complied; they were used to observing (or circumventing) the Production Code and knew that, under a state board of censors system, material acceptable in one state could be deleted in another. What Hitler in Hollywood emphasizes is that movies have always been a business in which concessions and trade-offs are standard practice both domestically with the Hays Office, local censors, and pressure groups like the Legion of Decency, and internationally with countries like Germany with ingrained prejudices that precluded the exhibition of certain films, particularly those deemed racially impure.

Hollywood for the most part ignored events in Europe and Asia that were moving the world inexorably toward war. The prelude to World War II, the Spanish Civil War, became the generic “Spanish conflict” in Last Train from Madrid (1937) and Blockade (1938). Audiences trained in hermeneutics might have figured out that the former was vaguely pro-Nationalist, and the latter, less vaguely pro-Loyalist, although sides were not specified. The newsreel, especially the March of Time, filled in the ellipses. New Yorkers who wanted the latest in world events, had newsreel theaters like the Embassy and Trans-Lux. Initially, the sight of Hitler elicited both boos and applause, and soon, just a chorus of jeers. Nazi sympathizers learned to be more prudent.

As the decade ended, so did Hollywood’s reticence. Confessions of a Nazi Spy (1939) made it clear to Americans still oblivious to the Nazi menace that there were organizations like the German-American Bund operating in New York. The following year, The Mortal Storm, Escape, and Chaplin’s The Great Dictator (all 1940) dramatized the creeping miasma of Nazism, with Chaplin brilliantly satirizing Hitler’s megalomania in a scene in which der führer envisioned himself as, literally, holding the world in his hands.

Hitler in Hollywood has the dynamic thrust of a drama, with the action moving steadily toward a climax, which sadly is 1939. It is also vividly written, academically unpretentious, and indispensable for historians and students of film.