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Jewish Immigrant Directors and Their Impact on Hollywood
- Wayne State University Press
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35 Catherine Portuges Jewish Immigrant Directors and Their Impact on Hollywood This essay reconsiders some effects of displacement and immigration on the work of film artists and intellectuals of the early and mid-twentieth century . During the 1930s and 1940s, hundreds of German-speaking writers and film professionals lived and worked in Hollywood. While some were émigrés who came to better their lot and further their professional careers, the majority were Jewish refugees who escaped the threat of Nazi death camps. The exiles’ sense of (Jewish) identity in the United States was shaped not only by the experience of displacement and the fight against fascism, but also by the political climate of the wartime United States and the film industry’s war efforts. Contributing their central European sensibilities to the culture of the Hollywood film industry at a key historical moment, they were instrumental in creating the look of commercial mainstream cinema as well as shaping the film noir aesthetic, both of which came to constitute American cinema’s iconic imagery at the time (see especially Vincent Brook’s excellent study Driven to Darkness: Jewish Émigré Directors and the Rise of Film Noir). Scholars such as John Russell Taylor (Strangers in Paradise: The Hollywood Emigres, 1933–1950) and Anthony Heilbut (Exiled in Paradise: German Refugee Artists and Intellectuals in America from the 1930s to the Present) have chronicled their odyssey, which is worth revisiting today in another age of migration and diaspora, with particular attention to the specificity of their nationalities. Often assimilated under the rubric “German,” their perspectives as central Europeans—Austrians and Hungarians—may instead, I suggest, account for their often unconventional and even critical cinematic practice. Over the successive waves of migration bridging the European and 36 Catherine Portuges American cultural divide, these and other artists’ cinematic accomplishments helped define what became a classic aesthetic, as anti-Semitism drove these “strangers in paradise” to the dream factories of Hollywood, a haven for the continuous supply of pre- and postwar émigrés. One of Hitler’s first actions as chancellor of the German Reich in 1933 had been to banish Jews from Germany’s film industry, widely regarded as the most creative and advanced in the world. This action drove those who had been at the forefront of the golden age of cinema to flee their homeland in the ensuing months and years. Many hundreds of European film professionals escaped to Hollywood in the years between 1933 and 1939, including actors Hedy Lamarr (Heidi Kiesler), Paul Henreid (Paul Georg Julius Hernreid Ritter Von WasselWaldingau ), and Peter Lorre (László Löwenstein); directors Fritz Lang, Billy Wilder (Samuel Wilder), Michael Curtiz (Manó Kertész Kaminer), Otto Preminger, and Fred Zinnemann; composers Erich Wolfgang Korngold, Arnold Schoenberg, Max Steiner, and Franz Waxman; and writers Vicki Baum, Lion Feuchtwanger, Thomas Mann, Bertolt Brecht, Salka Viertel, and Franz Werfel. As this partial list suggests, many, if not the majority, changed their names in an effort to leave behind their European Jewish identities and to be accepted as American rather than as foreign nationals or enemy aliens. Even the Warner brothers had so successfully effaced their original European identities that their descendants could not recall the family’s former name until recently, when a granddaughter, Cass Warner Sperling, confirmed it to be Wonskolaser. Yet Warner Bros. led international efforts to counter antiSemitism , and its anti-fascist stance became synonymous with films that took a stand against hatred, racism, anti-Semitism and prejudice. In 1942, Warners’ film Casablanca, directed by Hungarian-born Jewish émigré Curtiz and the next year’s Oscar winner for Best Picture, rallied Americans to join the fight against fascism and Nazism. Jack Warner was among many who were called to testify before the House Un-American Activities Committee , including a large number of Jews connected to the anti-fascist movement and who had been accused of being Communist subversives (see Cass Sperling’s film The Brothers Warner). With the rise of Nazism, members of the European cultural elite fled Europe, seeking refuge in Los Angeles. Some became stateless political refugees when they were stripped of their European citizenship, subject to surveillance by the FBI for anti-fascist activities or sympathies. While many émigrés were welcomed by the nascent, lucrative film industry of Hollywood , others, having found a safe haven in Southern California, were officially considered “enemy aliens”—and their movements closely watched—by the U.S. government. Their films number among the classics of American [44.200.193...