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Reviewed by:
  • The Collaboration: Hollywood’s Pact with Hitler by Ben Urwand
  • Bernard F. Dick
The Collaboration: Hollywood’s Pact with Hitler. By Ben Urwand. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. 2013.

The problem is the title. Within the context of Nazi Germany, “collaboration” evokes images of Vichy France and Quisling’s Norway. To say that the studios “collaborated” with Nazi Germany is to ignore the fact that studios were always making concessions to satisfy the Production Code Administration, the Legion of Decency, and the state censor boards. The studios conceded; they did not collaborate. They were also bound by the Production Code mandate that “the history, institutions, prominent people and citizen of other nations shall be treated fairly,” which included Germany, until it became our enemy, after which it was open season on Nazis. If The Collaboration has irked some film scholars, it is because of its judgmental tone. Naturally, the studios wanted to keep the German market. But that Universal made cuts in All Quiet on the Western Front for it to be shown in Germany is not a revelation. When the Legion of Decency slapped a “C” (Condemned) rating on Columbia’s This Thing Called Love (1941), the studio made the changes the Legion demanded, knowing that a “C” rating would doom the film in most parts of the country. Still, it was banned in Australia, Ireland, and British Columbia. Even today, companies seeking a PG-13 rating for a film will have to alter it if it has been classified “R.” [End Page 209]

Urwand is a well-trained historian who knows his way around archives and special collections. What is missing is a sympathy for the position of studio heads in the 1930s. Most of them were Jews who had to do business with an anti-Semitic regime and endure homegrown anti-Semitism: e.g., Father Charles Coughlin’s anti-Semitic radio diatribes, and isolationist Senator Gerald Nye’s concern that films critical of Nazism were being produced by men with “non-Nordic names.” There were “restricted” country clubs, hotels, and even communities where Jews were unwelcome. Also, the films of the 1930s reflected the political confusion of the age. Was capitalism failing? Were fascism or communism alternatives? Gabriel over the White House (1933) and The President Vanishes (1934) could be interpreted as arguments for or against fascism. No one knew the answer, much less Hollywood.

Although Urwand correctly states that Universal’s Carl Laemmle was born in German y (32), thirty pages later Laemmle is listed among the eastern European studio founders. There are other films about the persecution of the Jews that Urwand does not include: Beasts of Berlin (aka Goose Step, Hell’s Devils, 1939), So Ends Our Night (1941), The Cross of Lorraine (1944), Address Unknown (1944).

The Collaboration is a work of impressive scholarship, filled with sobering facts. One wishes the author were more sympathetic to the studios’ dilemma in the 1930s: If they made a movie about the plight of the Jews, would it backfire on them? Yet despite the compromises, Hollywood alerted audiences to the Nazi nightmare before the American entry into World War II, through films such as Beasts of Berlin, Confessions of a Nazi Spy (1939), The Mortal Storm (1940), Escape (1940), The Man I Married (1940), and The Great Dictator (1940), which perhaps was as courageous as Hollywood could be at such an ominous time.

Bernard F. Dick
Fairleigh Dickinson University, Teaneck
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