On Doherty’s Hollywood and Hitler, 1933–1939

Perhaps because of my own minor role in the controversy that engulfed Thomas Doherty’s vivid, compelling, and expertly researched survey of Hollywood’s response to the rise of Nazism, Hollywood and Hitler, 1933–1939, it is hard to avoid mention of Ben Urwand’s The Collaboration: Hollywood’s Pact with Hitler. Joel Rosenberg’s excellent review of Urwand’s book, which appeared in this journal in 2013, conversely could not avoid mention of Doherty’s book. Now that the controversy has appeared to die down, I find Rosenberg’s points identifying the commonalities between the two works particularly illuminating.

Doherty’s book has its weaknesses, as Rosenberg observes, but between the two titles, Hollywood and Hitler maintains the more nuanced if unsurprising historical perspective, covering the 1933 to 1939 period. The key to Doherty’s success is that his book ultimately stays grounded within a solid understanding of the many moving parts making up the film industry. “Hollywood” incorporated not just the familiar names of major studios but also smaller, independently financed, and now mostly forgotten outfits that had the freedom to tackle the threat of Nazism more forthrightly.

Unfortunately, a lack of meaningful distribution significantly marred their ability to galvanize the public. Poor production values made these films look amateurish and more like vanity projects than the hard-hitting exposés they promised to be, virtually assuring them a place at the bottom of the historical dust heap. Newsreels and foreign films, especially the Soviet Professor Mamlock (Adolf Minkin/Gerbert Rappaport, distributed in the US by Amkino, 1938), fared better, mostly because they already had built-in audiences and operated at the relative margins of the studios’ self-regulatory apparatus, the Production Code Administration.

Even these films at best reached mostly urban audiences and still faced local and state censorship restrictions. Doherty does a nice job of situating conflicts and controversies over the films that did or did not get made against a backdrop of lurching domestic and international politics. It is difficult to weigh the importance of an anti-Nazi film like Warner Bros.’ 1939 Confessions of a Nazi Spy (Anatole Litvak, USA) without considering pitched four- and five-way battles among anticommunists, Nazi sympathizers, troubled liberals, and ardent leftists, the last of which frequently could not agree among themselves. Sometimes these conflicts spilled over, as when Hollywood tried to depict the Spanish Civil War in a film like Blockade (William Dieterle, USA, United Artists, 1938). More often, they erupted when foreign dignitaries like Vittorio Mussolini, a son of the fascist dictator, or Leni Riefenstahl, the director of the Nazi propaganda film Triumph of the Will (Germany, distributed in the US by UFA, 1935), visited Hollywood. Hollywood’s anti-Nazi politics, as it turned out, thrived not in films but in what Doherty astutely deemed “celebrity activism.”

The basic flaw of Urwand’s book—and for some critics, the fatal one—is how its flattened and one-note historical perspective mistakes archival documents depicting how the Nazis wanted Hollywood to see them as evidence for how Hollywood actually saw the Nazis. In the aftermath of a strident and ham-fisted attempt to discredit Doherty’s work, it is easy to overlook the groundbreaking nature of Urwand’s work with primary historical documents as depicting perceptions of Hollywood from abroad. Compared to Urwand, Doherty treads much more familiar terrain, relying heavily on day-to-day accounts in industry trade papers like Variety, Hollywood Reporter, as well as others, and to a lesser extent on some familiar archival sources in the United States. Although Doherty, like Urwand, never fully explores how his selection of source materials might reflect deeper dispositions of its collective authorship, his reliance on these trade publications provides rich and nuanced insights into how the industry’s image of itself fluctuated and evolved in relation to the growing global threat of Nazism.

Rosenberg’s review hints that both Urwand and Doherty may have...