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131 11 a secret agent May 10, 1940: without ultimatums or declarations of war, Hitler’s divisions swiftly seized Denmark and Norway. And within days came the vast tank assault on France. The Maginot Line collapsed. Belgium collapsed. The French army collapsed. Northern France was swiftly overrun. And the already mauled British Expeditionary Force, unprepared for tank warfare, retreated to the Channel coast at Dunkirk. The United States took notice, up to a point, but still as a spectator. It seemed that only pro-British President Roosevelt and his direct associates were seeing the writing on the wall. Though Roosevelt’s warnings went unheeded,notsotheswiftmarchofevents.SoonlargesectionsofAmerica’s press, professedly disinterested, were finding the news too spectacular to consign to the back pages. The pro-Hitler Chicago Tribune, ecstatic at the way things were shaping up, was triumphantly telling America that Britain’s imminent defeat was demonstrating the rightness of America’s neutrality. The stupid little United Kingdom should long since have seen reason and subscribed to the Führer’s “Christ-like design” for a thousand years of peace. Also heralding Britain’s doom, famous American voices were being raised. The public hero Charles Lindbergh, who months earlier had been Hitler’s guest and the recipient of Nazi awards, was telling America that the continuance of strict neutrality was imperative in the name of the world’s future. In London, Ambassador Joseph Kennedy—amassing a vast fortune by practically cornering the Scotch whiskey market—was advising Churchill to seek peace with Hitler before being faced with unconditional surrender. So where did members of the British colony stand? Some were experiencing a backlash from what was going on in Europe. Increasingly, there was awareness of anti-British feeling proliferating in circles that had previ- HitcHcock’s Partner in susPense 132 ously been friendly. This hostility was creeping up insidiously; and though facing the fact wasn’t pleasant, pinpointing its cause wasn’t difficult. Many Americans had been quite rightly disturbed by the rise of fascism , first Mussolini in Italy, then Franco in Spain. With the spread of antifascism in the States, there came a wave of sympathy toward anti-fascist Soviet Russia, and out of that emerged a form of procommunism. I’m not saying this attitude was shared by the majority of Americans—far from it. But the wave spread noticeably through Hollywood film circles, where communism was becoming the fashionable dream of the left-wing intelligentsia . Great Britain was at war with Germany, and indirectly with Germany’s convenient ally Russia; and any enemy of Stalin and the Soviets was anathema to the left-wingers. In many Hollywood film circles, anti-British feeling verged on unconcealed ugliness. Too often, both vocally and in print, left-wingers were referring to Churchill as a filthy old fascist—declaring that the sooner Stalin and Hitler shut Churchill’s big mouth, the better for everybody, including those fucking English fools who were allowing the old son of a bitch to lead them by the nose. I had to be cautious. In those first two years of Hitler’s triumphs, my main obstacle was the great studios’ fear that any film hinting at anti-Nazi or pro-British sympathy would infuriate the twelve million–plus members of the German-American Bund—to the heavy detriment of box-office potential in states such as Wisconsin and Illinois. So the studios remained rigidly neutral, while at the same time reaping billions of bucks by disgorging sop that avoided mention of the war across the Atlantic. But with my services now in demand, I was able somewhat to pick assignments. This made it possible to write parts that would ensnare boxoffice names who might not realize they were indulging in anti-Nazi poison in the guise of popular entertainment. This tactic worked to my gratification, as my movies received a big showing in world markets. Among them were two films in which I actually broke the Hollywood taboo against anti-Nazi subjects. The first was Foreign Correspondent (1940), produced by Walter Wanger and directed by Alfred Hitchcock, and the other was a war film, Joan of Paris (1942). Walter Wanger had acquired Personal History, written by the foreign correspondent Vincent Sheean, and he had some six or seven writers trying to get a film out of it. No way. Sheean’s memoir was a fine piece, reporting the progress toward war as seen by an American journalist stationed in [3.142.197.198] Project MUSE (2024-04...

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