The Elusive Factoid: World War II Motivation at Warner Bros.?

Doherty [The Elusive Factoid: World War Il Motivation at Warner Bros.? Thomas Doherty Brandeis University The Elusive Factoid: World War II Motivation at Warner Bros.? /or the historian of Hollywood cinema, what goes into the footnotes is almost as important as what goes up on the screen. To cite a scholarly source is to display erudition, stand on the shoulders of giants, and cover your ass. Thanks to computer helpmates like Lexis and Nexis, a lot of the heavy lifting of drone-level research is now done by keyboard, but the work can still be demanding and dull, bad for the spine and dreadful on the eyes. Fortunately, for the academic detective on an intriguing case, the paper chase also has its compensations- the acquisition of knowledge, the pleasures of discovery, and the satisfaction of a puzzled solved. Which is why closure denied is so infernally frustrating . Even mind numbing boredom is preferable to winding up at an informational dead end, being confronted with a maddeningly elusive factoid that can't seem to be traced or double checked. The true elusive factoid is not an obscure or unfindable needle in a library stack, such as the second volume of Aristotle's Poetics or the missing reels to Von Stroheim's Greed. It is a piece of information whose verification would seem to be readily available and easily confirmed, but which like some microfiched Maltese Falcon remains tantalizingly out of reach and un-naildown -able. Here are the facts about an elusive factoid I encountered while researching a book on Hollywood and the Second World War. During the late 1930s and until American entry into the European war, only one of the major Hollywood studios was passionately and avowedly interventionist. At a time when any explicit ideological content was more likely to be ejected from rather than injected into Hollywood movies, Warner Bros, took an uncompromising anti-Nazi stance. Although always the most flagrantly socially conscious of the major studios, it was way out in front of the curve with films like Confessions ofa Nazi Spy (1939) and Underground (1941). The studio also forbade Nazi newsreels and motion pictures to play in its theaters. Warner Bros.'s anomalous status was singled out for praise by none other than Groucho Marx who, during a meeting of the Hollywood Anti-Nazi League in 1938, offered a toast of tribute in one ofhis few publicly recorded straight lines: "Here's to Warner Brothers — the only studio with any guts." According to Jack L. Warner, the studio's executive vice president and head of production, the reason for the antiNazi activism was personal. Warner tells a horrifying anecdote in his autobiography, My First Hundred Years in Hollywood, a brutal incident that he says incited his early antipathy to the Nazi regime. On a European jaunt in the early 1930s, he had visited Max Rheinhard's estate in Salzburg, Austria. As Warner tells it: There I got the sickening news that Joe Kauffman, our Warners man in Germany, had been murdered by Nazi killers in Berlin. Like many another outnumbered Jew, he was trapped in an alley. They hit him with fists and clubs, and 120 I Film & History World War II in Film | Special In-Depth Section kicked the life out of him with their boots, and left him lying there. Appalled, Warner closes down the studio's German distribution branch and becomes a committed, premature anti-fascist. The anecdote is pretty widely known among film historians. It is repeated in Lester Friedman's Hollywood's ¡mage oftheJew, Neal Gabler's An Empire ofTheir Own, and Colin Schindlern Hollywood Goes to War, all of whom footnote Warner as the original (and sole) source of the story. And I never doubted its authenticity. To be sure, like most autobiographies , especially Hollywood ones, Warner's version ofhis own life is as historically reliable as his studio's version of the life of Emile Zola. But the anecdote is vividly persuasive and indelibly detailed. Besides , it helped explain Warner Bros.'s atypical lurch into foreign policy and the legendary mogul had no reason to lie. Indeed, so compelling a tale made me hungry for more details. First stop...