Hollywood's War with Poland, 1939-1945 (review)

Ever wonder why Victor László is not a Pole? The underground leader who cannot get out of Casablanca is identified in the film as Czechoslovakian, even though his name is thoroughly Hungarian and the Czech resistance to Hitler was but a shadow of its Polish counterpart. Indeed, while Rick's Café is a veritable watering hole of Norwegians, French, and other Allied conspirators no Pole—amazingly, given the country's underground and its people's immigration proclivities—ever managed to make his way to Casablanca!

The Polish absence from one of Hollywood's most known World War II movies about the underground is symptomatic of the issues Professor Biskupski addresses in this book. Poland was the first victim of Nazi aggression to stand up to Hitler: the September 1939 invasion was the casus belli of World War II. Poles fought in East and West and ran the largest underground resistance. Poland lost 20% of its population and was the scene of the most brutal Nazi repression, including the Holocaust. Yet Poland is curiously invisible from almost all the war films made in Hollywood in the period 1939-45 and, when Poles appeared, they were universally stupid, cowardly, vile, and/or self-interested. Why?

Biskupski, professor in the Blejwas Chair of Polish History at Central Connecticut State University, New Britain, assigns three reasons for this situation: the politics of Hollywood writers, the politics of the Roosevelt Administration, and the attitudes of Polish Jews in Hollywood. These three factors, while independent, mutually reinforced a climate hostile to the Polish cause. He also gathers an impressive body of data documenting the parvity of Poles in films of the era as well as the derogatory roles in which they were cast when they did appear.

The author maintains that a significant number of Hollywood writers from the period were either Communists or at least left-wing fellow-travelers, committed to casting Stalinist Russia in the best possible light. Their political predilections dovetailed with the Roosevelt Administration views (advanced in Hollywood through the Office of War Information), which sought to sell the Soviets as the indispensable ally needed to defeat Hitler.

For both groups, Poland posed awkward problems. World War II had begun after Germany and the USSR first became allies and decided to partition Poland between them: Hitler invaded September 1, 1939, Stalin September 17. The Hitler-Stalin alliance only collapsed in 1941, when Germany invaded the USSR. Hawking the USSR as an Allied country required passing over nearly two years of history in silence, and became especially difficult after discovery of the Katyn massacre: it's hard to explain why an ally murdered almost 20,000 of another ally's officers. Given the delicate political minuet then being performed, " . . . Victor László could never have been a Pole, but as a Czechoslovakian he was suitably exotic without raising criticism of Soviet Russia" (p. 75).

Ignoring Poles is one thing; making them disappear or going out of one's way to denigrate them is another. The screenplay for The Mask of Dimitrios eliminates the book's Polish spy, who emerges without nationality. In Lifeboat, Steinbeck's original Polish Sheinkowitz [sic] becomes the Czech Kovac. Where Poles appear, they are negative. Boley in Rise and Shine is a stupid jock. Action in the North Atlantic's Pulaski (the namesake of the only foreign general who died in the American Revolution) is a whining coward. Winocki in Air Force has an inflated ego coupled with professional incompetence. The Story of G.I. Joe falsifies the Polish role in the Battle of Monte Cassino. The list can go on.

The third factor, which Biskupski least develops, is the attitude of Hollywood Jews of Polish ancestry towards their old country. Biskupski focuses on Warner Brothers, whose family hailed from north of Warsaw. He notes a desire to forget Poland, colored by memories of anti-Semitism (albeit carried out by the partitioners, e.g., Czarist Russia), but also forthrightly notes that the low...