HOMEPAGE | DONATIONS | ARCHIVE-GERMAN| ARCHIVE-ENGLISH | GERMAN LOSSES | GERMAN HISTORY | THE MAILBOX
|
Hollywood Declares War on Berlin By George Fowler When Britain declared war against Germany in September, 1939, America's motion picture industry was - by far - the world's most influential entertainment and propaganda machine. In place and ready to go into action was an immensely potent "odd couple" alliance - anti-German, left-wing and Zionist movie studio and theater chain owners, screenwriters and actors combined with a formidable "British colony" of top flight screen talent. Subject to draft at a moment's notice was a roster of glamorous and obedient children - the studio contract stars and supporting players. In the years immediately before Franklin D. Roosevelt's first term commenced in March, 1933 the technicians employed by America's motion picture moguls mastered the basics of "talkies." In two key respects, the latter of infinitely greater consequence, the movies would have a tremendous effect on the nation throughout the 1933-1945 New Deal era. Silent motion pictures had conveyed action, mood and emotion. They were of considerable propaganda value during World War I, with the fledgling industry grinding out melodramas about the Barbaric Hun. The highly accomplished actor and director Eric von Stroheim, a Jewish immigrant who had made his mark in Germany, adopted what he considered a Prussian name and bearing. He became the man America loved to hiss, with bis portrayals of bullnecked, monacled and sadistic German officers. These impressions would linger for decades in the public mind. The first great "social contribution" made by modern movies was overwhelmingly positive. Throughout the Depression years most Americans had much less in the way of creature comforts and financial security than welfare "clients" and newly arrived immigrants enjoy today. The movies, for a dime or 15 cents, offered hours of delicious escape from the harsh reality of daily life. The studio heads instantly realized the formula that would fill their dream palaces. Poverty was banned from the screen. Musicals characterized by RKO's Astaire-Rogers classics were filmed on opulent sets. The scenes showed swank resorts and hotels, playboys, glamour girls, yachts, grand ocean liners and magnificent country estates. The characters wore the smartest clothes and drove powerful touring cars. The leading characters were pampered by platoons of butlers and maids. Studios turned out an endless supply of rich-boy-meets-poor-girl and rich-girl-meets-poor-boy situation romances. At the happy ending, the poor boy or girl inevitably moved into their sweetheart's world of wealth and luxury - never vice versa. The morale boosting escapism provided throughout these tough years, often in wonderfully opulent theaters, strengthened America's bond with the movies; and with the stars they grew to love and to trust. If Spencer Tracy or Clark Gable made a screen statement, it was widely perceived as their own, not that of a studio script writer. The potential and capacity for screen actions and dialogue to manipulate public attitudes was therefore immense. For example, when Clark Gable doffed his shirt in Frank Capra's Oscar-winning It Happened One Night, the nation's undershirt industry went into a nosedive, since Gable's character in the film wasn't wearing one. In 1938 events moved swiftly. There was a severe economic downturn, and the failure of New Deal spending schemes to bring about a true and solid recovery became evident to millions who, in 1936, had contributed to FDR's great reelection landslide. In elections that year the Republicans almost doubled their number of U.S. House seats, from 88 to 170. They picked up eight Senate seats and 12 governorships. The four Democratic senators that Roosevelt attempted to purge (he even came into their states and spoke for their primary opponents) were renominated. For the Roosevelt element, there was a clear antidote. Happy days would be here again with the advent of war against Hitler's Germany. For differing reasons, warmongers of both the ideological bent and those who were in it simply for the money agreed that America should bolster its "inadequate" war-making capacities. The Pentagon began a peacetime military build-up which primed industries and boosted employment across the land. When Britain declared war on Germany in September, 1939, much of Hollywood became the administration's and London's immediate allies. With the exception of a few mighty figures such as Cecil B. De Mille, Howard Hughes and Walt Disney, most of the men controlling Hollywood - and such powerful studios as MGM, Twentieth Century Fox, Warner Brothers, Columbia and Universal - were strongly Zionist and left-wing. They already had (or quickly developed) a deep hatred of Hitler, simply because most of them were Jewish. The theater chains and distribution networks they controlled pulled in some 50 million moviegoers a week. Every week of the year, more than a third of the U.S. population went to the movies at least once. This valuable propaganda resource was just waiting to be cranked into motion on behalf of FDR's drive to drag the nation into WWII. Just as eager to do its bit was Hollywood's large and prestigious "British colony." These United Kingdom thespians had thrived even more (and were in greater demand) with the advent of sound, since talking pictures gave full vent to their impressive voices and rich accents. Also, they tended to be much better trained than American-born players. American audiences, quite simply, loved to hear them talk, and loved their style. The unofficial governor-general of
this assemblage was C. Aubrey Smith. He founded the
Hollywood Cricket Club and was reputed to read or trust no
newspaper save the London Times. To millions of
moviegoers his very appearance personified the Empire.
Several of its leading lights had known the horror of the
trenches in "the first war." Herbert Marshall had lost a leg
on the Somme, Ronald Colman had Hollywood's first intentionally antifascist film had been launched in 1937 by an independent, Walter Wanger. It involved the Spanish Civil War, an Iberian trauma that most movie producers didn't want to touch due to the Catholic Church's condemnation of the leftist side. Wanger hired successive communist screenwriters to put together a movie called Blockade. They were Clifford Odets and John Howard Lawson. The movie starred the very liberal Henry Fonda and the exceptionally beautiful English actress Madeleine Carroll (subsequently an agent for William Stephenson's British spy network in the U.S., run out of Rockefeller Center offices). By the time Blockade reached the screen it was overwhelmingly devoid of political content. But in the final scene Fonda's character makes a "where is the conscience of the world?" speech. It opened at Radio City Music Hall in June, 1938 and was boycotted and picketed nationwide by Catholic organizations. In 1938 Warner Bros. released its remake of the 1931 aerial combat hit Dawn Patrol. This was an arresting feeding-youth-into-war's-meatgrinder drama similar in message to the 1930 movie of Erich Maria Remarque's novel All Quiet on the Western Front. It starred Tasmanian-born Aussie Errol Flynn and British Colony stalwarts Basil Rathbone, David Niven, Donald Crisp and Melville Cooper. But Warners shifted gears with blinding immediacy. According to Clayton R. Koppes and Gregory Black in Hollywood Goes To War, Jack Warner sent screenwriter Milton Keims to New York to write a screenplay based on the trial of a German agent. The end result was Confessions of a Nazi Spy, a heavily embellished version of the actual trial. In the movie, "FBI agent" Edward G. Robinson (who admitted communist party membership following WWII) says of Germany's attempt to destroy the Constitution and the Bill of Rights: "It's a new kind of war, but it's still war." Confessions was directed by Anatole Litvak, a refugee from Germany and written by John Wexley, who was active in Hollywood anti-fascist circles. The trade paper Variety observed that the only outrage missing from the movie was a rape scene involving German soldiers. But vile German soldiers were very much in evidence in 1939's Nurse Edith Cavell, the first movie ever made by a British film company in Hollywood. It starred English actress Anna Neagle (born Marjorie Robertson). As shown in the May, 1995 issue of TBR, the facts relating to Nurse Cavell's tribulations were easily manipulated for propaganda purposes: In a nutshell, noble angel of mercy shot against a wall by heartless Germans. In 1940 producer Walter Wanger returned to the fray with Foreign Correspondent, which Hitler's propaganda minister Josef Goebbels called a masterpiece of propaganda. It was directed by the recent British transplant Alfred Hitchcock. One of its screenwriters was Robert Benchley, an avowed leftist who was considered one of the period's premier humorists. Its stars were somewhat afield, though; Republican Joel McCrea and Laraine Day, a young Mormon actress never politically active. Foreign Correspondent was a movie of intrigue in wartime Europe that didn't explicitly identify Germany as the enemy. But any informed 12-year-old of the time would have known which nation's agents were the villains. At its climax McCrea's newsman, a doubter who has had his eyes opened by events, delivers an impassioned radio broadcast imploring the world (specifically American audiences) to wake up to the aggressor-state's designs of world conquest. All the it's-our-war-too movies didn't require a running theme. A single impressive scene would do. In the 1940 South America adventure Green Hell the hero is played by Douglas Fairbanks Jr., whose incurable case of Anglophilia was as severe as that of his famed silent screen star father. But the propaganda scene involves not Fairbanks but rugged all-American type George Bancroft as "Tex" and a British actor who would become Hollywood's favorite sophisticated cad, George Sanders. On the way to the site of hidden relics and gold Tex and his new English buddy break into a chorus of Home On The Range - reportedly FDR's favorite tune. Here the audience sees American and Briton, arms around each other, singing our president's song. For good measure, Bancroft and Sanders break into an encore a few scenes later. Warner's 1940 The Sea Hawk starred Errol Flynn and pitted Elizabeth I (the embodiment of British courage and sophisticated cunning) against Philip of Spain (a stand-in for Hitler). They were portrayed by British actors Flora Robson and Montagu Love. The evil Spanish ambassador to England was English actor Claude Rains and the evil appeaser of Spain in Elizabeth's court was leftist (or then communist) English actor Henry Daniell. In The Hollywood History of the World author George MacDonald Fraser, a well-known novelist and screenwriter himself, states that Love, speaking with "as unctuously wicked a voice as a tyrant could wish" sums up the film's version of the 1585 power struggle - with an intended analogy to 1940 beyond mistake. Fraser continues: "Elizabeth and England have got to go, so that the map of the world can become a map of Spain - and we are treated to a dramatic shot of His Catholic Majesty's shadow looming over the map in question." Fraser wrote, "Churchill, we are told, was deeply moved by it, and it is bracketed with Lady Hamilton (released in America as That Hamilton Woman) as his favorite historical film." Of that 1941 release starring Lawrence Olivier as Horatio Nelson and Emma Hamilton as his extra-curricular love, Fraser wrote that "It was part of [film producer Alexander] Korda's war effort, made in America while that country was still neutral, and since it emphasized the similarity between Britain's stand against Napoleon and the solitary resistance to Hitler, it was widely (and rightly) regarded as propaganda." Korda was a Hungarian Jewish refugee who was subsequently knighted. Korda and Churchill were somewhat close and it is believed that Churchill wrote all or part of Olivier's Napoleon/Hitler speech. In other films Hitler was identified and lambasted much more directly than in those using thinly disguised surrogates such as Philip of Spain or Napoleon. The Great Dictator (1940) was Charlie Chaplin's great contribution to the prewar war effort. It was particularly effective, as in most American eyes the trappings of the Nazi regime and the personas of its leading lights were both menacing and prime subjects of ridicule. Deadly serious was Manhunt, made by Twentieth Century Fox in 1941. Directed by Fritz Lang, one of Germany's outstanding movie talents before he fled to the U.S., the story centers on a British big game hunter in the mid-1930s (Walter Pidgeon) who becomes excited about his idea of stalking down Hitler, getting him in his sights and pulling the trigger of his empty high powered rifle with telescopic sight. The stalking itself would be his sport; he had no thought of killing his "prey." The sportsman succeeds in his hunt and sighting, but is pounced upon by the Gestapo and is tortured. He escapes and has an interesting but lethal cat-and-mouse showdown with the film's main Nazi heavy, George Sanders. Sanders tells Pidgeon: "You are decadent. We don't hesitate to destroy." As the movie ends, Pidgeon is heading back into Germany, this time to find and kill Hitler for real. Thus theaters throughout neutral America showed a film urging the assassination of another country's leader. Paris Calling was a 1941 Universal release produced by Charles Feldman and written by Benjamin Glazer and Charles Kaufman. It centered on a Frenchman (Basil Rathbone) deemed a "traitor" - because he joins the Vichy government after the fall of France. His fiancée falls for a holed-up RAF officer (Randolph Scott). She joins the resistance and kills Rathbone in order to obtain some vital papers in his possession. Alleged communists in the cast included Gale Sondergaard and Lee J. Cobb, who portrays a Gestapo officer. Cobb would be one of many Jewish actors who would dress in SS black costumes and play particularly nasty Nazis throughout the war. This movie was made in Hollywood not only while we were still at "peace" with Germany, but while the Vichy government was recognized by the U.S. and was represented in Washington. One of the most blatant interventionist vehicles was a 1941 Warner release made with the cooperation of the FDR administration. Dive Bomber was largely shot (and impressively photographed in Technicolor) at a U.S Naval air station. It starred Flynn, conservative Republican Fred MacMurray and longtime liberal Democrat Ralph Bellamy. Flynn and MacMurray are Navy test pilots and Bellamy is the flight doctor. After the successful testing of an abdominal pressure belt to prevent blackouts in dives, Flynn tells Bellamy: "There are two kinds of blackouts this belt may lick. Our kind and the kind they're having in London right now." Character actor Regis Toomey is washed out by Bellamy for medical reasons. Of this Flynn says: "It's tough to get pulled out of the ring just when it looks like the main event [U.S. entry into the war] is about to start." Toomey goes to Canada and hooks on as a ferry pilot to Britain. Later, in his Canadian uniform, he visits his old buddies, telling them: "Great bunch of people up there and on the other side!" Dive Bomber also doubled as a recruiting film, encouraging young Americans to get in there and earn their wings. In the 1941 interventionist efforts International Squadron and A Yank in the RAF, American lads were already in the skies over Britain fighting the Luftwaffe. In Yank Twentieth Century Fox teamed two of its all-American type superstars, Tyrone Power and Betty Grable. Betty of course was doing her bit on the ground, in uniform and with blonde curls touching her shoulder-slung gas mask. Sergeant York was a 1941 Warner release even more celebrated than Dive Bomber. It was based loosely on the life of Alvin York, a Tennessee backwoodsman who won national fame as a World War I infantry hero. It starred Cary Cooper, with three-time Oscar winner (and subsequent conservative political activist) Walter Brennan in the top supporting role. The movie shows York as a conscientious objector uncomfortable in basic training at the prospect of killing. His C.O., Major Buxton (Stanley Ridges), gives York a ten-day furlough to think things over. Back home on a lonely hill, Cooper has a spiritual revelation that tells him that he must get into the fight. The scene conveys the feeling that Cooper is a composite of all of America's young men, meaning those looking up at the screen in 1941. Hollywood Goes To War relates that "Hollywood and Washington exploited Sergeant York for all it was worth. Warners built a huge publicity campaign around the film." New York's Astor Theater was decked out with 15,000 flashing red, white and blue lights. The premiere audience included such luminaries as Eleanor Roosevelt, 1940 GOP presidential nominee (and FDR foreign policy clone) Wendell Willkie and Gen. Lewis B. Hershey, the Selective Service (military draft) Director. Koppes and Black wrote that "Sergeant York capped an evolution in American motion pictures, that took them from being fearful of political subjects to being aggressively interventionist." MGM'S Mrs. Miniver wasn't released before Pearl Harbor, but it was the Gone With the Wind of "this is America's fight" productions. It was loaded with British colony talent headed by the lovely Greer Garson. According to Sheridan Morley in Tales From The Hollywood Raj, while the film was in production "President Roosevelt told [director William] Wyler that his film had greatly lessened any political opposition to increasing U.S. aid to Britain." Mrs. Miniver was aimed at the heart of Middle America, and showed the wartime travails of an English family really-just-like-us under Luftwaffe siege. A lovely English village and its jolly, garden loving people are scarred by brutal death from the sky. The father and husband (Walter Pidgeon) even sails his beloved small boat to Dunkirk to bring a few Tommies off the beaches. The final scene cleverly evokes newspaper photos and newsreel footage of the largely destroyed St. Michael's Church of England cathedral in Coventry (few Americans realizing that Coventry was one of England's prime war production centers). There is a huge hole in the roof of the local church. The pastor is played by Henry Wilcoxin (Mark Antony and King Arthur in C.B. De Mille epics), the only British colonyite as formidably British as C. Aubry Smith. In a speech that Wilcoxin and Wyler wrote the night before shooting, Wilcoxin tells his congregation that "This is a people's war! It is our war! We are the fighters!" The Catholic World, one of the rare liberal Catholic publications of that era, wished that "It had been some Catholic's privilege to [have directed Miniver]. Perhaps it was God's retort to anti-Semitism to have chosen William Wyler." S.C. Sheriff was an accomplished script writer close to Alexander Korda. The two had collaborated on Korda's 1939-Pearl Harbor efforts and had scripted one of Korda's finest; the classic Four Feathers, about the British army in the Sudan, with John Clements, Ralph Richardson and C. Aubry Smith. Richardson had teamed with Olivier in a 1938 British movie in which an unnamed foreign power (with all the bad guys having distinct German accents) had developed a "death ray" device to bring down British planes. Sheridan Morley, whose grandmother was British colony character actress Gladys Cooper, quoted Sheriff just after Pearl harbor: "England had been expecting [America's entry] for so long that when [the Japanese attack] came we hardly turned a hair. But to the Americans it came like a thunderbolt. . . " There would be almost a half million empty seats in America's movie houses when it was all over, because a lot of young men and boys who watched Buck Jones and Ken Maynard round up rustlers at the Saturday matinee, and who held hands with their girl and split a box of candy during a Garbo movie wouldn't be coming back. Their sacrifice wasn't in vain, we were told. They had given their lives to ensure the dawning of a much better and brighter world.
|
been gassed, Nigel Bruce had been seriously wounded and
Basil Rathbone had received the Military Cross for gallantry
in action.