Does 'The Collaboration' Overstate Hollywood's Cooperation
With Hitler?
Brandeis professor Thomas Doherty, who wrote an earlier book
on Hollywood and Hitler, calls the controversial "The Collaboration,"
which is excerpted in THR, "slanderous and ahistorical."
Ben Urwand's new book, The Collaboration: Hollywood's Pact
with Hitler, has sparked a debate among scholars and others about the nature of
Hollywood's relationship to Hitler and the Nazi party in the 1930s before the
outbreak of war in Europe. Drawing upon extensive archival research, much of it
not previously known, Urwand makes the case that the major American movie
studios went to extraordinary lengths to cooperate with the Nazis to protect
access to the German market.
Hitler's Hollywood: The Films Nazis Loved and Hated
Urwand has prominent defenders, including University of
Cambridge professor Richard J. Evans, the noted historian of the Third Reich,
who called the book, "full of startling revelations presented in examplary
fashion." Deborah Lipstadt, a Holocaust historian at Emory University has
said it "could be a blockbuster."
PHOTOS: Hitler's Hollywood: The Films Nazis Loved and Hated
But his most forceful critic has been Brandeis University
historian Thomas Doherty, the author of a competing narrative, Hollywood and
Hitler, 1933-39, published earlier this year. Here Doherty summarizes his
criticism of Urwand's book for The Hollywood Reporter. -- Andy Lewis
Ben Urwand's The Collaboration: Hollywood's Pact with
Hitler, to be published in September by Harvard University Press, dovetails in
some ways with my own book, Hollywood and Hitler, 1933-1939, published last
April by Columbia University Press.
Urwand's study has already generated an extraordinary amount
of buzz due to the incendiary charges emblazoned in its title: that Hollywood
was a hotbed of Nazi collaboration, a nest of craven greedheads whose pact with
the devil made the American motion picture industry -- particularly the mostly
Jewish moguls who ran the studio system -- complicit in the rise of Nazism and,
presumably, the horrors that came after.
I consider Urwand's charges slanderous and ahistorical --
slanderous because they smear an industry that struggled to alert America to
the menace brewing in Germany and ahistorical because they read the past through
the eyes of the present.
The trouble begins with the title on the marquee.
"Collaboration" is how you describe the Vichy government during the
Nazi Occupation of France or Vidkun Quisling, the Norwegian double-crosser
whose name became synonymous with treason. To call a Hollywood mogul a
collaborator is to assert that he worked consciously and purposefully, out of
cowardice or greed, under the guidance of Nazi overlords.
THE COVER STORY: The Chilling History of How Hollywood
Helped Hitler (Exclusive)
The subtitled designation "pact" doubles down on
the J'accuse! by echoing the two infamous treaties that abetted the forward
march of Nazism: the Munich Pact, signed on Sept. 30, 1938, in which the French
and the British bowed before Hitler's "last territorial demand" and
acquiesced to the carving up of Czechoslovakia; and the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact
of Aug. 23, 1939, in
which Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union signed an alliance that gave the green
light for World War II. This is very nasty company for the likes of Louis B.
Mayer, Carl Laemmle and Jack Warner.
The counterpoint is so basic it should go without saying
were not historical amnesia a pervasive condition.
In the 1930s, the Nazis were not yet the Nazis of our
history, our imagination. They had not yet started World War II, they had not
yet implemented the Holocaust and they had not yet become what they are now: a
universal emblem for absolute evil. From our perspective, the rise of Nazism
looks like a linear trajectory, a series of accelerating events terminating
inevitably at the gates of Auschwitz.
At the time, the endgame of Nazism was not so clear.
Most Americans, including the Hollywood moguls, had no
inkling of the horrors to come, no understanding that dealing with the new
regime in Germany was not business as usual. While sifting through the trade
press accounts (including those in The Hollywood Reporter) and industry memos
from the 1930s, I saw some greed and cupidity, to be sure, but mainly I saw
confusion, wishful thinking, and disbelief. How did a nation Hollywood had long
considered sane and rational become so pathological? Was this a permanent
affliction or would the fever break?
Today, any dealing with the Nazis seems unimaginable. In the
1930s, it just wasn't.
Appreciating the constraints under which the Hollywood
studio system operated is equally important. In the 1930s, motion pictures
possessed no First Amendment rights. (Cinema was not put under the umbrella of
the U.S. Constitution until the U.S. Supreme Court's Miracle decision in 1952.)
Censorship of all kinds -- from foreign governments, from state censor boards,
and from the industry's own in-house regulatory agency, the Production Code
Administration -- was an accepted fact of life.
STORY: How Jack Warner Tried to Crush the Postwar German
Film Industry (Book Excerpt)
A movie was not considered an inviolable work of art; it was
a malleable product that could be tailor-made to suit the whims of the customer
-- take a little off here, add something over there. Hollywood had been editing
films to foreign specifications since at least 1918, when the sinister Asian
villain in Cecil B. DeMille's The Cheat (1915) morphed from Japanese to Burmese
after protests from the Japanese government.
Of course, the Hollywood studios tried to negotiate with
Germany to leverage their films into a lucrative marketplace. This is hardly a
news bulletin.
Some, like Universal and Warner Bros., found dealing with
the Nazis impossible and pulled up stakes. Others, like Paramount, Fox, and
MGM, stuck it out until the outbreak of war in Europe. After all, Germany was
officially a "friendly nation" and the United States was not a
signatory to the Versailles Treaty. In addition to the immediate profit motive,
the studios sought to maintain a foothold for their distribution
infrastructure; no one expected the Third Reich to last for a thousand years.
Perhaps most importantly, a fixation on the mechanics of the
import market ignores the action on the homefront--a story of passionate
anti-Nazi activity in Hollywood. No Popular Front group in the 1930s did more
to alert Americans to the looming threat from Nazism than the Hollywood
Anti-Nazi League for the Defense of Democracy (HANL). Founded in 1936 and numbering some 5,000 artists-activists
from all ranks of the motion picture industry, HANL worked tirelessly to raise
awareness about the menace of Nazism--holding rallies, broadcasting radio
shows, and doing its best to inject anti-Nazi sentiments into Hollywood cinema
(no easy task given the obstacles set up by the internal and external censors
who always sought to denude American cinema of overt political content).
It would be unfortunate if the headlines about Hollywood
"collaboration" were to tar the reputations of those moguls who stood
tall and firm against Nazi ideology.
The work of Carl Laemmle, founder of Universal Pictures, is
especially praiseworthy. Like many German-born Jews of his generation, he had
an abiding affection for what he called his "fatherland" (the word
gave off no unpleasant aroma then). He
was astonished when the Universal production he was proudest of--the antiwar
epic All Quiet on the Western Front (1930)-- precipitated riots in Berlin,
incited by Joseph Goebbels himself.
With the rise of Hitler in 1933, Laemmle soon came to
understand that the Germany he fondly remembered was no more. He wrote checks to the European Film Fund, a
refugee charity co-founded by agent Paul Kohner and director Ernst Lubitsch,
and signed hundreds of affidavits to facilitate the immigration of Jewish
refugees into the United States (and thereby singlehandedly saved more Jews
from annihilation than the U.S. State Department).
At Warner Bros., which had pulled out of Germany in 1933
after the head of its Berlin office was beaten up by Nazi thugs, Jack and Harry
Warner consistently placed their pocketbooks and studio in service to the
anti-Nazi cause--dunning their employees for "donations" to HANL,
opening up the airwaves on radio station KFWB for anti-Nazi commentary and
entertainment fare, and producing a series of anti-Nazi allegories emphasizing
democratic aspiration and religious tolerance.
The meaning between the lines could be read by any sentient
spectator in films such as Black Legion (1937), a preachment against domestic
fascism; The Life of Emile Zola (1937), a tribute to freedom of expression
built around the French author's advocacy for the railroaded Jewish artillery
officer Alfred Dreyfus; The Adventures of Robin Hood (1938), an Errol Flynn swashbuckler that doubles as a
broadside against tyranny; and the biopic Juarez (1939), in which dark Mexican
peasants triumph over Aryan invaders. The allegory finally became explicit with
the first real shot across the bow, the groundbreaking Confessions of a Nazi
Spy (1939).
No wonder, in 1938, at a gathering of anti-Nazi activists at
the home of Edward G. Robinson, Groucho Marx, in one of his few recorded
straight lines, raised his glass and offered up a toast to Warner
Bros.--"the only studio with any guts."
"I never knock the other fellow's merchandise,"
says insurance agent Walter Neff in Billy Wilder's Double Indemnity (1944)--a
good policy as well for an author peddling a book. Still, I am obliged to say
that I am always leery of history that encourages the present to feel morally
superior to the past, that makes today's readers think: "Ah, if I were
alive in 1935, I would have been far more far-sighted and morally scrupulous
than those benighted and ethically compromised scoundrels who ran the
studios."
My own conclusion on the subject of Hollywood and Hitler in
the 1930s? On balance, and given the restrictions of the time, Hollywood did
more than any other for-profit business to sound the alarm against Nazism. It
is a story of not of collaboration but resistance.
Thomas Doherty is professor of American Studies at Brandeis
University and the author of Hollywood and Hitler, 1933-1939 (Columbia
University Press, 2013).
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Ben Urwand
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As a Hays Office censor, Joseph Breen (center) was able to
suppress anti-Nazi films.
PHOTOGRAPH: KURT HUTTON/GETTY
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Hitler in Hollywood
Did the studios collaborate?
by David Denby
In 1937, Warner Bros. departed from its usual fare of
jittery urban dramas and emotionally saturated women’s pictures. In a burst of
ambition, it mounted a historical spectacle set in late-nineteenth-century
Paris, “The Life of Emile Zola,” starring Paul Muni. “Zola” is meant to be a
stirring man-of-conscience movie: after early struggles, followed by huge
success, the writer, in self-satisfied middle age, gets drawn, with increasing
fury, into the Dreyfus affair. “Zola,” which was directed by the German émigré
William Dieterle, includes episodes that were interpreted at the time as
indirect attacks on Nazi Germany: scenes of state-inspired mob agitation
launched first against Alfred Dreyfus, a Jewish captain in the French Army who
is falsely accused of treason; and then against Zola for defending him—his
books are publicly burned. At the end, in an outpouring of the progressive
rhetoric that was typical of the thirties, Zola makes a grandiloquent speech on
behalf of justice and truth and against nationalist war frenzy. “The Life of
Emile Zola” was a big hit for Warners. It was nominated for ten Academy
Awards—Muni, formerly a star of the Yiddish theatre in New York (he was born
Meshilem Meier Weisenfreund), was nominated for best actor—and it won three,
including best picture. But there is a pervasive oddity about the film: the
word “Jew” is never spoken in it, and anti-Semitism is never mentioned. There
were four instances of “Jew” in the original screenplay, but three were cut,
leaving a single appearance of the word, on a printed page. As the French
general staff scan a list of officers, the words “Religion: Jew” appear
onscreen next to Dreyfus’s name. The shot lasts about a second and a half.
Was the undeleted word an error? A solitary act of defiance?
“The Life of Emile Zola” is a perfect example of the half-boldness,
half-cowardice, and outright confusion that marked Hollywood’s response to
Nazism and anti-Semitism in the nineteen-thirties. In that decade, the industry
produced a generally good-hearted and liberal cinema that celebrated such
democratic American virtues as easy manners, tolerance, heroic individualism,
and loathing of mob violence—all of which can be seen as a de-facto rebuke to
Nazism. At the same time, the studios cancelled several explicitly anti-Nazi
films planned for production, and deleted from several other movies anything
that could be construed as critical of the Nazis, along with anything that
might be seen as favorable to the Jews—or even a simple acknowledgment that
they existed. Except for Twentieth Century Fox, headed by Darryl Zanuck, a
shrewd and tough Gentile from Nebraska, the studios were run by Jews, who
controlled many hectares of Los Angeles turf and worldwide distribution
networks—an enormous power base that makes their timidity regarding Nazism a
matter of psychological and cultural as well as political interest.
In recent years, a variety of scholars, including Neal
Gabler, J. Hoberman, Jeffrey Shandler, Lester D. Friedman, Steven Carr, and
Felicia Herman, have worked on different aspects of this complicated history.
But the story has been charged up by the appearance of two new books: “The
Collaboration: Hollywood’s Pact with Hitler” (Harvard), by Ben Urwand, a junior
fellow of the Society of Fellows at Harvard; and “Hollywood and Hitler, 1933-1939” (Columbia), by Thomas
Doherty, a professor of American studies at Brandeis. Doherty’s book is much
the better of the two. A witty writer familiar with Hollywood history and
manners, Doherty places the studios’ craven behavior within a general account
of the political culture of the movies in the thirties and forties. He finds
both greed and fear in studio practice, but in a recent Times report on the controversy
he strongly objects to Urwand’s use of the word “collaboration.” Urwand, an
Australian, and the grandson of Hungarian Jews who spent the war years in
hiding, flings many accusations. He speaks of Hitler’s victory “on the other
side of the globe,” by which he means Hollywood, and he claims to see “the
great mark that Hitler left on American culture.” Throughout the book, he gives
the impression that the studios were merely doing the Nazis’ bidding. In that
same Times article, he says that Hollywood was “collaborating with Adolf
Hitler, the person and human being.”
Urwand has established the existence of multiple contacts
between the studios and German government officials, and, in an apparent coup,
he makes central use of a figure whom Doherty summons only sparingly: the Nazi
consul in Los Angeles, Georg Gyssling, a former diplomat whose suavely
threatening manner resembles the polite menace of Conrad Veidt’s Major
Strasser, in “Casablanca.” Urwand shows that the studios occasionally allowed
Gyssling to read scripts, to see early cuts of movies, and to demand—sometimes
successfully—deletions from finished films. But are Urwand’s extreme
conclusions warranted by what he has discovered? And, intentionally or not, his
accusations stir up an old, sore question: should the Jews have done more to
fight the persecutions that eventually enveloped them?
“The Americans are so natural. Far superior to us,” Joseph
Goebbels, the Nazi propaganda minister, confided to his diary in 1935, after
seeing “It Happened One Night.” American films, including musicals, were
popular in Germany; they had a relaxed, colloquial way about them that German
filmmakers, who tended toward agonized expressionism in the nineteen-twenties
and rigid didacticism during the Nazi period, couldn’t match. Goebbels’s
wistful appreciation of American ease is one of the bizarre ironies of the
story, since he was intent on purging the cinema of anything that didn’t
comport with Nazi ideology. Among other things, he removed Jewish artists and
workers from the German film industry and pushed out Jews who worked for the
distribution arms of American studios.
The Nazis saw every movie as a potential threat to their
immaculacy. Urwand quotes some solemn colloquies among Nazi officials,
including a mental-health expert. Would “King Kong” (giant ape with
Nordic-looking blonde) offend the “healthy racial feelings” of the German
people? How about “Tarzan” (shirtless jungle man with white woman)? “King Kong”
was released, “Tarzan” banned. So was the violent “Scarface,” Charlie Chaplin’s
“Modern Times,” and all the later films of Marlene Dietrich, an outspoken
critic of the Nazis. Goebbels’s ministry also found out which American actors
and crew members were Jewish or anti-Nazi, and refused to import films on which
they had worked.
All this censoring and interdiction came at the German end
of the distribution chain. Georg Gyssling was installed at the production end.
After arriving in Los Angeles, in 1933, he began scouring the trade press. If
he thought that a movie announced for production might contain elements
“detrimental to German prestige,” or if he went to a screening (at the studio’s
invitation) of such a movie when it was finished, he would write a letter
detailing cuts that he wanted made. For instance, after seeing “The Lancer
Spy,” a 1937 Fox picture set after the First World War, he objected to the way
German officials were portrayed, and sent a list of changes, which, according
to Urwand, were made before the film was released. The list was sent not to Fox
but to the Hays Office, which administered the Production Code. “The production
of a film of such a character will arouse very bad feeling in Germany against
the producing company and may lead to serious difficulties which should be
avoided in mutual interests,” he wrote, by which he meant that the film, at his
suggestion, could be banned in Germany.
Gyssling protested other films about the First World War
period—“Captured!,” set in a German prison camp, and “The Road Back,” based on
Erich Maria Remarque’s sequel to “All Quiet on the Western Front” (a pacifist
novel and movie that the Nazis hated). Urwand speculates that Gyssling, by
harping on the past, was trying to forestall even more negative images of
Germany set in the Nazi present. Gyssling played both the short game and the
long, and, occasionally, he overplayed. In 1937, when Universal ignored his
remonstrations and began adapting “The Road Back,” he sent letters to the cast
and crew warning that any movies they worked on in the future might be banned
in Germany. The impudent letter got into the press, an uproar ensued, and the
German Foreign Office had to assure the State Department that no further
threats would be made against American citizens. Yet Gyssling brazened it out
and remained in place.
Why did the studio bosses listen to him at all? They were
not thoughtful men who revealed themselves in diaries and letters; they ruled
by meetings and telephone calls, so we know virtually nothing about their
thinking on such sensitive matters. An obvious reason, which both Doherty and
Urwand give, is that the studios wanted to hold on to the German market.
Neither author, however, gives many figures, though Urwand notes that Paramount
actually lost a little money in Germany in 1936. Tino Balio, a professor
emeritus at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and an expert on the American
film industry, says that the German market was much smaller than that of Great
Britain, and that it got smaller still as the decade went on. Warners left
Germany in 1934, the year Nazi thugs assaulted its representative there (an
English Jew), and, as Urwand admits, by 1936 only Paramount, M-G-M, and Fox
were still distributing films in the country. In any case, the studios did not
have immediate access to their returns, which were frozen in German
banks—something that Urwand waits until the middle of his book to tell us.
No doubt the studio bosses accommodated the Nazis because
they hoped for a more amenable regime in the future; they were businessmen, and
acted as businessmen. Fox and Paramount, eager to claim some part of the frozen
assets, made newsreels, with Nazi coöperation, chronicling Party activities,
and sold them to overseas markets. Urwand scores a point here: these were
propaganda films, though we don’t know if audiences reacted to them with
pleasure or with loathing. A second attempt to get at the frozen assets: at the
suggestion of an American trade commissioner, M-G-M loaned money to German
companies in return for the companies’ bonds, which it sold at a discount. Some
of those companies made arms, and Urwand concludes that the studio “helped to
finance the German war machine.” Yet the studio executives could hardly have
known in the mid-thirties that another war was coming.
Given all the restrictions on studio operations in Germany,
Gyssling’s threats could not have been very plausible by the middle of the decade.
Isn’t it likely that the studios were responding to other pressures and fears
as well?
What many people don’t know about the Production Code is
that the studios imposed it on themselves. In 1922, they realized that, as a
new and increasingly scandalous industry, they needed an organization to
represent them in Washington. They formed the Motion Picture Producers and
Distributors of America, under the direction of the former Postmaster General
Will H. Hays, an Indiana Republican and a Presbyterian. (It still represents
the studios, under the title Motion Picture Association of America.) It also
set up a moral guide, which was intended to ward off both national and local
censorship. The Code was toothless until 1934, when the Legion of Decency—a
conservative Catholic organization—claimed that Hollywood, with its racy
productions, was polluting the nation’s youth. The organization threatened to
get Catholics to boycott any films that it saw as unfit. From that point, a
movie couldn’t get widespread distribution unless it received a Production Code
seal, which certified that its morals and its politics had withstood scrutiny.
Hays appointed as censor-in-chief Joseph I. Breen, a prominent Catholic layman
and contributor to Catholic journals. He was also an anti-Semite. Two years
before he was appointed, as Doherty reports, Breen wrote to a friend that
“people whose daily morals would not be tolerated in the toilet of a pest house
hold the good jobs out here and wax fat on it. Ninety-five percent of these folks
are Jews of an Eastern European lineage. They are, probably, the scum of the
scum of the earth.”
Most of Breen’s rules centered on sex and language, but the
code also included this stricture: “The history, institutions, prominent
people, and citizenry of all nations shall be represented fairly.” The
statement was so loose in meaning that it could be used to ban any critical
look at a foreign country. By 1934, then, Breen and Gyssling had overlapping
briefs. Breen read every script before it went into production, and he used the
“fairness” justification to limit or kill any film that touched on Nazi
Germany. As J. Hoberman and Jeffrey Shandler put it in their volume
“Entertaining America” (2003), a history of Jews and the media, “Breen and his
ecclesiastical supporters saw Hitler’s rise as instrumental in their campaign
to reform Hollywood. Nazi politics and anti-Semitic agitation had made Jewish
studio executives newly vulnerable.”
At several points in the mid-nineteen-thirties, an agent
named Al Rosen—eager to become a producer—attempted to raise money for a
project called “The Mad Dog of Europe.” The screenplay, which had been bouncing
around Hollywood since 1933, was about the destruction of a German-Jewish
family during Hitler’s rise to power. No studio had attached itself to the
project, but the script got to Breen’s office, and Breen took the matter
seriously. In a long memo, he wrote:
Because of the large number of Jews active in the motion
picture industry in this country, the charge is certain to be made that the
Jews, as a class, are behind an anti-Hitler picture and using the entertainment
screen for their own personal propaganda purposes. The entire industry, because
of this, is likely to be indicted for the action of a mere handful.
This kind of reasoning, with its open threat, effectively
killed the project and maimed many others.
In 1936, M-G-M acquired Sinclair Lewis’s best-seller “It
Can’t Happen Here,” a semi-satirical fantasia about American totalitarianism: a
Huey Long-type demagogue takes over the Presidency, and rules by means of the
secret police. When M-G-M geared up to shoot the movie, with prominent actors,
including Lionel Barrymore and James Stewart, Breen wrote a letter to Will
Hays, saying, “It is hardly more than a story portraying the Hitlerization of
the United States of America. It is an attempt to bring home to American
citizens, through the instrumentality of the screen, that which is transpiring
in Germany today.” (That it certainly was.) Breen also wrote Louis B. Mayer,
the president of M-G-M, a seven-page letter proposing sixty cuts in the
screenplay—in effect, making a Production Code seal hostage to impossible
demands. Even if the cuts were made, he wrote to Mayer, the movie would be
subject “to the most minute criticism on all sides,” which “may result in
enormous difficulty to your studio.” Mayer cancelled the project.
Breen continued to pressure the studios not to mention
Nazism right up to the outbreak of war. In 1938, when M-G-M wanted to adapt
“Three Comrades,” an explicitly anti-Nazi novel by Remarque, Breen insisted
that the movie be set earlier in time. “Thus we will get away from any possible
suggestion that we are dealing with Nazi violence or terrorism.” The pattern
was clear: no matter how vicious Nazi conduct was, any representation of it
could be deemed a violation of the code’s demand that foreign countries be
treated “fairly.” In practice, the more cruel and irrational the Nazis got, the
safer they were from any Hollywood dramatization of their actions. Breen warned
the studios of the danger to their German earnings, but his real intent was
probably to remind the men running Hollywood that they should never feel safe.
At times, Gyssling alerted Breen that something was amiss,
and they worked together. At other times, Breen worked alone, and he was
definitely the more powerful of the two; withholding a Production Code seal
could severely restrict a movie’s commercial chances in the American market.
You can discover the truth of Breen’s greater power from Urwand’s book, but
only by patient deduction. Urwand accounts for Breen’s activities (without
quoting his anti-Semitic letter), but he pumps up Gyssling’s role even when
he’s not sure that Gyssling deserves the credit. For instance, Urwand writes
that Gyssling, in 1934, “probably” intervened to get “Mad Dog” killed, though
“the evidence is inconclusive.” And, after admitting that he has no proof that
Gyssling caused M-G-M to abandon “It Can’t Happen Here,” he nevertheless
insists that Gyssling’s “presence in Los Angeles undoubtedly affected M-G-M’s
decision.” His account of what happened with “The Life of Emile Zola” is even
shakier. When Gyssling heard, in 1937, that the movie was in the works, he
called the producer, Henry Blanke, who, as he later wrote, placated Gyssling
with a lie. Blanke told Gyssling that the Dreyfus affair would play only a
small role in “Zola.” Urwand writes, “Just a few days after this phone call
took place, Jack Warner dictated some important changes to the Dreyfus
picture”—the three infamous deletions. But, as Felicia Herman notes, in a 2001
article in American Jewish History, citing a letter from Breen to Warner, it
was the Production Code chief who persuaded the studio to make the cuts. Urwand
quotes numerous letters from Gyssling to Breen but explicitly cites only one
letter from Gyssling to a studio. At one point, he says that a threatening
Gyssling letter to Warners has been lost, but he then reconstructs what the
letter “would” have said, based on the single letter he cites (without ever
quoting it). It’s hard to imagine how authoritative scholarship and furious
accusations can be based on missing documents, the conditional mood, and
conjecture.
Gyssling continued operating in Hollywood until June, 1941,
when Franklin Roosevelt broke off diplomatic relations with Germany, and the
Nazi consul, regretting his separation from his “thousands of friends” in Los
Angeles, abruptly left town. He made a lot of mischief in his eight years, but
neither he nor even Breen was as significant a force as the studio bosses’ own
fears.
The future moguls came from the backwaters of Eastern Europe
and arrived in the United States with nothing, not even fathers (who were
mostly feckless or missing). Desperate for respectability and for cash, they worked
at whatever trade lay at hand: peddling scrap metal, furs, gloves. Then, soon
after the emergence of storefront nickelodeons, in 1905, they threw in their
lot with a new, primitive art form that many regarded as a passing fad. Louis
B. Mayer, Samuel Goldwyn, Adolph Zukor, Carl Laemmle, Jesse Lasky, and the four
Warner brothers built their enterprises with a speed that even now, in the age
of venture capital and mobile-app entrepreneurs, seems remarkable. And yet,
outside their domain, as Neal Gabler has chronicled in his 1988 history, “An
Empire of Their Own,” they were silent or utterly conventional. They acted as
if all their power and their personal wealth could be taken away if they made a
mistake.
Their fears were not entirely irrational, since anti-Semitism
was widespread in America in the twenties and thirties. It could be found in
the radio broadcasts of demagogues like Father Coughlin, in the street rallies
of Nazi and pro-German groups in New York and other cities. The Jews were
blamed in some quarters for the worldwide economic crisis. Henry Ford, Theodore
Dreiser, and Charles Lindbergh, along with a variety of outraged organizations,
fulminated over Jewish control of the movie business, whose leaders were
variously excoriated as “Asiatics,” greedy buffoons, sexual predators, and
Bolsheviks.
In response, the studio bosses wrapped themselves in
Americanism, generating in their movies, as Gabler points out, an ideal
country: “It would be an America where fathers were strong, families stable,
people attractive, resilient, resourceful, and decent.” In that America, there
was no room for the kind of Jewish characters and actors who had appeared in
the silent and early-sound-period movies—the ghetto dwellers, the Yiddish
dialogue comics, the Jewish boy in the first sound film (from 1927), “The Jazz
Singer,” who turns his back on the Lower East Side and assimilates into
American society.
By acting as they did, the studio bosses fell into the trap
that they had allowed men like Gyssling and Breen to set for them. Because they
were Jews, they believed, they couldn’t make anti-Nazi movies or movies about
Jews, for this would be seen as special pleading or warmongering. (The Nazi
appeaser Joseph P. Kennedy, the Ambassador to Great Britain, said as much to
the studio heads as late as 1940, when the Wehrmacht was all over Europe.)
Breen tormented them with the spectre of what anti-Semites might do as a way of
stifling their response to what anti-Semitism was already doing—and would do,
in Europe, with annihilating violence. It’s as if the Hollywood Jews had become
responsible for anti-Semitism. Of all the filmmakers in the world, they became
the last who could criticize the Nazis. Their situation was both tragic and
absurd.
In their hesitations and their timidity, they were
supported, as both Doherty and Urwand demonstrate, by such organizations as the
Anti-Defamation League of B’nai B’rith and the American Jewish Committee, both
of which took the line that the Jews had to be careful about thrusting
themselves before the public. “They will get tired of us,” Cyrus Adler, the
head of the A.J.C., said. “What I want them to do is to get tired of Hitler”—a
line that is too sad for tears. These organizations, adding to Breen’s efforts,
lobbied successfully against the making of “The Mad Dog of Europe” and “It
Can’t Happen Here.” But were they overestimating the dangers of domestic
anti-Semitism? In 1934, they did everything possible to get Fox to halt its
production of “The House of Rothschild,” a historical account of the rise of
the Rothschild banking family. What troubled them most was the early scenes,
set in the eighteenth century, in which Mayer Rothschild (George Arliss)
attempts to hide some taxable money from a collector. Later, Mayer instructs
his sons to set up banks in multiple European cities as a way of attaining
power and dignity, which the movie, in its second half, shows them achieving.
The film is a celebration, and, when it opened, it was widely admired by Jewish
and non-Jewish audiences alike. The feared anti-Semitic reaction in the United
States never materialized, though the Anti-Defamation League remained unhappy.
Apparently, no Jew should be shown as greedy and power-seeking. Urwand quotes a
representative of the A.D.L. saying of the film, “It’s too bad that it was made
at this time, for it corroborates the basic Nazi propaganda, and this
corroboration is furnished by Jews.” The A.D.L. quickly remedied the situation,
in 1934, by holding a meeting with a group of studio bosses and production
heads, the result of which was that Jewish characters were banned altogether.
Oddly, Urwand seems to think that “The House of Rothschild”
was a disaster for the Jews, and he cites the fact that the Nazis used passages
of it for their own propaganda as an example of the harm it did. But the Nazis
would use anything for their own purposes. In 1935, they loved Henry Hathaway’s
paean to British imperialism in India, “The Lives of a Bengal Lancer,” with
Gary Cooper enduring torture rather than betray his friends. The film’s
endorsement of “the leader principle,” Urwand says, “enforced this central
aspect of Nazi ideology,” and he calls “Lives,” a likably silly adventure film,
Nazi propaganda. In his own way, Urwand thinks like an ideologue—or a censor.
For instance, he writes of a movie as if its entire emotional effect could be
summarized by recounting its story—as if acting, directing, cinematography, and
innumerable details of emphasis and atmosphere didn’t shape our responses as
much as plot does. Even Goebbels seemed to realize that American entertainment
breathed freedom in a great many ways.
That a man like Georg Gyssling was allowed past the front
gate of an American film studio is a disgrace, and Urwand deserves credit for
bringing his role out of obscurity. But the charge of “collaboration” is
inaccurate and unfair—a case of scholarly sensationalism. The studios didn’t
advance Nazism; they failed to oppose it. In that failure, they were joined,
and even surpassed, by other American businesses, including General Motors,
DuPont, I.B.M., and Ford, which operated in Nazi Germany and, in some cases,
continued to operate there after the war began. None of this makes Hollywood
any less cowardly, but Urwand, writing in the shadow of the Holocaust, which
few people in the mid-thirties could have imagined, recasts every act of
evasion as the darkest complicity. And he is too enraged to pose the obvious
practical questions: What if the studios had made a slew of anti-Nazi movies?
Would many people have gone to them? Could the studios have alerted the world
to the threat of Nazism? It’s hard to say. Still, it would have been nice if
they had tried. ♦
As a Hays Office censor, Joseph Breen (center) was able to
suppress anti-Nazi films.
PHOTOGRAPH: KURT HUTTON/GETTY
