In December 1930, Nazis in Berlin staged a riot to protest the Oscar-winning American movie All Quiet on the Western Front, which was based on German author Eric Maria Remarque's novel about World War I. The Nazis felt the picture negatively portrayed Germans, and they succeeded in having it banned. How did the major Hollywood studios respond? That's the question discussed by Ben Urwand in his controversial The Collaboration: Hollywood's Pact with Hitler (Bellknap/Harvard University Press, $26.95).
Germany, France, and England had healthy cinemas of their own, but none produced sufficient movies to meet popular demand. They and other European countries were, therefore, an important market for classic Hollywood's studios. Urwand alleges that the studios, which, with one exception, were run by Jews, "collaborated" with the movie-loving Adolph Hitler (who came to power in 1932) and the Nazis by not making films that accurately portrayed what was happening in Germany, rarely showing Jews on screen, and by allowing the German Consul General in Los Angeles to view and suggest changes to movies before they were released. The last point is a major discovery, but as Urwand himself admits, the Motion Picture Production Code specified that films could not be offensive to foreign nationalities �" a tenet that seems only to have been applied to Europeans.
To prove his point, he painstakingly analyzes one unproduced screenplay, Mad Dog of Europe, and the impact of and issues surrounding several released movies, including King Kong, Gabriel Over the White House, The Prizefighter and the Lady (1933), and The House of Rothschild (1934).
Independent producer Sam Jaffe wanted to film Herman Mankiewicz's play Mad Dog of Europe, which dramatized Nazi persecution of Jews. Mankiewicz was under contract to MGM, so Jaffe sought another writer to adapt the play. The story became so convoluted and improbable that no studio would film it. Undoubtedly, there was concern about offending the German government, but the absurd plot provided a ready excuse to reject the proposal.
Urwand concedes that the Jewish studio executives, like many immigrants or first-generation Americans, strongly wanted to assimilate into the dominant Protestant European culture. He also acknowledges the existence of widespread anti-Semitic sentiments that blamed Jews for the Great Depression. Yet following American boxer Max Baer's victory over Germany's Max Schmeling, MGM's Louis B. Mayer cast the triumphant, Jewish American pugilist in The Prizefighter and the Lady. The movie didn't hide Baer's character's Jewishness, and showed him in romantic situations with gentile women. It initially did well in Germany, but the dubbed version fell afoul of the censors, who felt that portraying a Jew having intimate relationships with non-Jewish women was offensive to the population. Baer had also criticized Hitler, which made him suspect, although Schmeling denied that Baer made those derogatory comments. The movie was subsequently withdrawn from circulation.
Darryl Zanuck, the head of Twentieth Century Fox, was the only gentile mogul of the era, and he insisted on filming The House of Rothschild, which, while including some negative Jewish stereotypes, also had many positive images. The film was a hit in America, but it indirectly resulted in the near-disappearance of Jewish characters in American movies. Jewish civil rights organizations were divided in their opinions about the picture, as they were about how the studios censored films being released in Germany. Urwand reveals that Mayer was a major shareholder of Twentieth Century Fox, and used that leverage to persuade Zanuck to stop making similar pictures. (Zanuck did return to the subject with 1947's Gentlemen's Agreement.)
Classic Hollywood's studios were called "factories" because they produced so many movies. They wanted to make money for shareholders, not to arouse public opinion about controversial topics. The German market was important to them, and they did use their leverage to mitigate some of the proposals coming from the Nazis. For example, they threatened to close down their offices in Germany, which would have resulted in thousands of job losses �" at a time when unemployment was rampant.
Could the studios have done more to alert America to the horrors of the Nazi regime? Certainly. So could the mainstream press and the government. It's important to remember that the US Ambassador to the United Kingdom, Joseph P. Kennedy, father of the future president, felt strongly that Hitler was the best defense against the dangers posed to democratic capitalism by Joseph Stalin's Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. That belief was also shared by Winston Churchill. In the UK, Sir Oswald Mosley founded the British Union of Fascists. Urwand holds Hollywood to a higher, anachronistic standard of behavior than most other institutions of the era, but is selective in his revelations. Surprisingly, he fails to mention how the publicly anti-Nazi Marlene Dietrich refused Hitler's orders to return to her homeland to make films, and instead became an American citizen.
The sensationalist title does the book a great deal of harm. The studios negotiated with the Nazis. The two sides accommodated one another, which is not the same thing as collaboration. The academic prose often makes for tough reading, although the footnotes and bibliography are thorough. It's also well-illustrated. These virtues, however, are not sufficient to prove Urwand's thesis.