"Hollywood and Hitler: 1933-1939" by Thomas Doherty

Hollywood came under scrutiny after World War II as the fear of Communism gripped the country.The Cold War came to Hollywood in 1947 when the House Un-American Activities Committee held a notorious round of hearings over possible Communist infiltration in the movie industry.Films were analyzed for messages that might be interpreted as promoting Communist views, such as Song of Russia, a wartime musical released when the Soviet Union was a U.S. ally.No pre-war congressional investigation ever called film executives on the carpet for failing to identify the threat to this country in the 1930s, an era when “Nazis were all but invisible in American movies at a time when depicting their savagery might have done the most good,” noted the New York Times.In his book, Hollywood and Hitler, 1933-1939, Thomas Doherty, a film historian and Brandeis University professor, explains that there were several reasons for U.S. moviemakers to avoid the issue before Warner Brothers released Confessions of a Nazi Spy in 1939.Americans were suffering through the depths of the Depression in the 1930s. Jobs were hard to find. People went to the movies to forget their troubles, watching fare like The Wizard of Oz or Fred and Ginger dancing in art-deco apartments, said Doherty.MGM boss Sam Goldwyn said if you want to send a message, use Western Union, emphasizing Hollywood’s overriding mission was to provide entertainment, Doherty noted.Other factors impeding a flow of message movies included the film industry’s production code that restricted movies from reflecting unfairly on any foreign country, he said. The Third Reich wasn’t above exerting pressure on Hollywood, itself, with German consul Georg Gyssling lobbying hard to keep Nazi references off the big screen.Studios also did business overseas, and Germany represented a big European market for U.S. films, said Doherty.But Doherty said there some outliers, films that did address the dangers that Nazi aggression presented before the mainstream studios finally got around to the subject.The first film to do so was Hitler’s Reign of Terror, “an oddball quasi-documentary” made by Cornelius Vanderbilt Jr. that was released in 1934, said Doherty, noting that the film contains some striking footage of Vanderbilt on the streets of Vienna and Berlin amid Nazi brownshirts.A member of one of America’s wealthiest families, Vanderbilt was a globetrotting raconteur who included “a truly bizarre sequence” with the reenactment of an interview between Vanderbilt and someone posing as Hitler. Vanderbilt asks “the money question,” said Doherty: “What about the Jews, your Excellency?”“The film gets a limited release in 1934. It’s controversial. The German embassy wants to censor it. It doesn’t have much impact. But whatever you say about Vanderbilt, the film is very prophetic,” said Doherty, noting that Vanderbilt points to the militaristic path that Germany was on, predicting war in Europe “in five or six years.”Hitler’s Reign of Terror gets an exclusive screening at the Peoria Women’s Club, 301 NE Madison Ave., on Oct. 16 in conjunction with the Peoria Area World Affairs Council. The film will be part of a program commemorating Vanderbilt’s speech at the club in 1939.Doherty cited another independent film, I Am a Captive of Nazi Germany, released in 1936. Isobel Steele, an American journalist and “party girl,” was imprisoned by the Nazis for espionage in 1934. Steele was released, returning to the United States to star in a film of her experience, the first anti-Nazi motion picture to get a production code seal of approval, he said.The film studios finally weighed in when Confessions of a Nazi Spy was released by Warner Brothers in the spring of 1939, a few months before war broke out in Europe.