Austrian and Dustbowl Refugees Unite in Three Faces West (1940)

Abstract

Abstract Released in July 1940, a little over two years after Austria had been incorporated into Nazi Germany and ceased to exist as an independent state, Bernard Vorhaus's Three Faces West takes a bold stand on contemporary issues through its Austrian-American romance. The filmmakers use the dire situation of farmers in a drought-ravaged area to elicit sympathy for the refugees from Europe and to challenge nativist and isolationist attitudes. The film features two refugees from Vienna, Austria—a renowned surgeon (Charles Coburn) and his attractive daughter (Sigrid Gurie)—who must adjust to living in a rural community in the American heartland. When the celluloid Americans meet these foreign individuals, serious cultural commentaries emerge. The promise of unity between foreigners and American-born is most pronounced when the young Austrian woman and the handsome, farmer protagonist (John Wayne) fall in love. In this rare Austrian-American romance set in the United States, the filmmakers counter perceptions of the refugees as alien others and suggest that cultural differences can easily be overcome. By weaving together the stories of the Austrians fleeing Hitler and their American counterparts fleeing the Dust Bowl, the film proposes a radical alternative to the misery of the displaced Americans familiar from the news and presented most graphically in John Ford's filming of John Steinbeck's 1939 novel The Grapes of Wrath (March 1940).