Authorship and Propaganda: Phyllis Bottome and the Making of The Mortal Storm (1940)

Abstract

The Mortal Storm (1940) was MGM’s powerful contribution to the anti-nazi ‘genre’ film. Adapted from a novel by the British writer Phyllis Bottome, the studio took some risks in producing a picture in which Germany was mentioned by name and in which the controversial political questions aroused by Nazi persecution of liberals, intellectuals and Jews were clearly represented. Bottome herself was an experienced propagandist, having been trained by John Buchan during World War One, and, during the Second World War, she was briefed by the Ministry of Information for propagandist purposes. Bottome was passionately engaged firstly with pushing the Hollywood studios to film her novel and then, once MGM bought the film rights, she tried hard to prevent the message of her book from being watered down by the studio. Simultaneously, she undertook an exhausting lecture tour though America in which she engaged her audiences with warnings about the Nazi regime’s behaviour in Germany. Bottome had lived for many years in Austria and then in Munich so, arguably more than any other woman writer of the period, she had seen first hand the reality of fascism. Her novel, The Mortal Storm (1937) had been a best-seller both had been in the UK and the USA, and the sell-out lecture tour guaranteed good audiences for the film. Although rarely taught on university film courses, where Chaplin’s The Great Dictator is more usually the token anti-nazi film discussed, The Mortal Storm challenged America’s isolationist position and was regarded with alarm by the German ambassador in Washington as an effective and dangerous piece of propaganda.