Hollywood and Hitler, 1933–1939 by Thomas Doherty (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: Hollywood and Hitler, 1933–1939 by Thomas Doherty Leslie Fishbein (bio) Hollywood and Hitler, 1933–1939. By Thomas Doherty. New York: Columbia University Press 2013. 429pp. Thomas Doherty’s Hollywood and Hitler, 1933–1939 is a tour de force of film history, deftly weaving together many strands of Hollywood and world history to explain Hollywood’s vexed and often vexing relationship to the rise of Nazism and its charismatic leader, Adolf Hitler. Doherty begins his exposition with Hollywood’s first confrontation with Nazism on December 4, 1930, when a mob of brownshirts invaded a motion picture theater and trashed the screening of Lewis Milestone’s All Quiet on the Western Front, an award-winning lament of the slaughter of the young in World War I to nurture old men’s dreams of glory, and ends when after the death of its courageously anti-Nazi producer, Carl Laemmle, Universal Studios rereleased the film accompanied by a prologue reviewing the Great War and its aftermath, including the now iconic newsreel footage of the 1933 book burning. As Doherty notes, “Among the volumes being tossed into the pyre was, of course, Erich Maria Remarque’s All Quiet on the Western Front” (364). To explain Hollywood’s convoluted relationships with Hitler between these historical bookends, Doherty’s prodigious knowledge of Hollywood history–the glamour and the gossip but also the economic forces that shaped decisions about production and distribution–allows him to provide readers with a multi-variant analysis of Hollywood’s initial neglect of Hitler and of its subsequent preoccupation even in present-day films with the Nazi leader. Hollywood’s obsession with preserving the lucrative German market for its films impelled most producers to comply with German demands for the Aryanization of those involved in film production and distribution, firing or relocating many Jewish staff members stationed in Germany and increasingly conforming to the demands of Nazi censorship of American films to be screened in Germany. During the first wave of Nazi terror, motion picture journalists and Hollywood producers evinced “the natural befuddlement of cool businessmen up against hot-headed fanatics” and remained oblivious to contemporary Nazi horrors and impending disaster (39). Nazi censorship meant that Hollywood films seeking to be screened in Germany had to obtain one of a limited number of import permits, to be granted a certificate issued by the Reich Ministry of Popular Enlightenment and Propaganda, and “to pass the home censor, who scrutinized the contents for moral, political, and eugenic purity” (25). [End Page 106] Just as the weak Weimar government had capitulated to Joseph Goebbels’ Ministry of Popular Enlightenment and Propaganda by rescinding the license for All Quiet on the Western Front, Hollywood moguls, many of them Jewish, not only conformed to the strictures of the German market but also imposed self-censorship within Hollywood itself. Hollywood relied upon the offices of the Motion Picture Producers and Distributors of America (MPPDA), which served the studio system by imposing self-censorship in order to avoid censorship by others. Moreover, in order to avoid offending Nazi officials and, in particular, the wrath of Georg Gyssling, the German consul in Los Angeles, Hollywood came to shun Jewish subjects in films, subjects that had been a staple of the industry since the 1920s with the enormous popular success of the first commercial “talkie,” The Jazz Singer (1927). Under the leadership of Will Hays and Joseph Breen, the MPPDA deployed the Production Code to shield Hitler and Nazism from public criticism, claiming that the code’s vague admonition that “the history, institutions, prominent people, and citizenry of all nations shall be represented fairly” meant that Hollywood was bound not to offend the people or culture of any nation on the planet. As a result, “under the Code, the transformation of the Weimar Republic into the third Reich was Germany’s business” (43). However, liberals and leftists within the Hollywood community, particularly actors and writers who had been active in the Popular Front, did coalesce to form the Hollywood Anti-Nazi League (HANL) and deployed skills honed during the fights to unionize Hollywood workers in dramatic efforts to combat Nazism abroad. Although little known today except among film scholars, HANL...