by Lynne Olson
THANKS TO THE MAJOR studios’ timidity toward war-related subjects, American moviegoers’ only glimpse of what was happening overseas for most of the 1930s was through the newsreels that preceded the feature films they came to see. For half a decade, the major newsreel companies, which were not subject to the feature films’ self-censorship system, had increasingly featured stories on Hitler and Mussolini and the threat they posed to peace in Europe.
Of all the newsreel services, March of Time, a product of Henry Luce’s empire, was by far the most anti-Nazi and pro-British. Unlike its competitors, it added staged dramatizations to its narration and documentary footage, creating a new and powerful form of film journalism that its detractors called biased and inflammatory.
In 1938, March of Time ignited a storm of controversy with a short film called “Inside Nazi Germany,” which showed, among other things, police rounding up Jews and bullyboys painting anti-Semitic slogans on buildings. “From the time the German child is old enough to understand anything, he ceases to be an individual and is taught that he was born to die for the fatherland,” the film’s announcer declared in stentorian tones. While German officials protested its showing and the city of Chicago banned it, millions of Americans flocked to more than five thousand theaters around the country to see the film.
For the next three years, most of the newsreels produced by March of Time touched on the European crisis. Outspokenly anti-Fascist, they also openly championed a more prominent American involvement in the conflict.
BY 1939, HITLER AND Mussolini had pulled the plug on Hollywood, severely restricting the showing of American films in their countries and, in the process, cutting off much of the studios’ foreign revenue. With Great Britain as the only lucrative film market left in Europe, the way was now clear for the major studios to join the newsreels in depicting the Nazi threat. But the only studio to do so in 1939 was Warner Bros., which long had specialized in movies with explicitly political and social themes. In May of that year, Warner Bros. released Confessions of a Nazi Spy, which depicted German American agents, in league with Joseph Goebbels, trying to win power for the Nazis in the United States. Discovered in the nick of time, the conspiracy is broken up by the FBI and New York police. In the final scene, the district attorney, at the agents’ trial, lectures the jury—i.e., the American public—about the dangers of isolationism.
In Washington, German chargé d’affaires Hans Thomsen lodged a sharp complaint with the State Department over Confessions’ anti-German themes. He did the same after the 1940 release of MGM’s The Mortal Storm, a powerful if melodramatic account of the rise of Nazism in Germany and its horrific effects on a Jewish professor and his family. Shown in June 1940, just before the fall of France, The Mortal Storm was the first in a flood of major anti-Nazi Hollywood releases that came after the German blitzkrieg in Western Europe. As Life sardonically noted, “So fast are the studios filming diatribes against Adolf Hitler … that no Hollywood visitor can sit down in a studio commissary without finding a plug-ugly in Nazi uniform beside him.”
Two months later, just as German bombs began raining down on London, Americans flocked to theaters to see a spine-tingling spy thriller whose story, like that of The Mortal Storm, was unsettlingly close to real life. The film, entitled Foreign Correspondent and directed by Alfred Hitchcock, focuses on Johnny Jones, a newspaper reporter in New York who at the beginning cares little or nothing about the growing crisis in Europe. After being transferred to London, however, Jones, played by Joel McCrea, is pitchforked into a surreal world of assassinations, fifth columnists, and murderous Nazi spies. No longer apathetic about Germany’s danger to the world, he becomes a fierce champion of the anti-Nazi cause.
In the movie’s last scene, Jones, in the midst of a Luftwaffe air raid on London, makes an impassioned radio broadcast to listeners back home, in effect urging them to shed their isolationism and come to the aid of an imperiled Europe. With lights flickering and an air raid siren wailing in the background, he declares: “All that noise you hear … is death coming to London. You can hear the bombs falling on the streets and the homes. Don’t tune me out—this is a big story and you’re part of it.… The lights are all out everywhere, except in America. Keep those lights burning.… Hang on to your lights, they’re the only lights left in the world.”
Foreign Correspondent was produced by Walter Wanger, Hollywood’s most outspoken interventionist. The son of well-to-do German Jewish immigrants and a product of Dartmouth, Wanger was one of the film industry’s few successful independent producers. He was unapologetic about using his movies as ideological weapons, making it clear that his goal with Foreign Correspondent was “to shake the U.S. into awareness of what must threaten her if she turned her back on Europe.”
Alfred Hitchcock was another unabashed advocate of using films for political ends. In his case, the aim was to further the cause of his native Britain. Hitchcock was just one of many prominent British citizens in Hollywood who worked closely with their government to promote Britain and its war effort. When the war began in 1939, Lord Lothian had advised members of the large British film colony, among them actors Cary Grant, Ronald Colman, and Cedric Hardwicke, to stay where they were instead of returning home. “The maintenance of a powerful British nucleus of actors in Hollywood is of great importance to our interests,” Lothian wrote Lord Halifax, “partly because they are continually championing the British cause in a very volatile community which would otherwise be left to the mercies of German propagandists, and because the production of films with strong British themes is one of the best and subtlest forms of British propaganda.”
While some younger actors, including David Niven, ignored Lothian’s advice and went back to Britain to enlist, most stayed in America. They were joined by an influx of British directors and writers, many of them recruited by their government to go to Hollywood. In 1940, Alexander Korda, a Hungarian émigré who had emerged as one of Britain’s foremost producers and directors, arrived to make That Hamilton Woman, a costume drama about the love affair between Emma Hamilton and Lord Nelson, the British admiral who defeated Napoleon’s forces at the Battle of Trafalgar.
Starring Laurence Olivier and Vivien Leigh, the movie, as Korda freely acknowledged, was “propaganda … with a very thick coating of sugar,” meant to underline the parallels between Britain’s struggle against Napoleon’s crusade for world domination and its current fight against another European conqueror. In one speech, Nelson declares to his fellow admirals: “You cannot make peace with dictators. You have to destroy them. Wipe them out!” In New York and other cities with strong interventionist sympathies, those stirring lines invariably drew loud applause from moviegoers.
Winston Churchill, who loved That Hamilton Woman and saw it many times, reportedly recruited Korda to do more than make pro-British movies. According to Korda, he worked closely with William Stephenson, a close friend of his, at the prime minister’s behest, setting up an office in Rockefeller Center and acting as an intermediary between the British government and British Security Coordination operatives. Although there’s no official proof of this, Churchill did, without explanation, confer a knighthood on Korda in 1942.
Also doing their bit for Britain were some of its best-known novelists and playwrights. Two of the screenwriters who worked on Foreign Correspondent, for example, were R. C. Sherriff, whose poignant play about World War I, Journey’s End, became a classic, and James Hilton, who wrote the bestselling novels Goodbye, Mr. Chips and Lost Horizon (both of which became popular movies, too).
Sherriff and Hilton, who was particularly adept at evoking the image of an idealized, inspiring Britain, also helped write Mrs. Miniver, about the experiences of an upper-middle-class family in the London suburbs at the time of Dunkirk and the Blitz. An enormous hit, Mrs. Miniver, with its story of British resolution and courage in the midst of catastrophe, touched the hearts of millions of Americans. Churchill called it “propaganda worth a hundred battleships.” But as Mrs.
Miniver’s director, William Wyler, noted, his film, like That Hamilton Woman, was hardly a realistic portrait of the conflict. Wyler, who called himself “a warmonger” and said he made Mrs. Miniver because “I was concerned about Americans being isolationists,” nonetheless acknowledged that the movie “only scratched the surface of war.”
Yet even hard-boiled films like Confessions of a Nazi Spy and The Mortal Storm tiptoed around the war’s grim reality. With one prominent exception, no Hollywood film in the late 1930s and early 1940s ever made clear, for example, that Jews were the main targets of Nazi persecution. In Hollywood movies, it was acceptable to condemn Nazism but unacceptable to make specific mention of its savage anti-Semitism. In The Mortal Storm, which is clearly about the destruction of a Jewish family in Germany, the word “Jew” is never mentioned.
The decision to sidestep the issue was made by the studio heads, who feared that raising it in films would stir up an even greater wave of anti-Semitism in the United States. Their concern was fueled by a visit paid to Hollywood in late 1940 by Joseph P. Kennedy, the isolationist American ambassador to Britain and a former movie mogul himself. At a lunch with fifty top film executives, most of them Jewish, Kennedy warned his former colleagues of the danger to themselves and their fellow Jews if they continued “using the film medium to promote or show sympathy to the cause of democracies versus the dictators.” Such movies, he said, only served to highlight Jewish control of the film industry, which in turn could lead to an anti-Semitic backlash against Hollywood.
The only major industry figure to thumb his nose at such fears was Charlie Chaplin, whose 1940 movie The Great Dictator was the sole Hollywood product in that period to single out anti-Semitism as a core tenet of Hitler’s ideology. Remembered today mostly for its satiric depiction of Hitler and Mussolini as blowhard buffoons, The Great Dictator also takes an unsparing look at the Nazis’ savagery toward Jews.
Chaplin, who was not Jewish and who produced and directed his own films, was under ceaseless pressure to cancel the project from the day it was first announced. Hate mail poured in, and even the White House, which encouraged him to make the movie, warned Chaplin that it probably would be an enormous failure. In fact, it was a major box-office hit and, as it turned out, Chaplin’s most commercially successful film, which today is regarded as a classic.
INTERESTINGLY, THE MOVIE WITH the greatest impact on Americans prior to Pearl Harbor had nothing to do with anti-Semitism, Nazis, the British, or World War II. Instead, it dealt with the true story of a Tennessee farmer named Alvin York, who in 1917 was forced to reconcile his strong pacifism with what others told him was his patriotic duty to fight for his country in World War I.
Drafted into the Army, York, an excellent marksman, briefly considered becoming a conscientious objector before finally—and reluctantly—agreeing to serve. During the Meuse-Argonne offensive in France, he led an attack on an enemy machine gun nest, disregarding heavy fire to capture 132 Germans and kill 28 others. For that, York was awarded the Medal of Honor and, when he returned home, was honored as one of America’s greatest wartime heroes.
For years, York had resisted the idea of a film about his exploits, but in 1940, he finally yielded to the persistence of producer Jesse Lasky Jr. With the help of screenwriters Howard Koch and John Huston, Lasky set out to make York’s story a parable for modern times, depicting the dilemma between America’s antipathy toward war and the need to fight to preserve the country’s cherished freedoms and principles. In the process of making the film, the real-life York, who had retained his pacifism after the Great War and had spoken out in the 1930s against getting involved in another conflict, became a convert to interventionism.
Released in the summer of 1941, Sergeant York, starring Gary Cooper, was given a lavish premiere in New York City. Among those in the audience were York, General John Pershing, Eleanor Roosevelt, Wendell Willkie, Henry Luce, and General Lewis B. Hershey, the director of the Selective Service System. Four weeks later, Washington staged its own premiere, lending Sergeant York the distinct aura of a government-sanctioned film. Troops accompanied York from Union Station to the White House, where Roosevelt told him—and reporters—that he was “thrilled” with the picture. The morning after its screening, which was attended by members of Congress, military leaders, and other government officials, York was invited to deliver the daily invocation in the Senate.
The film more than lived up to the administration’s hopes, striking a deep chord with millions of Americans struggling with the same dilemma faced by York more than twenty years earlier. The movie’s message, as the historian David Welky put it, was that “men must fight for … freedom, liberty, democracy—and implied that the time was right to fight for them again.” For young male moviegoers who might be inspired by York’s onscreen actions to enlist, the Army had prepared an eight-page recruitment brochure detailing the hero’s life.
A huge hit, Sergeant York was the highest-grossing U.S. film in 1941. It was nominated for eleven Academy Awards and won two, including the best-actor honor for Gary Cooper.
ON SEPTEMBER 9, 1941, Senator D. Worth Clark banged down a glass ashtray in lieu of a gavel to begin Senate hearings into charges that the film industry was, in Senator Gerald Nye’s words, “trying to make America punch drunk with propaganda to push her into war.” The hearings were widely publicized, and nearly five hundred spectators crowded into the Senate caucus room that morning, some standing on chairs to get a better view of the action. They had come not only to witness the expected verbal fireworks between studio executives and subcommittee members, all but one of whom were staunch isolationists, but also to catch a glimpse of the film industry’s famed legal counsel—Wendell Willkie.
Willkie, who had joined a New York law firm shortly after his 1940 defeat by FDR, reportedly was paid $100,000 (about $1.5 million in today’s dollars) for his services. Steep as his fee was, there was no denying that the studios received full value for their money. A genius at public relations, Willkie was extraordinarily adept at using congressional hearings to further his own cause, as he had demonstrated in his early-1930s battle against the Roosevelt administration over the Tennessee Valley Authority.
Assisted by a battery of studio lawyers and coordinating his strategy with the White House, Willkie advised movie executives to go on the attack. He gave them a master class in doing so, issuing a blistering prehearing press release denouncing the subcommittee’s assault on the film industry as un-American and anti-Semitic and accusing it of trying to extinguish basic human freedoms.
According to Willkie, Hollywood made no apologies for its opposition to Hitler and the Nazis. Alluding to Nye’s comments about the moguls’ Jewish roots, Willkie maintained that the movie executives were deep-dyed Americans and that only a traitor could doubt their loyalty. He argued that the isolationists were trying to intimidate Hollywood into making films reflecting their own perspective, which would be a gross violation of American civil liberties. “It is just a small step to the newspapers, magazines, and other periodicals,” Willkie declared. “And from the freedom of the press, it is just a small step to the freedom of the individual to say what he believes.”
Thanks to Willkie’s arguments, the subcommittee had been placed squarely on the defensive even before the hearings started. In questioning the senators’ purpose for launching the investigation, the former presidential candidate had managed to “put his clients on the side of God and country and their enemies at the other extreme,” David Welky has written. “To oppose Hollywood was to oppose the United States. To question its motives was to embrace Nazism.”
On the first day of the hearings, Willkie sat at a table off to the side of the room, strategically close to the large press contingent covering the proceedings. Initially, D. Worth Clark had told him he would be allowed to cross-examine witnesses and ask questions of the subcommittee, but the Idaho Republican changed his mind after the release of Willkie’s inflammatory press statement. If Clark thought he had
silenced the voluble counsel for the film industry, however, he soon realized his error.
To his chagrin, Clark also discovered that one of his panel’s five members, Senator Ernest McFarland, was in fact a Willkie ally. A freshman Democrat from Arizona, McFarland was known as an interventionist, but he had never been particularly vocal on the issue and had maintained friendly relations with Nye, Clark, Wheeler, and other isolationist Westerners. Considering McFarland a tame supporter of Roosevelt, Clark had chosen him as the subcommittee’s token interventionist. As it turned out, the burly Arizonan despised the isolationist views of his Senate colleagues and wasted no time in making that clear. His first target was the hearing’s first witness, Gerald Nye.
During his testimony, the senator from South Dakota did nothing to help himself. Stung by Willkie’s accusations of anti-Semitism, he read a forty-one-page statement denying that “bigotry, race, and religious prejudice played any role in the hearings” and declaring that he was opposed to “the injection of anti-Semitism … in American thinking and acting.” But then he negated everything he’d said by fulminating against film executives who, “born abroad and animated by the hatreds of the Old World,” were “injecting into U.S. films the most vicious propaganda I’ve ever seen.” According to Nye, many Americans believed “that our Jewish citizenry would willingly have our country and its sons taken into this foreign war.” By encouraging such an attitude, the senator argued, American Jews were contributing to the growth of anti-Semitism in the United States.