In the September 16th issue of the magazine, I reviewed two books, by Thomas Doherty and Ben Urwand, devoted to the relationship of the Hollywood studios to Nazism in the nineteen-thirties. One of the books, Urwand’s “The Collaboration: Hollywood’s Pact With Hitler,” is so recklessly misleading that my point-by-point critique of it, I now realize, needs some additional detail. In this post, I want to do two things: offer a partial list of Urwand’s omissions and blunders; and make public some research on one aspect of these tormented issues by Steven Carr, of Indiana University-Purdue University. Carr, as well as Thomas Doherty, has a much broader and better-informed view of the matter than Urwand. (I use Professor Carr’s material with his permission.)
Perhaps I’m naïve about academic publishing, but I’m surprised that Harvard University Press could have published anything as poorly argued as Urwand’s book; and I’m surprised still more that Harvard or Urwand (or both) hired a commercial book publicist, Goldberg McDuffie, which, in its press release for Urwand’s book, attacked Doherty’s work on the subject, “Hollywood and Hitler, 1933-1939.” Here’s a taste: “Whereas Doherty relied on flawed, superficial accounts in domestic trade papers, Urwand discovered a vast array of primary source materials….” In the past, disputes between scholars were hashed out in academic journals and conferences, not by hired guns. Doherty does quote trade papers, but he provides a much richer account of the political atmosphere of the studios in the nineteen-thirties than does Urwand, and he arrives at different conclusions from “The Collaboration.”
Urwand’s thesis is that the studios, by dropping anti-Nazi movies and taking Jewish characters out of their films, and by negotiating with Nazis from 1933 to 1939, actively collaborated with the Third Reich. But what the studios failed to do regarding Nazism has always been known—it was widely reported at the time. Urwand, however, does much more than charge the bosses with cowardice (an accusation with which I agree); he has them actively working for the Nazis. On June 25th, Urwand told the Times that, in the thirties, “Hollywood is not just collaborating with Nazi Germany, it’s also collaborating with Adolf Hitler, the person and human being.” It’s an extraordinary and damning claim, if true. But Urwand offers no evidence of this personal connection—not until the epilogue, when he pulls an apparent rabbit out of his hat. He describes a visit that a group of Hollywood executives took to Germany. On July 6, 1945, a little less than two months after V-E Day, the executives travelled up the Rhine in Hitler’s former yacht. When he learned of the trip, Urwand told the Times, “That was the one time I actually shouted out in an archive.”
I’m not sure what the shouting was about. By July, 1945, Hitler, of course, was dead, and the executives embarked on his boat wearing Army uniforms. Why? Because, as Urwand relates, they had been invited to Germany by General George Marshall as a way to witness the destruction of Germany and to reëstablish their business in that country after the war. Harry Warner even wanted the studios to take over the film business altogether in Germany. (That didn’t happen.) I think Urwand completely misunderstands the pleasure cruise. The studio bosses, posing for photos in front of castles in their nifty costumes, were not betraying their closeness to Hitler (which, in any case, Urwand never demonstrates). Much more likely, they were taking a victory lap: “We won this war, and now we are going to run this country and ride in your goddamn boat.” Something like that, I would guess, was the prevailing sentiment. The cruise was inappropriate and maybe foolish (the top executives helped the war effort mainly from their desks in Culver City and Burbank), but Urwand mistakes preening for some sort of sinister relation. His charge is sensational and baseless. It should be withdrawn.
Throughout the book, Urwand shows little understanding of how the movie business—or even routine capitalist activity—might work. In my piece I granted him a point about the newsreels that Paramount and Fox made in Germany under Nazi supervision during the thirties. It seems that the receipts from American films shown in Germany were frozen in German banks, something that Urwand doesn’t reveal until the middle of the book—and a key point, since he insists that studios behaved cravenly in order to hold onto the German market (more on that in a moment). In any case, the two studios, eager to put the frozen assets to use and earn some money, photographed party rallies and the like, and the films were issued as propaganda in Germany and also around the world.
Or at least that’s what Urwand says in the book, where he presents the American-made newsreels as a case of remorseless greed and yet another instance of the studios working for the Nazis. But Urwand does not say in his text what he said on NPR’s “On the Media” on September 6th—that the footage taken by the cameramen was sent back to Hollywood, where it was re-edited, stripped of its propagandistic narration, and reissued for the world market as films “neutral in tone.” Those are his words. Well, where I was brought up, that kind of newsreel is not called propaganda. It might even be called reporting. The world could see how the Nazis presented themselves, and the world may have been impressed, enamored, or terrified, but the world was not watching propaganda for Nazi Germany. So I no longer grant Urwand a point about the newsreels. The charge that they were Nazi propaganda for the world market should be withdrawn or corrected, too.
Urwand leaves the impression, despite some perfunctory nods to the Hollywood Anti-Nazi League and other liberal anti-Nazi activity in the movie colony, that the American cinema of the thirties was rife with fascist filmmakers. In my piece, I mentioned the absurdity of his thinking that if the Nazis liked an American film (because they could exploit some element in it), then that film was necessarily Nazi propaganda. The Nazis liked the rule-Britannia, pro-imperialist adventure movie “The Lives of a Bengal Lancer,” with Gary Cooper, because, for them, it embraced “the leader principle.” Even so, it seems that “Lives” wasn’t rigorous enough for the Party. Urwand goes on:
First of all, King Vidor’s “Our Daily Bread” was made in 1934, before “The Lives of a Bengal Lancer,” which was made in 1935. They were released in reverse order in Germany (though Urwand doesn’t tell us that explicitly), yet I would still object to the phrase, “the next Hollywood movie that delivered a National Socialist message,” since such a “delivery” was not the intention of either movie. I’m afraid there are a couple of small additional problems. King Vidor made “Our Daily Bread” independently, using his own money, and the film was considered a noncommercial experiment (it flopped in this country). So it’s not a studio film at all, and it shouldn’t be included in this indictment of the studios. “Our Daily Bread” is devoted to a group of people in the Depression who gather together and found a coöperative farm. At key moments, the movie depends on Soviet-style montage (the film was lauded in Moscow); it ends with the members of the collective triumphantly building a trench. In this country, “Bread” has always been thought of as a stirring left-wing film, and if the Nazis glommed onto it for their own purposes (the collective has a strong leader), does that transform it into a fascist film? My God, poor Vidor! It turns out that he mortgaged his house to make Nazi propaganda. But this sort of thing is ridiculous. No artist or entertainer can be held responsible for what totalitarians six thousand miles away make of his work. As the wonderfully erudite blogger The Self-Styled Siren put it in her powerful attack on the book, “Urwand is tainting an incongruous set of films with the Nazi seal of approval.” And the Siren, yet again: “Taking scenes out of context is what ideologues do. Film analysis takes in the entire picture, as does historical analysis, or so I have always thought.”
Urwand is so busy hunting for Nazi messages that he doesn’t mention the Marx Brothers, whose “Duck Soup” was a burlesque of dictatorial regimes, or the gangster movies, which were loved for their anti-establishment message. He mentions Frank Capra’s movies, with their frequent hatred of the rich and powerful, but does so without suggesting how central they were to the era. He doesn’t mention the many newspaper comedies (“The Front Page” was the most famous), in which wise-guy journalists tell off stuffed shirts and corrupt political leaders. As Pauline Kael remarked, the reason why you don’t see journalists doing that in movies from other countries is not because those countries lacked stuffed shirts and corrupt officials. Urwand doesn’t mention “Fury” and “Black Legion,” with their loathing of mob violence, either. Urwand misses all of that—the happy freedom, the sexual entanglements of rich and poor, the anti-authoritarian tone of so much American entertainment in the thirties. If the studios were working for the Nazis, they certainly found a strange way of doing it.
American movies at their most exuberant were unintentionally a plug for the American way of life. During the war years, they became an intentional plug, but that’s another story. “The idea that Hollywood collaborated with the Nazis mistakes a tactic for a strategy,” Steven Carr said in an e-mail. “The fact that those in Hollywood, rightly or wrongly, saw negotiations with the Nazis as a key way to leverage keeping American films in theatres abroad seems especially important.” He told me that the State Department counselled the studios to keep films flowing to Germany:
Negotiations, Professor Carr says, not collaboration—which puts the studios’ relation to the Nazis in quite a different light. Yes, they negotiated with Nazi officials and killed a couple of films, and they even removed material that might have been construed as anti-Nazi. Urwand is quite right about these facts—which, as I said, have always been known. And yes, the studio executives wanted to keep their distribution networks in Germany intact—as Doherty suggests, because they were hoping for a better situation later on. But if they were acting under guidance from the State Department, you would have to say they mixed patriotism with business practice. For Urwand to hold these men responsible for not seeing, as they dealt with the Nazis in the mid-thirties, that the war and the Holocaust were coming—well, that’s bizarrely unfair. The studio bosses made the same mistakes that the State Department made; the same mistakes that American newspapers and major corporations investing in Germany made. Urwand’s moral certainty sends him tumbling through the wrong end of the telescope. Emile Zola’s “J’accuse” was directed at his contemporaries. Zola didn’t say, “With hindsight I know better than anyone eighty years ago.”
These are all philosophical and historical issues. At the nuts-and-bolts level, Urwand’s book is strangely organized and, in many cases, confusing. For instance, he insists that the Nazi consul in Los Angeles, Georg Gyssling, was able to “terrorize” Hollywood by threatening to block any American film that cast aspersions on Germany. With his disapproval, the film would never receive distribution in that country. It’s one of Urwand’s central thrusts. But he never gives any evidence for how convincing Gyssling’s threats were. He doesn’t say how much money was earned by the studios in Germany in the thirties, how these figures waxed and waned, and so on, so we have no idea what a loss of revenue for a given film or studio might mean.
Warners was out of Germany by 1934, Universal and Columbia by 1936, and all the German receipts were frozen—simple facts that Urwand scatters throughout the book. Did he fail to pull these essential things together in one place so we couldn’t see what becomes obvious—that he doesn’t have much of a case regarding Gyssling’s influence? The studios behaved badly, but there were two other forces far more powerful than Gyssling putting pressure on them: Joseph Breen, the anti-Semitic censor who had control over the Production Code’s seal (the absence of which could destroy domestic distribution of a film), and who constantly pushed the studios to take politics out of their movies; and, finally, the bosses’ own fears as immigrant Jews that all their money and power would be taken away. Urwand mentions the latter in passing, but he seems to have no awareness of the emotional significance of it. The richness of human motive and vulnerability doesn’t interest him.
There’s more—much more. For instance, Urwand doesn’t notice what Doherty chronicles, that censorship was widespread in the thirties. It wasn’t just the Nazis who were trying to shape studio content. The Brits had things they wanted taken out of American films, as did the French; there were censorship boards in Chicago and Kansas cutting up American movies. Violation of artistic intent was a commonplace. You can’t understand the studios’ malleability in relation to Nazism without understanding their malleability in relation to so many other people. In our own time, American movies are being tailored to suit the semi-totalitarian regime in China. It’s called “the movie business.” This is the time to acknowledge a blunder of my own. In my original piece I wrote that German filmmakers “tended toward agonized expressionism in the nineteen-twenties and rigid didacticism during the Nazi period.” The word “tended” was meant to propel a quick generalization, but it’s not good enough. In the thirties, the German film industry also produced musicals and comedies.
My own wish, for whatever it’s worth, is that Louis B. Mayer, the Brothers Warner, Harry Cohn, Adolph Zukor, and the others had puffed their chests and said the following in the thirties: “To hell with Gyssling and his threats. To hell with the anti-Semitic bastards in the country who want to see us drown. To hell with the Anti-Defamation League, which is telling us we can’t do anti-Nazi pictures or pictures with Jews in them because it would call attention to ourselves. We built a magnificent entertainment business, and we’re going to make the pictures we want to make.” But they didn’t say that. They negotiated, they evaded, they censored their creative people, they hid, they schemed to preserve their business in the future. They behaved cravenly. But they did not collaborate.
I repeat: I cannot see how Harvard University Press could have published this book without some basic fact-checking and a sterner sense of intellectual relevance and organization. Something broke down here in the vetting process, and that likely includes the expert academic reader reports that Harvard University Press surely commissioned, which are meant to protect the author, the press, and the facts. “Our culture peculiarly honors the act of blaming, which it takes as the sign of virtue and intellect,” Lionel Trilling wrote in 1945, a good year for blaming. Yes, and for that reason, the desire to blame should be guarded and monitored by the ones issuing charges. In the coming weeks, there will be other reviews of Urwand’s book in major publications and in blogs, but for now I would like to plant a suggestion that will undoubtedly be greeted with derision by any publishing executive who hears of it: Urwand did some good digging, found some interesting things, but organized his book poorly and hurled all sorts of unprovable accusations. Harvard should acknowledge these problems and correct them in a revised edition that is better informed, if less sensational—for its own sake and for the sake of Urwand’s career as an historian.
Credit: Harvard University Press.
