Chapter 4
Hollywood at war
President Franklin Delano Roosevelt ran for reelection in 1940 on an isolationist platform; he promised to keep the United States out of what many called “the European war.” But when Japan bombed the Pearl Harbor naval base in Hawaii on December 7, 1941, public sentiment changed, and the United States entered World War II. Over the next year, FDR established the Bureau of Motion Pictures and a number of additional offices and agencies designed to enlist Hollywood in the war effort. Further enticing Hollywood to collaborate with the US military, the Department of Justice agreed to suspend an ongoing antitrust investigation of the studios, and the Selective Service System declared Hollywood to be an essential industry, exempting its critical personnel from the draft.
The film studios signed on to help fight the war, using movies and star power to shape public opinion. Even beyond direct government work, Hollywood contributed to the larger war effort by making patriotic films, raising money for war bonds, and entertaining troops. It has been estimated that as much as one-third of Hollywood production during the war directly bolstered America’s wartime activities, and, not coincidentally, it was also one of the most profitable stretches in Hollywood’s history. The film industry, the moviegoing public, and the country were all in sync for a time.
Hollywood gets political
FDR’s fascination with Hollywood and popular media long predated the war. He had ties to Hollywood as far back as his days as governor of New York. After becoming president, FDR regularly invited actors, directors, and studio heads to the White House. He screened several films a week for family and friends. And he transferred his love of film to his son, James, who had an undistinguished career as a Hollywood producer before serving in the Marines and then in Congress. Not only did FDR love film; he mastered the art of using film and radio to shape public opinion. He became famous for his “fireside chats,” radio addresses that personalized his political agenda and always began with the intimate salutation “My friends.”
The Roosevelt administration also used documentary films in the 1930s to explain its New Deal policies, producing such masterpieces of the genre as The Plow That Broke the Plains (1936) and The River (1938). And the New Deal workers’ relief project, the Works Progress Administration, employed many writers, directors, and actors who would go on to have distinguished Hollywood careers, including Orson Welles, Nicholas Ray, and Sidney Lumet. Really showing his media savvy, FDR decided to appoint as the first White House press secretary Stephen Early, the Washington representative for Paramount Pictures’ newsreel service. FDR valued the American film industry, and the relationship went both ways. The president enjoyed broad support in Hollywood, even from right-wing stalwarts like Jack Warner.
FDR’s interest in the media dovetailed with the film industry’s turn toward politics, and Hollywood was primed for war when the time came. The film community had been far ahead of the country as a whole in calling for intervention in the war, and many of the industry’s leaders were already deeply engaged in European politics.
On a business level, wartime hostilities closed off some European markets, which contributed to the studios’ diminishing attention to the needs of European audiences. And slowly, the move toward war overrode studios’ concerns about alienating ticket buyers with political films, which had been so important to the Production Code’s project. Also, in the midst of the Depression, Hollywood artists and intellectuals looked for solutions to social and economic problems in communist, socialist, and fascist ideologies. Others actively opposed the rise of fascist and communist governments in Europe.
It was a time of political extremes in Hollywood, as indeed it was throughout the world. Charlie Chaplin and Orson Welles were some of the most outspoken figures on the Hollywood left, and they both gave antifascist speeches at rallies of the Popular Front, the loose amalgam of left-leaning groups. Excerpts of Chaplin’s speeches made their way into his early sound films, and echoes of Welles’s politics can be found in his first feature, Citizen Kane (1941), as well as other films he made in the 1940s.
More formally, the Hollywood Anti-Nazi League was founded in 1936 to oppose fascism. The League was a Communist Party front organization, founded at the instigation of the Communist Party USA (which was directly funded by the Soviet Communist Party), and card-carrying Communist screenwriter Donald Ogden Stewart chaired the league. But despite its party affiliation, the organization brought together the entire Hollywood spectrum: studio executives and writers, liberals and conservatives, Christians and Jews. Actor James Cagney, director John Ford, and Production Code Administration head Joseph Breen attended the organization’s opening gala, which was cohosted by Stewart and Algonquin Roundtable doyenne Dorothy Parker.
The powerful group included studio heads Jack Warner and Carl Laemmle, and it championed labor unions and advocated for racial equality. The organization backed the Loyalists against the Fascists in the Spanish Civil War, and it arranged large-scale protests when Mussolini’s son Vittorio and Nazi filmmaker Leni Riefenstahl came to Hollywood. Mussolini’s son was a producer trying to put together an international coproduction deal with Hollywood producer Hal Roach. Riefenstahl came to Los Angeles to meet with Walt Disney while attempting to arrange US distribution for her film about the 1936 Berlin Olympics, Olympia (1938).
After the Hitler-Stalin Pact of 1939 created a transitory alliance between the communist Soviet Union and fascist Germany, the Anti-Nazi League was forced to change its name to the Hollywood League for Democratic Action, and it lost its raison d’être. The Anti-Nazi League’s heyday may have been brief, but it launched Hollywood into the global politics of the 1930s and prepared the way for active participation in the war. It would also open the door for criticism of Hollywood’s politics in the coming decades.
Warner Bros. at war
When the United States finally entered the war, Hollywood sprang into action. Top movie stars lent their talent and celebrity in many ways. Clark Gable and Ronald Reagan voluntarily enlisted. Bob Hope and Shirley Temple signed up with the United Services Organization (USO) to perform for troops. James Cagney, Joan Crawford, Bette Davis, Melvyn Douglas, and John Garfield all spoke out against fascism. Some of the most successful studio directors, including Frank Capra, John Ford, John Huston, and William Wyler, joined the military to make documentary films.
Warner Bros., however, led the industry in its support for the war. The depression made for strange political alliances, and Jack and Harry Warner’s devotion to FDR was certainly one of them. Like MGM head Louis B. Mayer, the Warner brothers had close ties to the Republican Party. But they bucked their party’s line throughout the 1930s and 1940s not only to champion FDR’s New Deal and war plans but also to contribute to the lionization of FDR himself.
6. Marlene Dietrich performs for US frontline soldiers. Entertaining troops was one of many ways that Hollywood supported the war effort during World War II.
Warner Bros. eased into its role as the most patriotic studio. The Warner brothers began by insisting that studio employees donate to antifascist causes, and they cut off all studio ties with Germany in 1933, long before the other studios. Then, Warner Bros. began to express its American boosterism and antifascism in films. Starting in 1936, the studio made a number of short films celebrating American history. All of the studios still made shorts that played before features and served as a testing ground for new talent and ideas. In this case, Warner Bros. experimented by showing politically outspoken films to American audiences.
After some success, the studio brought its political agenda to feature films. Continuing to address contemporary politics through historical films, Warner Bros. released The Life of Emile Zola (1937), which alluded to the author’s fight against anti-Semitism in nineteenth-century France. Then the studio tackled ripped-from-the-headlines events in a string of largely successful films endorsing wartime policies, explaining the war to American audiences, and, under military contracts, educating soldiers.
Warner Bros.’ 1939 film Confessions of a Nazi Spy changed the playing field for the studios, and it opened the door for political films in Hollywood. It was the first major studio film to take on Nazism, and it had to win over the Production Code Administration and refashion many of the elements of the studio system for a world at war. As director, Warner Bros. chose Ukrainian-born Anatole Litvak, who had made films in Germany before fleeing the Nazis and ending up as a contract director on the Warner Bros. lot. Litvak’s signature documentary-like style added authenticity to a politically brave film.
Confessions of a Nazi Spy stays as close to real events as possible, telling the story of a Nazi spy ring in the United States that was thwarted by the FBI. The film hits viewers over the head with its based-on-real-events message. It has a newsreel-style voice-of-god narration, and it uses the real names of the people depicted in the film to suggest that the studio is merely relating and not shaping its story.
But despite its reportage-like presentation, Confessions of a Nazi Spy still clearly fits the Hollywood mold. The documentary look is a thin veneer for a time-tested genre formula: the spy thriller narrative that concludes with a courtroom drama. And the cast is made up of familiar faces like those George Sanders and Francis Lederer. One of the studio’s biggest stars, Edward G. Robinson, plays the heroic FBI agent, rebranding him as a hard-hitting force for justice, and preparing the ground for Warner Bros.’ other stars Bogart and Cagney to move from playing gangsters and lone wolves to taking on new roles as soldiers, resistance fighters, and company men.
7. The first major studio film to take on the Nazis, Confessions of a Nazi Spy (Warner Bros., 1939) tells the true story of a spy ring in the United States. The film mixes documentary-style realism with popular stars such as George Sanders (right) and the familiar courtroom drama genre.
Not only did the genre and star system have to fit a new mold, but the Production Code needed to be rethought for a changing political climate as well. Confessions of a Nazi Spy ignited internal disagreements within the Production Code Administration (PCA) office. The film represented a move into strongly nationalist politics. What if it offended American politicians or European audiences? What if the political climate changed quickly? The Third Reich took an active interest in policing Hollywood films, and it employed a full-time representative in Hollywood, Georg Gyssling, to ensure that Germany’s interests were being served. Gyssling strenuously opposed Confessions of a Nazi Spy, but in the end PCA head Joseph Breen approved the film, saying that it honestly and fairly represented German politics and the German people.
It is likely that the PCA approved the film in part because the German market was all but closed off to Hollywood by 1939. The PCA helped films achieve fluid international circulation. If politics precluded distribution to a particular country, then the PCA seal was moot anyway. And, unsurprisingly, Germany and the Axis countries banned Confessions of a Nazi Spy after its release.
What is surprising is that the Warner Bros. gamble paid off. The film was a hit with audiences and critics, winning the best film award from the National Board of Review, which had become a critics’ rather than a censors’ organization by that point. Confessions of a Nazi Spy also opened the floodgates, leading a wave of political and especially anti-Nazi films in Hollywood. The next year Chaplin’s The Great Dictator (United Artists, 1940) parodied Hitler; Frank Bozage’s The Mortal Storm (MGM, 1940) explored the rise of Nazism in a small German town; and many films began to plug Nazis into stock villain roles. Deeper into the war, Hollywood produced a cycle of anti-Nazi films, including Edward Dmytryk’s Hitler’s Children (RKO, 1943) and Fritz Lang’s Ministry of Fear (Paramount, 1944), that examined the details of Hitler’s reign as stories came to light.
After the United States entered the war, Warner Bros. showed that Hollywood storytelling was perfectly prepared to humanize politics and imbue history with emotion. Warner Bros. started production on its big-budget patriotic diversion Yankee Doodle Dandy (1942) even before the bombing of Pearl Harbor. Yankee Doodle Dandy drew on the lessons of the studio’s shorts to construct a biographical musical about Broadway legend George M. Cohan. It uses Cohan’s career as a loose framework for stringing together the big patriotic song-and-dance numbers for which Cohan was famous: “You’re a Grand Old Flag,” “Over There,” and “Yankee Doodle Boy.” The film whipped audiences into a frenzy around the American flag, which is featured prominently. And Warner Bros. gave the lead role to its top star, James Cagney, lending prominence to the film while also reflecting stars and stripes on Cagney, one of the studio’s most precious commodities.
Yankee Doodle Dandy is related through a series of flashbacks illustrating stories that Cohan tells President Roosevelt. The audience watches Cohan from over FDR’s shoulder, and we are presumably meant to identify with FDR as we celebrate America. It must have been jarring to have a sitting president impersonated in a major film, and Yankee Doodle Dandy opens with a self-conscious discussion of the pitfalls of depicting the current president. After the film’s success, Warner Bros. continued to use the device in subsequent films, effectively linking the studio with the commander-in-chief. Yankee Doodle Dandy turned out to be a huge box office success, and it won three Oscars, including one for Cagney. It is still a fondly remembered favorite, just barely squeaking into the American Film Institute’s list of the top 100 films at number 100.
But even a year or two after its release, audiences saw films like Yankee Doodle Dandy as simplistic propaganda. Years later, Warner Bros. mocked its own creation, as it did many of its other films, with a Bugs Bunny short. In Yankee Doodle Bugs (1954), Bugs Bunny recounts for his nephew Clyde how important rabbits were at pivotal moments in colonial American history. Obviously pro-rabbit propaganda, the stories mislead Clyde, who returns from his history exam wearing a dunce cap.
As the war dragged on, it took over more and more of Warner Bros.’ resources. The studio made combat films like Air Force (1943) and Objective, Burma! (1945), which were designed to explain individual battles, missions, or theaters of war to audiences, an important task for a complex war fought on many fronts. These films were both grounded in facts and molded to fit studio genre formulas. Accuracy rarely trumped a dramatic story, and the British government was even moved to complain about how much Objective, Burma! centered on American troops instead of other Allied forces. The combat genre almost always had an allegorical dimension, in which squadrons were invariably made up of soldiers from diverse ethnic, class, and geographical backgrounds, who, like the country itself, came together in the service of democracy.
Warner Bros. also made films under contract for the military. Government contracting was a new business for Hollywood, and the major studio heads agreed to share the wealth. They formed the Research Council of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, which assigned government contracts to its members. In addition to the major studios, the Research Council included prominent independent producers Walter Wanger and Walt Disney (Disney would remain a minor, specialized studio until the 1970s).
One of Warner Bros.’ contracts was for a series of educational cartoons about the character Private Snafu made between 1943 and 1945. Private Snafu (an acronym for “Situation normal, all fucked up”) bumbles his way through military service, revealing the details of his orders to German spies and neglecting to take his malaria pills, among other costly mistakes. So that the severity of the issues was not lost in the humorous shorts, Private Snafu dies in several of the episodes. The soldiers lucky enough to be assigned to watch Private Snafu shorts were in for a treat. The cast and crew boasted some of the greatest talent in Hollywood, including Looney Tunes director Chuck Jones (a cult favorite today); the voice of Bugs Bunny and just about every major Warner Bros cartoon character, Mel Blank; and scripts by Theodore Geisel (aka Dr. Seuss).
The Private Snafu series took important lessons for military personnel and turned them into unforgettable confections embodied by a lovable character. It is exactly the kind of personal, emotional power that Hollywood could lend to otherwise dry wartime endeavors. Other standout shorts that achieved a similar effect include Warner Bros.’ You, John Jones! (1943), in which James Cagney imagines what it would be like to be a Russian, Greek, or Chinese father whose family was being bombed by Axis powers. And in the War Department short Autobiography of a “Jeep” (1943), an anthropomorphized jeep narrates its own American dream tale: the military vehicle was born out of scientific ingenuity; it achieved success through grit and hard work; and it ended up in endless photo ops with celebrities and heads of state.
Making films about the vicissitudes of contemporary politics, however, could be controversial. In 1941, Germany broke its nonaggression pact and invaded the Soviet Union, forcing a delicate alliance between the United States and the Soviet Union. Warner Bros., as it had done before, jumped in first to address this new wartime development, adapting the memoir of former US ambassador to the Soviet Union Joseph E. Davies. Mission to Moscow (1943) looks like a natural successor to Warner Bros.’ previous films, filtering recent political events through a biographical narrative and documentary-style presentation. The film was distributed with a prologue by Davies, who assures audiences that his only bias is that of a midwestern American educated in the public school system. He goes on to thank “those fine patriotic citizens, the Warner brothers,” for telling his story. Helmed by Yankee Doodle Dandy director Michael Curtiz, Mission to Moscow reprises the impersonation of FDR, who, mostly off camera, instructs Davies to go to Germany and then the Soviet Union to learn all that he can about the Nazis and Soviets.
The film employs the documentary aesthetic that proved so effective in Confessions of a Nazi Spy, especially montage sequences of stock footage from Soviet archives and clips from the Nazi propaganda film Triumph of the Will (1935). Davies tours factories and meets with diplomats while his wife and daughter observe department stores and parties. Through didactic dialogue, they all come to realize that despite the goatees that every actor playing a Soviet man is made to wear, the United States and Soviet Union have more similarities than differences. In the final section of the film, Davies speaks to US politicians and Winston Churchill, making the pragmatic case for a US-Soviet wartime alliance.
Mission to Moscow was less financially and critically successful than many of Warner Bros.’ other wartime films, but it did kick off a cycle of films about Russia released over the next two years: The Boy from Stalingrad (Columbia, 1943), The North Star (RKO, 1943), Three Russian Girls (United Artists, 1943), Song of Russia (MGM, 1944), and Counter-Attack (Columbia, 1945). These were far from revolutionary films, but after the war they would come under close scrutiny during investigations into potential communist infiltration of Hollywood. Like most of the films made by Hollywood during the war, the Russian cycle brought a human dimension to the geopolitics of World War II. Hollywood’s wartime film production brought European and Asian cultures to life for movie audiences, and they explained in moral terms what Americans were fighting for.
Wartime government agencies
The Hollywood studios did not promote the war unchaperoned. Starting in the 1930s, the Production Code had proven to be a valuable tool for standardizing movie narratives and managing films’ moral and political messages. Making movies for wartime required even more risk and complications. Some overseas markets closed, and others became more important. Public opinion about the war shifted quickly, and getting accurate military information out was important. For all of these reasons, plus the Department of Justice’s and Selective Service’s efforts to help the film industry, Hollywood studios worked willingly with a range of government agencies that oversaw wartime production and distribution.
The Office of Censorship cleared films for import and export, and its staff decided whether films had the potential to be valuable to the enemy. Did they jeopardize national security, show sensitive military installations, or disparage the US military? The office also evaluated depictions of Americans and allies that were sent abroad. The PCA continued to insure that films were not offensive to political parties or national governments, but the Office of Censorship often overrode the PCA, blocking films that the PCA approved.
In 1942, the Office of Censorship convinced Republic Pictures to shelve Fu Manchu Strikes Back, because of its offensive Chinese stereotypes. And in an ironic twist, Frank Capra’s frequent screenwriter Robert Riskin found himself working for the Office of Censorship and banning a film for export that he had written, Meet John Doe (1941), presumably because it shows Americans ready to embrace socialism and susceptible to crypto-fascist manipulation.
The Office of War Information (OWI) had the broadest mandate to oversee the American film industry. The OWI presided over all domestic and exported US media, including Hollywood, which reported to the OWI’s Bureau of Motion Pictures. Like the PCA, the OWI reviewed ideas, scripts, and rough cuts of films. The OWI, however, was more proactive than the PCA. The OWI not only commented on filmmakers’ work; its staff often fed filmmakers war details, script ideas, and even prepared speeches that they hoped would be included in films. The OWI produced a weekly newsreel of its own, but its primary job was to monitor existing film companies. In 1942 the Bureau of Motion Pictures issued The Government Informational Manual for the Motion Picture Industry, which expanded on many of the political directives already in the Production Code. The manual cautioned against expressing racism, religious intolerance, and class prejudice, warning that such sentiments “are manifestations of fascism and should be exposed as such.” The OWI wanted to ensure that the United States appeared to be a tolerant democratic society.
The OWI staff turned out to be early fans of the cult classic Casablanca (1942). Michael Curtiz directed Casablanca for Warner Bros. in between Yankee Doodle Dandy and Mission to Moscow, and it seemed to capture the country’s mood in a more offhanded way than the two calculated efforts that bookended it. Casablanca is the story of American expatriate cafe owner, Rick (Humphrey Bogart), who has to decide whether to help a French resistance fighter, Victor Laszlo (Paul Henreid), escape to America. As an added complication, Rick is in love with Laszlo’s wife, Ilsa (Ingrid Bergman), and, moreover, like America itself, Rick is trying to remain neutral even as Nazis, French soldiers, embattled North Africans, and European refugees pass through his cafe. But Rick is continually drawn into political disputes, because he cares about the people involved. It may be the perfect expression of Hollywood’s personalization of the war.
The OWI viewed Casablanca on October 26, 1942, just before the British invasion of North Africa, and the OWI notes praised the film for showing that individual sentiments, like Rick’s love for Ilsa, needed to be subordinated to fight against fascism. The OWI also liked that the film depicts America as a haven for the dispossessed: everyone in Rick’s cafe is in search of exit visas to America, the land of freedom. Finally, the OWI praised Rick’s brief mention of his own history fighting against fascism in Spain and France. Rick’s and America’s reasons for getting involved in the war did not start with Pearl Harbor but stem from a long history of fighting for democracy on a global scale. The perceptive film viewers at the OWI recognized the allegorical implications of Casablanca, as would most 1940s audiences.
The OWI’s purview stopped at the border of Latin America, which belonged to Rockefeller family scion Nelson Rockefeller’s Office of the Coordinator of Inter-American Affairs (CIAA). Rockefeller had his fingers in many pies—business, politics, culture—and he would go on to have a long political career as governor of New York and vice president of the United States. During World War II Latin America became an important export market for Hollywood and an equally important political battleground for the US government discouraging fascist and communist infiltration. With European distribution cut off, Hollywood ramped up production of films for export to Latin America, and Rockefeller was eager to help. In addition to overseeing content like the OWI did, Rockefeller’s agency also offered insurance for films made in or for Latin America. Orson Welles traveled to Brazil to make a film under the CIAA terms. But the project fell apart, like so many of Welles’s other projects, and eventually some of his footage was released a half century later as It’s All True (1993).
Rockefeller’s most dramatic intervention was made on behalf of the Disney studio. When Walt Disney failed to settle a strike with his animators, Rockefeller stepped in as CIAA head. Rockefeller sent Disney on a diplomatic tour of Latin America, where he showed films and talked to audiences. While Disney was away, a federal mediator negotiated terms for the end of the strike. Once the animators were back in the studio, they set to work making films for Latin American audiences, including Saludos Amigos (1942) and The Three Caballeros (1944).
These wartime cultural agencies were controversial from the time of their inception. Was their mandate to insure that media disseminated accurate information about the war, or did they constitute an American propaganda ministry? During the House of Representatives’ budget hearings of 1943, Republican members of Congress worried that FDR had created his own personal propaganda agency, which had the potential to be invaluable during future elections. The House cut funding to OWI completely. The Senate agreed to close the OWI’s domestic branch and the Motion Picture Bureau, but it restored some funding to the overseas branches, which countered enemy propaganda through the end of the war. After the war, the State Department took over some elements of the wartime agencies, and the 1948 Smith-Mundt Act made it illegal for the US government to propagandize its own citizens.