As reports of purges at Ufa and beatings in Berlin swirled though executive offices in New York and studio cafeterias in Hollywood, Col. Frederick L. Herron, foreign manager of the Motion Picture Producers and Distributors of America (MPPDA), left for Washington to consult with the State Department on “the Hitler activities in Germany so far as they affect [the] film business.”1 The effect of Nazism on the film business—the release of American pictures into Germany and the depiction of the new Germany in American cinema—was the overriding concern of Hollywood’s corporate consortium. Jewish personnel in Germany were a fungible commodity.
Herron should have stayed in New York: no one knew anything for certain. The reliability of information from Nazi Germany was dubious and the flow of intelligence circuitous. On Hollywood matters, the official chain of communication began with trade representative George R. Canty in Berlin, who filed weekly reports and sent frequent cables to the Motion Picture Division of the Department of Commerce in Washington, D.C., whose director then funneled the information to Herron at MPPDA headquarters in New York. In turn, Herron kept Washington apprised of scuttlebutt from studio branch managers in Berlin and around Europe. The three-way back and forth can be traced in the staccato grammar of a cable sent in April 1933 from Washington to the MPPDA:
REPLY TO CABLE SENT CANTY QUOTE CONFIDENT CONDITIONS UNALARMING BUT PROBABLE NECESSITY CERTAIN PERSONNEL READJUSTMENTS TALK SHEEHAN WHO KNOWS STORY WROTE HERRON TODAY
Translation: Canty assumes that the Jewish employees of the Hollywood studios in Germany will have to be fired or transferred. Fox’s foreign manager, Clayton Sheehan, recently in Berlin and now back in New York, should be spoken to directly for a firsthand account. Colonel Herron will be kept in the loop.2
Formed in 1922, the MPPDA served as the political arm of the economic cartel that was the classical Hollywood studio system. To front for the oligopoly, the moguls selected a man of impeccable credentials, unimpeachable probity, and high-level contacts on Capitol Hill and Wall Street—Will H. Hays from Sullivan, Indiana: Republican Party kingmaker, former Postmaster General for President Warren G. Harding, and a nondrinking, nonsmoking elder of the Presbyterian Church. At the helm until 1945, Hays led the industry from rough-and-tumble adolescence to prosperous maturity. As Hollywood’s public face, the slight, imperturbable Hoosier—dubbed “the Czar of Movieland”—soon found the MPPDA remade in his name. Inside and outside the industry, it was better known as the Hays office.
The Hays office was also the common signifier for the corset of Hollywood censorship, but here the billing was false. The man who tied that knot was a stern Irish Catholic named Joseph I. Breen, whose background in diplomacy (as a consular officer during the Great War) and public relations (as media maestro for the Eucharist Congress held in Chicago in 1926) proved almost as useful as his religious pedigree (as a prominent Catholic layman and regular contributor to topline Catholic journals). In 1931, Hays summoned Breen to Hollywood to run interference with Catholics aghast over Hollywood’s post-talkie lurch into vice and violence. By December 1933, the gregarious workaholic had wrangled control of the Studio Relations Committee, the nominal enforcer of the Production Code. The Production Code was Hollywood’s moral guidebook, a catechism of Catholic bylaws written by Father Daniel A. Lord, a multitalented Jesuit priest from the archdiocese of St. Louis, and Martin J. Quigley, editor-publisher of Motion Picture Herald, an influential weekly for independent exhibitors. The Code had been adopted by the moguls in 1930 and then promptly ignored.
Breen steered Hollywood back onto the straight and narrow. On July 15, 1934, he formally took over the new agency created to give teeth to the Code and established with Breen in mind as enforcer in chief: the Production Code Administration (PCA), an in-house arm of the MPPDA. In matters pertaining to motion picture morality, Breen was not quite omnipotent, but from 1934 until his retirement in 1954 he was more potent than anyone else in town. Around Hollywood, the office, whose formal name was the Production Code Administration, and that the public knew as the Hays office, was named after the man whose iron hand signaled stop or go for the machinery of motion picture production: the Breen office. A film that received a Code seal, the emblem of his inspection, was said to have been “breened.”
The front man and the mogul: Will H. Hays (left), president of the Motion Picture Producers and Distributors of America, presents Paramount Pictures founder Adolph Zukor with a commemorative autograph album during a celebration of the studio’s twenty-fifth anniversary, July 1, 1937.
Officially, Breen’s purview was limited to screen morality while Hays governed the political and economic precincts of the industry. In practice, however, the spheres of influence overlapped and the pair worked in harmony.
Hays and Breen were especially in tune in a desire to keep Hollywood far away from the rocky shoals of political conflict. The Hays office and the Breen office shared an acute aversion to ideological controversies or partisan disputes of any stripe.a For characters in a Hollywood film to squabble over politics in front of moviegoers—Democrat or Republican, American or German—was bad for business all around.
Unfortunately, the binding text of the Code, a document fixated on morality, offered little guidance on domestic politics or foreign policy. Though eloquent on the moral duty of filmmakers toward the young and innocent, insistent on the sanctity of Christian American civilization, and meticulous about what should be neither seen nor heard on the Hollywood screen, it was mute on the stance of a democratic art toward a totalitarian nation. The pertinent phrase in the document, under a section devoted to “National Feelings,” simply read:
The history, institutions, prominent people, and citizenry of all nations shall be represented fairly.
As interpreted by Breen and Hays, the vague injunction codified a see-no-evil, speak-no-evil, hear-no-evil policy toward any regime on the planet, especially if the nation in question offered a lucrative market for Hollywood imports. Under the Code, the transformation of the Weimar Republic into the Third Reich was Germany’s business.
Thus, though privately worried that the erratic behavior of the Nazis might disrupt the course of commerce, the Hays office maintained a stoic demeanor in public. Even as Jewish American employees of the studios were roughed up and forced to flee Germany, the MPPDA insisted that “these men left the country willingly and have since returned to work there.”3 The trade between Hollywood and Berlin, said a spokesman, was “a matter of strictly individual action by the major companies” rather than a matter of collective MPPDA policy. “Haysian officials and others in the trade recently have heard rumblings over the possibility that strict regulation and censorship based largely on racial prejudice might prompt one or more of the majors to abandon German distribution,” Variety reported in 1936, but whatever Hollywood decided, New York washed its hands of the matter. “Feeling with Haysians currently is that the entire matter is one that should be handled directly by each company.”4 On matters related to Nazism, the official position of the MPPDA was to deny the existence of an official position. If Universal and Warner Bros. decided to withdraw from Nazi Germany, fine; if Paramount, Fox, and MGM decided to stay, fine also.
However, the MPPDA’s laissez-faire attitude toward the studios’ business dealings with the Nazis did not extend to the production of films dealing with the Nazis. On the Hollywood screen, Germany was not to be slighted, the Nazis were not to be criticized, and Hitler was not to be mentioned. The official policy deflected pitches, discouraged projects, and relegated anti-Nazi sentiments to the margins of American cinema.
Between 1933 and 1939, a dedicated American moviegoer whose only source of foreign news was the Hollywood feature film knew only a world of exotic adventure, courtly romance, and scenic locales. Scarcely a glimpse of Italy in Ethiopia, Spain in flames, or Germany on the march penetrated the blackout. Even mild jests and veiled allusions were scratched from scripts and clipped from prints. In MGM’s Dancing Lady (1933), Jerry Howard of the comedy trio Howard, Fine, and Howard, an early incarnation of the Three Stooges, was shown working on a jigsaw puzzle until he finally supplies the missing piece. Mugging a queasy expression, he exclaims: “I’ve been working on this for five weeks and look what I finally got—Hitler!” To which comedian Ted Healy responds, “What did you expect—Santa Claus?” The reference to Santa Claus was left in the final film, but the punch line about Hitler was cut.5 More conspicuous by his absence than Santa Claus, Hitler was the missing piece in Hollywood’s cast of characters in the 1930s.
With the Hollywood studios on the sidelines, the fight against Hitler and Nazism in American cinema was taken up by films so little circulated as to barely register on the cultural radar, then or since: the offbeat documentary, the low-budget independent feature, and the odd foreign import. Looking over the minimal returns and paucity of projects in the pipeline, Variety pronounced Hitler “a blah show subject,” and puzzled over the anomaly of a charismatic headline maker who failed to translate into box office gold. “Theory that a hot news subject is sure-fire theatrical material seems to be negated by the Hitler matter,” the paper concluded in late 1933. “Thus far no one’s been able to sell a Hitler item as entertainment.”6
With no commercial incentive and plenty of official disincentive, Hitler was ignored by the Hollywood screen even as he redrew the map of Europe. Stirrings of anti-Nazism were squelched before the cameras rolled or exiled to the fringes of a subaltern independent market. Projects about Hitler and Nazis went unmade or came to the screen so ill-made as to be dead on arrival.
Nearly as conspicuous as the absence of Nazis was the disappearance of Jews. After 1933, the cinematic spotlight on Jewish schmaltz and shtick went dark. The German market was the first reason: why showcase an ethnicity sure to get the film banned from import? The strict enforcement of the Code after July 15, 1934, was the second reason. The injunction to represent the history, institutions, and prominent people of all nations fairly meant that the broad stereotypes that branded a stock character as Jewish tended to be eliminated or softened. Commerce and censorship colluded to erase Hollywood’s most prominent ethnic group from the Hollywood screen.
Though never a major current in Hollywood cinema, Judeo-centric scenarios were a modest undertow in silent-screen melodrama and Jewish entertainers a major wave in the comic mode of the early talkies. With so many Jews in the business and so many avid moviegoers in New York, it was only natural that Jews occur more frequently on screen than in the national census. The lilt of Yiddish comedy routines (what the trade press called “Hebe humor”) enlivened the early sound cinema, especially in the rich tributary of ethnic hybrids marrying the children of Israel and Ireland: Kosher Kitty Kelly (1926), Abie’s Irish Rose (1928), and the long-running series The Cohens and the Kellys (1926–1933). Occasionally a Jewish-themed melodrama warranted feature-length treatment, The Jazz Singer (1927) being the loudest shout-out. But no canny businessman builds a mass entertainment around 3 percent of his consumer base. However prominent Jews might be in Hollywood, on the Hollywood screen they left lighter footprints. Throughout the 1930s, Jewish stars continued to reign as big, though usually Anglicized, names on the motion picture marquee (Edward G. Robinson, Paul Muni, Paulette Goddard, Melvyn Douglas—formerly Emmanuel Goldenberg, Meshilem Meier Weisenfreund, Pauline Marion Goddard Levy, and Melvyn Edouard Hesselberg, respectively), but in the narratives proper, Jews qua Jews were scarce.
Nonetheless, in the immediate aftermath of January 1933, a minor tributary of feature films—too small in number to constitute a cycle much less a genre—served as allegories by default on Nazi antisemitism. Of the four films released on American screens, only one came from a major Hollywood studio; two were imported from Great Britain; and one was a domestic production in a foreign language. Nettlesome controversy and tepid box office dampened the prospects for further ventures in Judeo-themed cinema for the balance of the decade.
The highest-profile of the quartet was The House of Rothschild (1934), a prestige bio-pic of the Jewish banking family starring British actor George Arliss, a thespian famed for his theatrical turns as Great Men from the pantheon of European history. “Policy of following the headlines in writing film material will be carried out in Rothschild,” Variety noticed, connecting the dots across time when 20th Century Pictures announced plans for the film. “Story of the international banking family in its present form deals in part with the persecution of the Jews in Germany around the period of 1850.”7 After the studio received letters protesting a story deemed “too Semitic” for its portrayal of the Jewish family as more or less human, producer Darryl F. Zanuck and George Arliss vetted the script for undue pro-Jewish slants, confirmed its evenhandedness, and resolved “to make no further alterations in the story which is based on fact.”8
Directed by Alfred Werker, adapted by Nunnally Johnson from the stage play by George Hembert Westley, and showcasing the versatile Arliss playing both patriarch Mayer and son Nathan, The House of Rothschild was a handsomely mounted period piece that hardly needed to strain to make explicit what was so strongly implicit. Over two generations, the Rothschilds are snubbed and insulted even as they reshape European commerce and bankroll the British Empire. The origins of the international banking system having limited box office appeal, a good deal of the family tree is traced via the star-crossed romance between the beautiful Julie Rothschild (Loretta Young) and the dashing Captain Fitzroy (Robert Young), a Christian. “In sequences that have a definite modern parallel, the Jew is scorned and the romance between Julie and gentile Captain Fitzroy is thwarted,” observed Motion Picture Herald, also alert to the geopolitical reverberations, before passing along a word to the wise exhibitor. “Don’t succumb to the temptation of even whispering propaganda. Rather sell The House of Rothschild with dignity, in which enthusiasm is untempered.” That is, keep mum about the pro-Jewish slant.9
Pro-Jewish The House of Rothschild was. Herded with his wife and five sons into the Jew Street ghetto of eighteenth-century Frankfurt, old man Rothschild is an honest but penny-pinching merchant who dons the mask of the conniving Jew when corrupt German tax collectors barge into his home. A generation later, operating from five European capitals, his sons are the first family of European finance, with Nathan now head of the house. Nattily dressed, urbane, and socially connected, Nathan is every inch the complete modern banker. Unlike his father, he never has to touch filthy lucre, much less bite a coin to test it for counterfeit metal. He rules the London stock exchange through his genius at math and his insight into human psychology.
But where the British respect and honor Rothschild—he is on a first-name basis with the Duke of Wellington—his ethnic stock on the Continent is not so high. Rothschild’s economic acumen earns him the undying enmity of a German antisemite whose campaign of “lies and propaganda” incites pogroms throughout Germany. As nineteenth-century brownshirts run riot through the ghetto, Nathan thinks twice about betrothing his beloved daughter to Anglo-Christian society. “Go into the Jewish quarter of any town in Prussia today and you’ll see lying dead Julie’s people killed by your people, but for one crime—that they were Jewish!” he scolds his would-be son-in-law.
The House of Rothschild was a capital-A picture sold on pageantry and the appeal of its top-billed star Arliss (nothing if not ecumenical in his historical role playing, the actor had already won an Oscar for Disraeli [1929] and followed up his turn as Mayer and Nathan Rothschild with Cardinal Richelieu [1935]). The film opened to huge business and rave reviews and earned a Best Picture nomination from the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. Admired though it was, however, The House of Rothschild left no descendents. Throughout the 1930s, its familial Judeo-centricity remained an anomaly in Hollywood’s monolithically Christian neighborhoods.
A pair of films from Great Britain, both starring Conrad Veidt, the somnambulist in the German Expressionist classic The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1920), now an exile from Nazi Germany living in London, received chillier receptions. Veidt plays the title Jew in two incendiary projects with deep roots in European antisemitism, each tale trafficking in medieval myths and libels. The English productions stumbled into the American marketplace unaware that two nations speaking the same language might not share the same response to Jewish-themed material.
Allegorical anti-Nazism: ethnic chameleon George Arliss as patriarch Mayer Rothschild (top), counting up his coins, and as Nathan Rothschild, threatened by nineteenth-century brownshirts in 20th Century Pictures’ The House of Rothschild (1934), a sympathetic biopic of the European banking dynasty.
Directed by Maurice Elvey and based on E. Temple Thurston’s play (which itself was based on Eugene Sue’s book and Gustave Doré’s painting of the same name), The Wandering Jew (1933; U.S. release January 1935) featured Veidt as the nomadic scapegoat for his accursed race. After spitting at Christ on the day of His Crucifixion, the haughty Matathias (Veidt) is condemned to wander through time, immortal and damned. He is a randy knight during the First Crusade in 1150; an avaricious merchant in Palermo, Sicily, in 1290; and a beloved physician in Seville, Spain, in 1560, during the Spanish Inquisition.
In the last incarnation, as a healer of the poor and outcast, Matathias performs penance for his insult to Christ and the narcissism of his past lives. When a prostitute in his care falls in love with him (“I love you as Mary Magdalene loved Him,” she confesses), his transformation from sinner to saint is nearly complete, awaiting only his martyrdom at the hands of the Spanish Inquisition. An offhand remark (“It would be hard with Christ to know His own if He came back again,” he says of the bloated clerics overseeing the reign of terror) is enough to seal his fate. Dragged before the Inquisition, he refuses to deny his Jewish faith, but by then his religious roots are a technicality. The Wandering Jew has become Christlike in his suffering and Christian in his acceptance of the divinity of the messiah he once spat upon. Tied to a stake in a crucifix-like posture, he awaits burning alive—but Christ reveals Himself and delivers Matathias not to death but to eternal life. The Jew has wandered straight into the grace of Christian salvation.
A lavish production, especially by the impecunious standards of British cinema, The Wandering Jew was imported in 1935 by Loew’s Inc., MGM’s parent company, and slated for release during Yom Kippur for promotional tie-ins. That was a miscalculation. Though the film oozes at least as much anti-Catholicism as antisemitism, an opening act featuring a lecherous Jew spitting on Christ was not a gesture calculated to foster interfaith comity. Also, in 1935, the word “Jew” on a theater marquee was enough to make its referents wince at a description that was also spat out as an insult. Alarmed at the provocation, Hollywood Jews maneuvered behind the scenes to suppress the film. Knowing where the levers of power were located, they launched a full-court press on the Breen office.
“Friday last, I received a formal, dignified protest from a local group of Jewish women against the picture entitled The Wandering Jew,” Breen wrote Hays. “The protest was made on the grounds that the picture was a libelous attack upon the Jews, and, generally, very offensive.” No sooner had the women’s delegation left his office than Breen received a phone call from George Cohen, from the law firm of Loeb, Walker, and Loeb, who wanted Breen to know that “a number of his Jewish friends had spoken to him about this picture and urged him to use his influence with us to have the picture very critically examined before it received our approval.” Later that same day, Breen was on the receiving end of yet another protest call from a concerned Jew, this time from screenwriter Al Cohn, who as scenarist for The Jazz Singer and The Cohens and the Kellys films, claimed a proprietary interest. “Al tells me that there was considerable apprehension about this particular picture at the local meeting of some sort of anti-defamation league,” Breen reported.
Importuned by a Jewish women’s group, a Jewish lawyer, and a Jewish screenwriter all in one day, Breen contacted the New York office, where the British import would have been vetted, to find out what was up. To his relief, he learned that the film was never formally submitted for a Production Code seal. Breen asked Hays to make sure that Vincent G. Hart, head of the New York branch of the PCA, exercise great care in handling the case should the film be submitted. “I know that you want no approval given on a picture that libels any race of people,” he told Hays, speaking for them both.10
Meanwhile, in New York, protests by the Anti-Defamation League of the B’nai B’rith forced Loew’s head Nicholas M. Schenck—who was initially enthusiastic about the picture and had signed a deal to distribute it—to renege on the contract. The company also withdrew its planned application for a Code seal, thus saving Vincent Hart the trouble of a tough call. Originally slated to open at the 5,400-seat Capitol Theatre in New York, it was demoted to the 875-seat Criterion, where it played to enthusiastic crowds for five weeks.11 Clearly, American Jews were of two minds about the film, reading it more as an attack on Christian anti-semitism than a regurgitation of old slurs against the Jews. However, influential voices in the trade press and American Jewry—sometimes overlapping categories—were uneasy about the whole affair: the title, the spitting, the avarice. “It’s not entertainment. It’s not enlightenment. It’s not even propaganda, one way or the other—it’s just disturbing,” commented Variety, troubled at “the reopening of ancient racial wounds.”12
The trigger word in the title of The Jew Suss (1934), the other British-made meditation on the plight of European Jewry, was expunged for the American market. Based on Lion Feuchtwanger’s novel Jew Suss, directed by Lothar Mendes, and masked by a tactical relabeling for the American marketplace, Power (1934)—as it was rechristened—hit an even heavier wave of resistance.
In the Duchy of Württemberg in eighteenth-century Germany, up-from-the-ghetto hustler Reb Joseph Suss-Oppenheimer (Veidt again) insinuates his way into the royal court. He sinks so low that he is willing to pimp his sweetheart to the lecherous Duke, but when he tries the same trick with his beautiful teenage daughter, she plunges off a roof rather than surrender her virtue. Heartsick and bent on revenge, Suss confronts the Duke, who dies of a stroke. Put on trial for murder, the defiant Suss boasts that no tree will be high enough to hang him. Born again to the faith of his fathers, he also refuses to reject his Jewish heritage even though he is revealed to have been born of a Christian mother. In the harrowing finale, the Jew Suss is hanged from a steel cage hoisted high over the public square, as snow falls and the crowd roars.
For many observers, the inflammatory content—a conniving Jew in Germany executed to the delight of a howling mob—overpowered the aesthetic virtues or box office potential. “This is not entertainment; it is a medium by which the basest passions are appealed to,” seethed Pete Harrison, editor and publisher of Harrison’s Reports, a weekly newsletter for motion picture exhibitors. Harrison was appalled by every aspect of the “abhorrent” production, which he found offensive in equal measure to Jews (“because of the slur it casts on their race”) and Christians (“because of the sensationalism and tyrannical character” of the Christian protagonists). “Unsuitable for any decent person—Class C,” he decreed, giving the film his own personal “condemned” rating. “I am making a personal appeal to every exhibitor in the land not to show this picture. In addition to the fact that it is not entertaining, this is not the time to show anything that arouses racial prejudice.”13
After Power opened at Radio City Music Hall, the Loew’s circuit, which had agreed to distribute the film, got cold feet. To salvage its commercial prospects, A. P. Waxman, the stateside press agent for British imports, arranged a private screening for a pair of very influential Jewish leaders—Albert Einstein, who went on record praising the film, and Rabbi Stephen S. Wise, the era’s most prominent spokesman for liberal Judaism, who devoted a sermon to the film on his radio broadcast. Loew’s reconsidered and distributed the film, but despite the blurbs from the professor and the rabbi, Power flopped.14
The fourth film was not in either British or American English. Die Vandernder Yid (The Wandering Jew, 1933), a Yiddish-language variation on the Temple-Sure-Doré theme, uses Nazi Germany as a backdrop for a history of antisemitism that stretches from the captivity in Babylonia, the carnage of the Crusades, and the torments of the Spanish Inquisition, on through the pogroms of Czarist Russia, and into the wilderness that is now Nazi Germany. Directed by George Roland; written by Jacob Mestel, already a multi-hyphenate talent in Yiddish theater and later its historian; and starring Jacob Ben-Ami, a heartthrob of the Yiddish stage, it has the distinction of being the first American, though not Hollywood, attack on Nazi Germany in a feature film.
A brilliant painter, Great War veteran, loyal German, and esteemed professor at the Berlin Academy of Art, Arthur Levi (Ben-Ami) enjoys all the perquisites of assimilation in Weimar Germany, including a beautiful blonde gentile fiancée, until the Nazis raise “the New German Racial Question.” Suddenly, the Berlin Academy refuses to hang his painting, brownshirts shout “Juden!” outside his home, and his shiksa girlfriend bails. Newsreel footage of the Nazi book burnings staged in Berlin on May 10, 1933, is stitched into the melodrama, the flames of the fires reflecting on Levi’s face.
Rather than see his masterpiece consigned to the flames (a full-length portrait of his deceased father as Jehovah, also entitled “The Wandering Jew”), Professor Levi prepares to destroy it himself—whereupon the portrait comes to life. To put the present troubles in perspective, the patriarch guides the son through the bitter history of the Jewish people, a tour through time illustrated with copious footage from silent-era costume dramas. The lesson concludes on the note of uplift offered by the Zionist movement launched by Theodore Herzl. Just as Moses and Herzl led oppressed Jews to the promised land, a new prophet will arise to lead the chosen people out of Germany. The Nazis may burn Jewish literature, “but they can never extinguish the Eternal Spirit” of the Jewish people.
The first American, though not English-language, anti-Nazi feature film: Natalie Browning, Jacob Ben-Ami, and Ben Adler in George Roland’s Yiddish-language production, Die Vandernder Yid (1933). (Courtesy of the National Center for Jewish Film)
The prospects for Die Vandernder Yid with its target audience seemed propitious. “This film is definitely of the nature of propaganda aimed intensely at the current anti-Semitic activity carried on by the Hitler government in Germany,” commented Motion Picture Herald. “As such, in theaters which may count upon a reasonably large Jewish attendance, the exhibitor has something to sell here.”15 Variety’s Wolfe Kaufman concurred: “First of the anti-Hitler pictures, there ought to be a market for it.”16 Yet static camerawork, histrionic acting, and glacial pacing doomed Die Vandernder Yid even among that percentage of the demographic likely to lend a box office mandate to anti-Nazi cinema. Booked for a four-week run at the Cameo, the arthouse venue of choice in New York for politically tinged ethnic fare, and publicized as the first film to dare “a vigorous denunciation of Hitlerism,” it barely survived two weeks before management pulled the plug.17
In 1933, Sam Jaffe, a low-powered Hollywood producer, and Herman J. Mankiewicz, the high-living Hollywood screenwriter, shopped around a project entitled The Mad Dog of Europe. It seemed like a surefire high concept: first out of the gate, inspired by headline material, and precast with a magnetic villain. Yet perhaps no film—or non-film—better illustrates the Hollywood aversion to anti-Nazi cinema in the 1930s than the long-gestating, never-realized scenario caught in a 1930s version of development hell. As Hitler consolidated power and remade Germany, conquered new territory and pushed Europe to the abyss, the project stumbled and sputtered, hit false starts, raised expectations, dashed hopes, and, finally, curled up and died.
Not to be confused with the well-known character actor of the same name, producer-turned-agent Sam Jaffe began his career at Paramount as a production manager under the legendary producer B. P. Schulberg. Jaffe was well connected: Schulberg was married to Jaffe’s sister, Adeline Jaffe Schulberg, who was in her own right a powerful talent agent and activist for progressive causes. In 1932, after a blowup with director Josef von Sternberg on the set of Blonde Venus (1932), Jaffe resigned from Paramount and moved down a notch on the studio hierarchy to RKO, where he scored with Diplomaniacs (1933), a hit comedy starring the manic duo Bert Wheeler and Robert Woolsey.18
In July 1933, Jaffe left RKO to devote full energies to The Mad Dog of Europe, which was to be his first venture into independent production. In a blatant bid for ecumenical outreach, the project was described as “an anti-Hitler film of the sacrifice of Jews and Catholics.”19 Declared Jaffe: “With the exception of certain essential newsreel matter, I am planning to make this picture in Hollywood with Hollywood personalities and labor.” In full-page ads in the trade press, he trumpeted his opus-to-be as “an anti-Hitler subject depicting the intolerance and bigotry resulting in the persecution of the Jews and Catholics in a Central European nation and the world catastrophe involved.” Shooting was scheduled to begin on August 23, 1933.20
The Motion Picture Producers and Distributors of America had other plans. Unofficially but unmistakably, Jaffe was told to back off.
Jaffe decided not to buck the power brokers whose goodwill he depended upon. That September, after only a short summer vacation away from the studio treadmill, he joined Columbia Pictures in a general executive capacity working directly under studio kingpin Harry Cohn.21 Finding the irascible Cohn unbearable, Jaffe shifted career paths. Joining his sister’s talent agency, and ultimately taking it over, he spent the balance of his work life as one of Hollywood’s most successful agents.
By October 1933, the project had come into the hands of Al Rosen, who planned to reverse Jaffe’s career trajectory: he was an agent eager to move into motion picture production. In his commitment to The Mad Dog of Europe, Rosen would prove to be made of sterner stuff than Jaffe.
Under the shingle March of Time Productions, Inc., Rosen set up shop at Tiffany Pictures, a Poverty Row shop specializing in one- and two-reelers, and announced that The Mad Dog of Europe would begin shooting on November 1, 1933. He described the screenplay as being “based on the Hitler career, cinematizing the lives in Germany from 1914 to 1933, of a Jewish [and] a Catholic family. Film’s nucleus [is] 7,000 feet [of newsreel footage] taken in Germany in the past decade, [and] smuggled from the country.”22 Rosen aimed at a “states rights market,” which in industry parlance meant exhibitors without formal contractual affiliations with the major studios. To generate buzz, he flashed around a picture of a Hitler lookalike hired “to portray the heavy” in his forthcoming production. Apparently, the actor was a dead ringer for the original. “He isn’t being invited to any social functions,” deadpanned the Hollywood Reporter.23
Again, official Hollywood moved in. Frederick W. Beetson, secretary-treasurer of the Association of Motion Picture Producers, tried to dissuade Rosen from undertaking the project—first by jawboning then by strong-arming.b On October 15, 1933, Beetson met with Rosen and urged him, for the sake of the German market (and presumably with no pun intended) “to let sleeping dogs lie.” Rosen waved a bundle of supportive letters from religious organizations in Beetson’s face. MPPDA or not, he vowed to bring the project to the screen.24
Fed up, Rosen went public with the MPPDA’s intimidation tactics. According to Rosen’s account of his meeting with Beetson, he was ordered outright to shut down production. Having already invested thousands of dollars in the project, Rosen did what any independent producer would do: he sued. Alleging “malicious interference with contracts and conspiracy,” he asked for $1,022,200 in damages—$7,200 for money expended, $15,000 for incurred obligations, and $1,000,000 in punitive damages.25 Rosen claimed that the MPPDA told him it would “be to his best interests not to” produce The Mad Dog of Europe and that, if he persisted, “the association would do everything in its power to prevent him.”26 The suit went nowhere.
Scared away by the MPPDA and Rosen’s uncertain financing, potential artistic collaborators backed off. Herman Mankiewicz asked Rosen to take his name off the script; B-movie director Phil Rosen (no relation to the would-be producer), whose name had been attached to the project, also dropped out. “They tell me I am dealing with a controversial subject, but I don’t call it that,” said Rosen. “There have been plays and pictures before based on the crime of oppression and social bigotry, so why not again?”27 Nonetheless, with the antipathy of the MPPDA common knowledge around town, securing financing and A-list talent in Hollywood was hopeless.
The undeterrable Rosen traveled to New York to solicit funding from Jewish leaders. No luck.28 He then trolled for seed money in Paris, where he reportedly “picked up several thousand feet of stock shots and some atrocity stuff from Germany” but failed to secure financing.29
In February 1934, back in Hollywood, Rosen put up a good front for potential investors. He announced the start of production with Lowell Sherman slated to direct and Lynn Root signed on as screenwriter. (Root was unknown at the time, but Sherman was a major coup, a hot commodity after helming the smash-hit Mae West vehicle She Done Him Wrong [1933].) He sent out word that Sam Rosoff, the wealthy New York subway builder, had put an “unlimited bankroll” at his disposal, the MPPDA be damned.30 He took out trade press ads declaring that The Mad Dog of Europe would “shortly go into production.”31
Over the next months, Rosen kept up the charade that the project was a done deal by announcing the acquisition of ten thousand feet (approximately 110 minutes) of authentic sound pictures “showing Hitler in action, and also giving unusual views of how the Jews have been treated.” With such compelling newsreel footage, Rosen confided, all he really needed to do to make a surefire thriller was to “shoot sufficient added stuff to carry a story.” If he was unable to cobble together a drama as timely as the day’s headlines, he planned to reedit the newsreel footage into a feature-length documentary. Either way, the shooting of the dramatic sequences would begin within a month.32 Really, the cameras would start rolling any day now.
To show he meant business, Rosen submitted his proposal for The Mad Dog of Europe to the Production Code Administration. Bound by its own rules, the Breen office had no option but to vet the project. In the process, it formulated a policy that shaped Hollywood’s attitude to anti-Nazi cinema for the rest of the decade. The film and the guidelines were debated at the highest levels of the industry—meaning the Breen office in Hollywood and the MPPDA’s board in New York.
The consensus and “unofficial judgment” of the motion picture industry was laid out by Breen in a widely circulated memo that set a precedent not limited to the case at hand: “such a picture should not be produced.” The Breen office was not issuing an official prohibition; it was offering a word to the wise in the form of an advisory opinion. Of course, around Hollywood, in dealing with the Breen office, an official prohibition and an “unofficial judgment” was a distinction without a difference.
The men of the Breen office in November 1934: Production Code Administration chief Joseph I. Breen (first row, center); his right-hand man Geoffrey Shurlock and, on Breen’s left, Dr. James Wingate, former head of the Studio Relations Committee. Standing left to right: staffers Douglas Mackinnon, Karl Lischka, Islen Auster, Arthur Houghton, and John McHugh Stuart.
Breen knew Rosen—and any other producer contemplating an anti-Nazi scenario—deserved more than an imperious thumbs down. Patiently, a bit defensively, he explained:
This general and unofficial opinion is based pretty generally upon the thought that such a picture is an out-and-out propaganda picture and, while it might serve a good purpose from a propaganda angle, it might likewise establish a bad precedent. The purpose of the screen, primarily, is to entertain and not to propagandize. To launch such a picture might result in a kind of two-edged sword, with the screen being used for propaganda purposes not so worthy, possibly, as that suggested by The Mad Dog of Europe idea.
The likelihood that American Hitlerites would seek a Code seal for a pro-Nazi film was remote, but Breen was covering all the bases. Interestingly, the PCA head let slip that he himself considered the project “worthy” of purpose. As ever, though, his internal barometer was sensitive to the possibility of domestic blowback:
Then, too, it is to be remembered that there is strong pro-German and anti-Semitic feeling in this country, and, while those who are likely to approve of an anti-Hitler picture may think well of such an enterprise, they should keep in mind that millions of Americans might think otherwise.
After all, Breen need not remind a man whose surname was Rosen that
Because of the large number of Jews active in the motion picture industry in this country, the charge is certain to be made that the Jews, as a class, are behind an anti-Hitler picture and using the entertainment screen for their own personal propaganda purposes. The entire industry, because of this, is likely to be indicted for the action of a mere handful.
With this in mind, “thinking people” within the industry believed that “The Mad Dog of Europe should not be made, despite the fact that it may appear at first sight to be a worthwhile enterprise.” Breen closed with a clincher: “It is certain to be inflammatory and might result in a boomerang.”33 Of course, the “thinking people” within the industry were Breen’s immediate superiors on the MPPDA’s board in New York—the policymakers and moneymen, Jew and non-Jew alike, who thought it best to let sleeping dogs lie.
At that juncture, even the tenacious Rosen was shut down. Throughout the 1930s, he tried repeatedly to get the project off the ground—at Paramount, at RKO, at Columbia—with different scripts, but always with the same incendiary title and identifiable tyrant. In 1936 he attempted an end run around the Breen office by soliciting the official blessings of the State Department. The State Department alerted the MPPDA, where foreign manager Col. Frederick L. Herron fielded the call. “Confidentially, the State Department tells me that they have had a letter from our old friend Rosen of The Mad Dog of Europe fame, stating that he wants to make a picture built around a Jewish girl and a German boy with [a] world war background,” Herron informed Breen. He asked Breen to dig up the old memo “quietly” and “as soon as possible, in confidence” copy it to New York for Herron to pass on to the State Department.34
Like Hollywood, Washington wanted nothing to do with The Mad Dog of Europe.
In the 1920s and 1930s, when the motion picture camera was still a novel invention and exotic peoples in remote regions had yet to be captured on film, a few young men with the requisite moxie and money assumed the guise of intrepid newsreel photographers. Working freelance or on spec, the amateur shutterbugs roamed the world and cranked away in the days when the Eyemo camera—a durable, handheld 35mm camera marketed by Bell & Howell with an eye to the newsreel market—was still a luxury item. Newsmen without portfolio, they practiced a kind of journalistic noblesse oblige—traveling far and wide, often in first-class cabins, but sometimes enduring severe hardships and courting real danger.
One of the most energetic of the breed was Cornelius Vanderbilt Jr., scion of the nineteenth-century robber barons. Though born with the most silver of spoons in his mouth, Vanderbilt looked upon his plutocratic kith and kin as a tribe of “dull, uninteresting, hopelessly mediocre people.”35 Resolving to break free from the ballrooms of the mundane superrich, he enlisted as a private in the Great War and tried to live down his blue-chip name. Deployed as a message carrier, he motored between battlefronts, dodged artillery shells, and nearly perished in a gas attack. Mustered out, disgusted by the effete New York social scene, he migrated to California, founded a newspaper, went bust, returned to New York, and lived in a flat that became party central for the intoxicated fops and flappers of a metropolis in full Jazz Age swing. He also used his contacts to interview some of the most inaccessible newsmakers of the age—Al Capone, Joseph Stalin, Benito Mussolini, Pope Pius XI, and, on the historic evening of March 5, 1933, his biggest catch, Adolf Hitler.
Earlier that year, operating out of plush quarters in Paris, Vanderbilt had set about stalking his quarry. Registering as a journalist, he toured European capitals, and with two French cameramen went to Vienna to cover mass meetings and political demonstrations.36 In Berlin, he interviewed the former Crown Prince of Germany and, in Holland, the prince's father, Kaiser Wilhelm. Getting within range of the present leader of Germany was far more difficult than gaining an audience with the former rulers. “Strange, isn’t it,” Vanderbilt remarked to the Crown Prince, “that you Hohenzollerns are so much easier to see than Hitler?”
The plutocrat as journalist: Cornelius Vanderbilt Jr. (right) with producer-director Cecil B. DeMille in Hollywood in the 1920s.
Vanderbilt persisted and on the evening of March 5, 1933, the day of the Reichstag elections that gave the Nazis a parliamentary plurality, he obtained an audience, of sorts, with Hitler. The vaunted interview actually consisted of little more than a few shouted exchanges as Hitler prepared to go on stage at the Sports Palace in Berlin to speak to throngs of hysterical Nazis marshaled to greet their new, democratically validated Reich Chancellor. “Tell the Americans that life moves forward, always forward, irrevocably forward,” said Hitler, gesturing to the rapturous multitudes awaiting his entrance. “Tell them that Adolf Hitler is the Man of the Hour, not because he has been appointed Chancellor by Hindenburg, but because no one else could have been appointed Chancellor instead.… Tell them that he was sent by the Almighty to a nation that had been threatened with disintegration and loss of honor for fifteen long years.”
As Hitler strode into the spotlight, Vanderbilt yelled out a final question. “And what about the Jews, Your Excellency?”
Hitler shrugged off the impertinence. “My people are waiting for me!” he snapped. “You hear that song? You hear those drums? See this man here [Dr. Ernst “Putzi” Hanfstaengl, Hitler’s Harvard-educated foreign press chief]. He will tell you about the Jews and all the other things that worry America. Good-bye, sir.” Hitler then marched on stage to deliver his speech.
A few weeks later, still trying to arrange a sit-down interview, Vanderbilt spoke by telephone with Hanfstaengl, whom Vanderbilt described as Hitler’s “Man Friday.” Seeing dollar signs in Vanderbilt’s name, Hanfstaengl attempted a shakedown, asking $5,000 for an exclusive session with Hitler. Vanderbilt slammed down the phone.37
On May 24, 1933, after having made “a number of documentary shots of Jewish refugees” and writing “on the Jewish problem in Germany,” Vanderbilt sailed for New York with the footage.38 Word of Vanderbilt’s scoop and motion picture plans preceded him. “The Hitler storm will gather when Cornelius Vanderbilt’s picture of Nazi oppression of the Jews is released in this country,” predicted Motion Picture Daily. However, unlike the putting down of The Mad Dog of Europe, the MPPDA made no effort to block Vanderbilt’s production.39 Vanderbilt, after all, was not a Hollywood regular. Doubtless too his patrician roots and personal connections made him less susceptible to pressure than cash-poor Hollywood Jews like Sam Jaffe and Al Rosen.
Not that Vanderbilt—the family black sheep—was flush. He had to take financing where he could find it. Shut out by the major studios, Vanderbilt cobbled together a deal with two independent producer-distributors—Joseph Seiden, who specialized in Yiddish-language cinema, and Samuel Cummins, who would later hit the jackpot as the stateside distributor of Ecstasy (1933), the Czech-German import featuring a quite naked young actress later christened Hedy Lamarr.
Directed by Mike Mindlin, a hired gun fresh off the sexploitation flick This Nude World (1933), and edited by Vanderbilt and Edwin C. Hill, a veteran NBC newsman known as “the Globe Trotter,” Hitler’s Reign of Terror was a 65-minute mélange of stock newsreel footage, ragged reenactments, and original material shot by Vanderbilt. “At last before your eyes actual uncensored scenes of Hitler’s reign of terror!” shrieked exclamation-pointed, all-capitals copy blazing across the trailers for the film. “Ripping aside the curtain on history’s most shocking episode and exposing the Nazi menace in America!” A virtually unseen curiosity in its time, and certainly since, the film has seen its quirky status grow as its availability over the years hovered somewhere between scarce and nonexistent.
Hitler’s Reign of Terror opens with newsreel footage of Samuel Seabury, the crusading New York judge; Rabbi Stephen S. Wise, the voice of liberal Judaism in 1930s America; novelist Fannie Hurst, author of the tear-jerking novels Back Street (1931) and Imitation of Life (1933); and Edward Neary, head of the American Legion, all denouncing Nazism during a rally at Madison Square Garden in 1933. Both Vanderbilt and Hill appear in the film as themselves, Hill assuming on-screen commentator duties and Vanderbilt playing the dauntless American reporter. In a framing device, Hill reads a statement on Nazism, illustrated with newsreel footage of torchlight parades and book burnings, and dispatches Vanderbilt to go forth and investigate, spawning more newsreel footage of ecstatic crowds, antisemitic signage, book burnings, and still more torchlight parades. Already, the images of frenzy and fire have become visual shorthand for the Nazi fever.
Back in America, Vanderbilt reenacts for Hill a fanciful embellishment unmentioned in his magazine articles and memoir. Claiming the film was stolen from him, he demonstrates how he managed to save several reels of raw footage by taping the film cans to the bottom of his car during a border inspection.
The brief interview with Hitler is reenacted by Vanderbilt, microphone in hand, confronting a Hitler impersonator. Thrusting the mike into the face of the faux führer, Vanderbilt repeats the question he dared to ask Hitler at his moment of triumph. “And what about the Jews, Your Excellency?”
After the face-off between Vanderbilt and Hitler, padding abounds: newsreel footage of the Great War, reenactments of Vanderbilt’s interviews with Crown Prince Louis Ferdinand and the Kaiser, and an authentic interview, for whatever reason, with Helen Keller. A sampling of speeches from the Madison Square Garden rally, including excerpts from Undersecretary of State Raymond Moley and Congressman Samuel Dickstein (D-NY), fills out the balance of the running time. Narrator Hill closes with a summary of Nazi history till now—and a warning for the future.
Premiering on April 30, 1934, at the Mayfair, an independent theater on Broadway, and guaranteed a warm reception from an island dense with anti-Nazi Jews, Hitler’s Reign of Terror gave the house the biggest single opening day in its history, surpassing the receipts of the previous record holder, another hair-raising tale from a strange land, big-game hunter Frank Buck’s Bring ’Em Back Alive (1932). On the lookout for trouble, police stood outside the theater, but no disturbances were reported.40
The Production Code Administration was still a couple of months away from formal operation—July 15, 1934, was the official opening day—so Hitler’s Reign of Terror never received an inspection from the Breen office. Nonetheless, officials of the MPPDA kept a wary eye on the film. Roy Norr, who worked for the MPPDA in public relations, was dispatched from the New York office to attend the opening day at the Mayfair and report back to MPPDA trouble-shooter Maurice McKenzie. According to Norr, the film “included only a few original ‘reproductions’ of alleged interviews had by Mr. Cornelius Vanderbilt, Jr. with the Kaiser, Mr. Hitler, and others. A general statement on the screen covered the fact that such interviews were ‘reproductions’ and it was obvious that the actors took the parts of the Kaiser, Hitler, and others in certain scenes.”
A series of frame enlargements from Cornelius Vanderbilt Jr.’s Hitler’s Reign of Terror (1934): Vanderbilt reenacts his interview with Hitler (top), discusses his exploits with collaborator Edwin C. Hill, (middle), and, in an authentic scene, walks among the brownshirts in Nazi Germany (Courtesy of the Cinémathèque Royale de Belgique)
As to what industry policy should be toward Vanderbilt’s exposé, Norr was open-minded. “The fact that it is a propaganda picture does not make it necessarily unsuitable for the screen,” he wrote McKenzie. “There is no more reason why a theater owner may not take a given side on a public question than why a newspaper publisher should not adopt a definite policy one way or another re Hitlerism.” True, Hitler’s Reign of Terror portrayed Hitler and Nazism in a manner likely to bring about ill will toward Germany, but “the film certainly does not go beyond responsible newspaper reports and actual happenings published.” Norr concluded his remarks with impeccable logic: “A government cannot be insulted by the depiction of its own acts.”41
An official of the U.S. government thought otherwise. “The film serves no good purpose,” wrote George R. Canty from Germany, responding to inquiries from the Department of Commerce after protests from the German ambassador in Washington. On this matter of film policy at least, Canty agreed with the Nazis. “The German government has, in my opinion, heretofore been very arbitrary for one reason or another in its treatment of American films, but in this case, I am inclined to sympathize with the viewpoint of the German ambassador.”42
Censors across America were also inclined to sympathize with the German viewpoint. Though the MPPDA put up no hurdles, Hitler’s Reign of Terror was banned and cut by state and city censor boards reluctant to offend Nazi sensibilities. The New York State Censor Board denied the film a license, a decision that usually shut down exhibition throughout the state. Billing the docudrama as a news film, the Mayfair played it anyway and producer Samuel Cummins threatened a court fight if the board tried to block the screening.43 The board blinked and backed off.
In Chicago, after the film had cleared the Chicago Board of Censors, the local Nazi consul, who claimed the footage was faked and shot in New York, successfully persuaded the police commissioner and mayor to halt screenings. Cummins denied the charges, sued the consul for slander, and filed a writ demanding a halt to the injunction. The film was eventually released, but only after being slashed to ribbons by the reeducated censor board, which demanded fourteen cuts and a title change to the less judgmental Hitler’s Reign.
Under whatever name, Hitler’s Reign of Terror needed all the controversy it could muster. Even critics sympathetic to Vanderbilt’s good intentions cringed at the clunky pacing, blustering narration, and slipshod technique. “The word for this one is ‘fiasco,’” decreed Variety.44 “This picture adds nothing to the knowledge of Nazism that is not already known,” frowned Film Daily.45
The peripatetic Vanderbilt was undaunted. Returning to Germany, he claimed to have obtained exclusive pictures of Nazi riots in Berlin and Munich during the bloody purge of the S.A. and the murder of its leader Ernst Rohm in June 1934. Smuggling the footage out to London, he announced plans to recut the new footage into an updated version of Hitler’s Reign of Terror.46
The revised release never came to fruition, perhaps because the original fared so poorly. In San Francisco, a local German delegation somehow persuaded the police to arrest Herman Cohen, owner-manager of the Strand Theater, for booking the film. After bailing himself out, Cohen secured an injunction against further police actions and, no fool, set about milking his arrest for publicity value. “Come and see why the Nazi element had the manager arrested for showing Hitler’s Reign of Terror!” urged ads in the San Francisco papers. Yet not even curiosity about a cause worth going to jail over could drum up business: the film flopped—and promptly vanished.47
On August 10, 1934, Isobel Lillian Steele, a pretty, 23-year-old American music student, was arrested in Berlin on suspicion of espionage. Hauled into Alexanderplatz Prison for interrogation, she was later transferred to Moabit Prison, already notorious as a Gestapo house of torture. Above her cell door was painted a white cross, the mark for a condemned inmate.
Canadian-born but a naturalized American citizen raised in Hollywood, Steele had come to Germany in June 1931 to study violin. Virtually stranded in Berlin when the exchange rate for the U.S. dollar cratered, she made ends meet by freelance magazine work and radio commentary. Being young, attractive, and artistic, she spent few evenings alone, partaking of the wide-open Weimar nightlife and, not being Jewish, missing few beats when the Nazis pushed decadent entertainment options underground.
Sometime in early 1934, Steele became infatuated with a dashing Polish aristocrat and well-known spy-about-town, Baron Ulrich von Sosnosky, a captain in the Polish military. To loosen lips and facilitate compromising positions, it was his business and pleasure to host hedonistic parties attended by film actresses, aristocrats, high-ranking Nazi officials, and fun-loving expatriates like Isobel Steele. Miss Steele, however, was not the only woman who had fallen under the spell of the enchanting captain. Also smitten were the Baroness Benita von Berg and Frau Renate von Natzmer, two beautiful secretaries in the offices of the Reichswehr, the regular German army. Both women were passing secret military documents to Sosnosky.
A Weimar-style libertine and foreign agent as colorful as Baron Sosnosky could not operate for long in the new Germany. On February 28, 1934, a squad of Gestapo officers converged on his opulent Berlin apartment and broke up the party. Along with the captain and his female retinue, some fifty guests were rousted from the parlor and taken into custody—sobbing noblewomen in evening gowns, screen actresses, and Nazi officials not privy to word of the bust.
Fortunately for Steele, who flitted on the fringes of Baron Sosnosky’s social circle and espionage ring, she happened to be home on deadline that fateful night. Getting word of her near miss, however, the good daughter of Hollywood knew immediately what to do: turn the story of the charismatic Polish nobleman and his elegant Mata Haris into a motion picture scenario. “It wasn’t an anti-Nazi film,” she later insisted. “It was merely a story of the most romantic man I can recall.”48
The Nazis suspected more subversive motives. Informed of Steele’s on-spec screenwriting and indiscreet opinions of the Nazi regime (“I did not approve of the persecution of the Jews. I believed in the freedom of the press. I told my friends these things. And from that grew the whole monstrous affair of lies and rumors on which the Nazis sent me to prison.”), the Gestapo barged into her apartment, confiscated the manuscript, and arrested her.49
In Alexanderplatz and Moabit prisons, Steele endured four months of harsh questioning, spartan conditions, and threats of execution. Outside the gates, meanwhile, her plight ballooned into a major diplomatic incident. That December, through the efforts of the American ambassador to Germany, William E. Dodd, and the intervention of Sen. William E. Borah (R-ID), she was released, shunted by train up to Hamburg, escorted on board the U.S. liner President Harding, and deported.
Steele’s German coconspirators were not so lucky. Employing the traditional means of execution for traitors to the German state, the Nazis beheaded the two Reichswehr secretaries seduced by Captain Sosnosky. Captain Sosnosky’s own neck was saved by an exchange of spies between Germany and Poland.
When Steele’s ship docked in New York, a phalanx of reporters and newsreel cameramen waited at the pier. A reporter for the New York Daily News, which had paid $1,000 for the exclusive rights to her story while Steele was en route, tried to keep his prize catch quiet, but the newsreel boys were not taking no for an answer. “We don’t care what she says,” snarled a cameraman, “as long as she talks about something while we get fifty more feet of film.” Steele relented, but gave away no juicy details. “It was no fun,” she said. “If you are seeking pleasure, I would advise you to look elsewhere.”50 The Daily News then took possession of its exclusive, spiriting Steele away to a downtown hotel where she dictated her account. Under headlines like “One Hundred Days of Hitler Horror,” her story was serialized in newspapers across the nation.
Back in Hollywood, Steele started work on a prison memoir, lectured to women’s clubs, and—of course—shopped the story around to the studios. Predictably, the major studios passed. Constrained by the MPPDA and the Breen office, Hollywood balked at bankrolling any project liable to roil relations with Germany, upset her American fifth column, or validate the screen as a soapbox for political speech. However, a wily independent producer saw the makings of a marketable film in Steele’s tale of intrigue, imprisonment, and anti-Nazism.
Alfred T. Mannon was a former president and treasurer of Republic Studios, a decidedly second-tier nonmajor studio, and an independent producer of long experience. In 1935 he partnered with Steele to form Malvina Pictures Corporation, Malvina being the name of a stuffed doll Steele clung to for comfort in her cell. Mannon decided to build the film version around two clever exploitation angles. Steele’s story would be called I Was a Captive of Nazi Germany, echoing the first-person desperation of Warner Bros.’ well-remembered exposé of another prison society, I Am a Fugitive from a Chain Gang (1932). To further underscore the she-was-there melodrama, and sensing star power in the photogenic ex-captive, he cast Miss Steele as herself in the title role.
In early 1936, production commenced—whereupon, almost immediately, the German Consul in Los Angeles, Dr. Georg Gyssling, demanded that the MPPDA intervene to stop the project. Gyssling was Hitler’s man in Hollywood. A career diplomat and former winter Olympian, he joined the Nazi Party in the 1920s and in 1933 was rewarded with the plum assignment of Vice-Consul in charge of the German Consulate in Los Angeles.
The redeemed captive: former prisoner of the Nazis Isobel Steele waves to reporters upon her arrival in New York, December 26, 1934.
No sooner had Gyssling submitted his credentials than he began to hector the studios about alleged anti-German tendencies in their production schedule. He lodged a protest with Columbia Pictures against Below the Sea (1933) on the grounds the seafaring adventure story was “highly detrimental to German prestige” because “the crook of the story is a German submarine commander, who is represented in a most hideous way and furthermore whose acting is not at all based on established facts.”51 Hearing that 20th Century-Fox’s Great War espionage thriller The Lancer Spy (1937) would show scenes of “drunken German Army officers, who beat each other and molest women,” he warned that such an insult to German honor “may lead to serious difficulties which should be avoided in mutual interests.”52 The leverage he applied was always the same: that if the studio persisted in the project at hand, said company would be refused permission to bring its films into Germany and the entire slate of Hollywood imports might be caught in the backwash.
When the MPPDA pleaded no jurisdiction over Mannon’s independent venture, Gyssling sent Steele a threatening letter on consulate stationery. An exposé “allegedly dealing with certain experiences of yours in Germany” having come to his attention, he warned her against the production of a film “detrimental to German prestige.” Gyssling also summoned German members of the cast, many of whom were German citizens, to a meeting at the consulate to deliver the threat in person.53
“Detrimental to German prestige”: reproduction of a letter from Los Angeles–based Nazi consul Georg Gyssling threatening Isobel Steele and the makers of I Was a Captive of Nazi Germany (1936).
Mannon and Steele could afford to shrug off the pressure. As a one-off production company, Malvina Pictures had nothing to fear from a boycott by Germany. By July 1936, Gyssling notwithstanding, I Was a Captive of Nazi Germany was wrapped and booked for a New York premiere at the Globe.
At this juncture, Mannon did something unusual: he submitted the film to the Breen office for a Production Code seal. In this, the producer departed from the standard application procedure, which was to submit early screen treatments and the final screenplay before the commencement of actual shooting. The process of preproduction revision was the most cost-effective way of doing censorship, far less expensive than altering a finished film. It was in fact a central rationale for Hollywood’s system of in-house censorship.
Breen informed Mannon of what he already knew: that Dr. Gyssling had objected to “the [possible] approval by the PCA [of] your picture … on the grounds that it does not fairly represent the German Government and its people.” Breen quoted chapter and verse to Mannon. “If such a protest can be sustained, we would have to reject your picture as a violation of the Production Code which directs that ‘the history, institutions, prominent people and citizenry of other nations shall be represented fairly.’”
A tad disingenuously, Breen then tried to sidestep the diplomatic minefield by reminding Mannon that the length of time required for the proper adjudication of so serious a matter might delay the film’s release to the detriment of its commercial prospects. Perhaps, he suggested, Mannon might want to withdraw his application for a Code seal?54
Mannon was not about to let Breen off the hook so easily. An old Hollywood hand, he knew that a Code seal was the essential transit visa into the prime theatrical venues, motion picture palaces and neighborhood Bijous alike, contractually obligated to exhibit only cinema approved by the PCA. Without the coveted imprimatur, I Was a Captive of Nazi Germany would be consigned to a limited number of second-rate venues.
Responding with a firmness unusual for an independent producer, Mannon insisted on a fair hearing. “I am informed by competent authority that the German Consul exceeds his authority when he protests to your organization about the subject matter of pictures or the conduct of private individuals or films in connection with a picture to be exhibited in the United States,” he told Breen. In this, he was technically correct, but politically obtuse: foreign consuls, Nazi or not, wielded considerable influence on the MPPDA by threatening to block Hollywood imports from their homelands.
From Mannon’s vantage, withdrawing I Was a Captive of Nazi Germany would also be an admission that Gyssling’s charges had merit, that the picture—which neither the consul nor any other German had yet seen—was an unfair representation of Germany. Mannon asserted that, on the contrary, “I was particularly careful not to depict political incidents that did not actually happen and have supported Miss Steele’s personal knowledge of these incidents with headlines from the New York Times and other back numbers of newspapers. In fact, the inserts in the picture are actual photographs of back numbers of newspapers.” Mannon had strived to portray the German citizenry as “wholesome people” and to cast no aspersions on the character of “prominent people.” Moreover:
If the present regime in Germany did not win its popularity by inspiring the youth of Germany, if there was no Boycott of the Jews, if the Blood Purge and the burning of the books did not happen, if Minister of Propaganda Herr Goebbels did not suppress Herr Von Papen’s speech on the necessity of a free speech,c if Isobel Steele was not arrested and charged with high treason [and] espionage and held for four months in solitary confinement at the Alexander Platz and Moabit prison in Berlin, subjected to rigid cross-examination and deported without trial only after the United States Department of State demanded that she be given an immediate trial or freed, then the picture is unfair to the German Government.
Under the circumstances, Mannon saw no reason why Gyssling “should endeavor to suppress a re-enactment of actual photographs of these scenes.” Therefore—and here he tossed the ball back into Breen’s court—“I must urgently insist that the picture be given your code approval or refusal.”55
Mannon’s demand for due process ignited a buzz of activity in the upper ranks of official Hollywood. The MPPDA and the Breen office could discourage the major studios from bankrolling an anti-Nazi project, or browbeat an underfinanced independent into backing off, but Mannon confronted the association with a fait accompli—a finished film, in the can, ready for PCA examination. Hemmed in by its own ground rules, the Breen office was compelled to review the film, grant or deny it a Code seal, and, if denied, state the reasons in plain English.
Like any bureaucrat faced with a decision above his pay grade, Breen passed the buck upstairs. He informed Hays that after discussion with B. B. Kahane, president of RKO, and Emanuel Cohen from Paramount Pictures, the decision should be a “matter of industry policy” and as such “the Board of Directors in New York [should make] the decision as to whether or not this picture should be approved.”56 Breen would serve as messenger boy.
Having gotten his marching orders from above, and his Irish up by Gyssling’s meddling, Breen delivered the news with a straight face. Back-pedaling, he assured Mannon that far from caving in to pressure from Gyssling, he had merely had Mannon’s best commercial interests at heart. His suggestion that Mannon withdraw his application for a Code seal “was prompted by a desire on our part not to delay the release of your picture. The official protest filed with us by the Consul for Germany at Los Angeles, could not, we feel, be passed over lightly.” After that defensive feint, however, Breen abruptly informed Mannon: “Attached hereto we are sending you our formal Certificate of Approval, No. 2526.” Just like that, though with a caveat:
In this connection, I want to make it clear that this formal approval by the Production Code Administration does not carry with it an endorsement of the authenticity of the facts set forth in your picture. It must not be understood that in approving your picture, the Production Code Administration approves the picture’s content in any way. The judgment of the approval is based solely upon the picture’s technical conformity to the Production Code.
Mannon had scored a major victory. He had forced the Breen office to concede fair treatment of a foreign nation did not mean sympathetic treatment. He also created an opening for anti-Nazi cinema that any of the major studios might have slipped through—had they been so inclined.
On August 1, 1936, I Was a Captive of Nazi Germany opened at the Globe on Broadway in New York, but without the Code seal in its title credits.57 (Breen’s approval had come too late to redesign the title credits even had Mannon been willing to pony up for the postproduction costs.) Whether fearing Nazi retribution or professional embarrassment, the actors and offscreen talent, with the exception of Steele, went unbilled.
Drawn from Steele’s serialized narrative, I Was a Captive of Nazi Germany suffers from the limitations of the lead actress (whatever her talents as a musician, Steele is no thespian) and the constraints of budget (neither the décor of the Berlin apartments nor the Nazi prisons could pass for the originals). Its interest lies in its unique status as the only anti-Nazi feature film produced in America and granted a Code seal before 1939.
A written prologue sets the stage:
The TRUTH is often stranger than fiction.
Isobel Steele’s experiences in Nazi Germany in 1934 astounded the world when her book was first published.d
Now it has been possible to reenact the whole sequence of events so that the world can see, what hitherto, it has only been able to read.
The chief character in this amazing drama is reenacted by Isobel Steele herself and in order to safeguard the welfare of the other members of the cast their names are not disclosed.
A newsreel montage and a voice-over narration survey the disintegration of Weimar Germany and the rise of Nazism, exculpating the old regime and excoriating the new. The naïve but honorable President Paul von Hindenburg is forced to grant Hitler the Reich Chancellorship “to purify the Aryan strain,” whereupon “Hitler’s anti-Semitism gained by leaps and bounds.”
After the crisp history lesson, the voice-over makes an unusual invitation. “Let us meet someone who actually witnessed the political drama—an American girl who stood [on the] sidelines and was by August 1934 caught in the whirlpool of this sweeping revolution. I take pleasure in introducing Miss Isobel Steele.”
Sitting in a plush apartment, Steele is dressed to the nines—black gloves, sleek dress, draped in mink.
“How do you do?” she says pleasantly.
After some small talk, the voice inquires, “Tell me, did you like making this picture?”
“Very much. Although the prison scenes depressed me. Hollywood has a way of making things realistic.”
In a bombastic timbre borrowed from Westbrook Van Voorhis’ pronouncements for the March of Time series, the voice-over resumes the thumbnail history of Nazi Germany. The “greatest outburst of political prejudice modern history has recorded” finds its logical expression in the subjugation of the Jews, the deification of Hitler, and the chill pervading everyday life. “Jewish persecution began at once. It is estimated that over 90,000 were thrown into prison and concentration camps, while 70,000 leaving homes and possessions fled in poverty.” Over newsreel footage of the Nazi book burning of May 10, 1933, book jackets with Jewish bylines are superimposed on the pyre. Overdubbed in German-accented English, “the diminutive but fiery” Dr. Paul Joseph Goebbels rants before the bonfire. Inserts of Steele watching the spectacle among a crowd of Germans, the glow of the flames flickering on her face, are an eerie reminder that she was, in fact, an eyewitness to this history.
The reenactment proper begins with Steele meeting a German film producer at a suitable locale: a dubbing session for the German-language version of an American motion picture. Doing the voice-over work is the actress who will draw her into the web of Baron Sosnosky.
Though the broad currents of Nazi history pass in review (the murder of S.A. leader Ernst Rohm on June 30, 1934, is reenacted with a Hitler impersonator), the off-to-the-side details of life in the new Germany are more arresting to the eye. A sign on a Berlin taxi bears the slogan “Ich faber kein Juden!” (“I carry no Jews”). A brownshirt looks forward to his new assignment as a paid informer. “My days of enforcing Jewish boycotts and fighting communists are about over,” he gloats. Fanatical worship of the führer energizes the true believers and terrorizes ordinary Germans into submission.
After the Gestapo arrests Baron Sosnosky and his female spy ring, a German producer approaches Steele to write an insider’s account of the sensational case. “I know nothing about writing scenarios,” she blurts out with unwitting self-reflexivity.
When Steele is arrested by the Gestapo, a character destined for a long life in Hollywood cinema—the sinister Nazi villain—makes his screen debut. “Crying will not help you here, Fräulein,” sneers Steele’s interrogator, jolting awake the comatose melodrama. “Up until the time she is nabbed by the secret police, this feature appeared to be dying on its feet,” noted Variety. “Once she is under the stern hands of the Nazi authorities, it perks up appreciably. Prison scenes are fairly realistic and Miss Steele’s acting improves in her new environment.”58
Before too much duress, the intervention of “the brilliant Idaho statesman” Senator Borah secures Steele’s release. The final shot of Steele, now safe on native shores, taps into deep wellsprings of American mythology: the redeemed captive—smiling, her hair blowing in the sea breeze—stands on the deck of a ship in New York Harbor with the Statue of Liberty standing firm in the background. The American girl is no longer tormented by brutal savages.
“Hollywood has a way of making things realistic”: a lobby card advertising Isobel Steele’s real-life story.
Watching I Was a Captive of Nazi Germany on a warm summer evening in 1936, William Weaver of Motion Picture Herald witnessed the kind of rowdy outbursts that always made exhibitors nervous about films that stirred up emotions besides yuks or tears. During a prison sequence, when German slogans on a cell wall were translated by the narrator as an anti-Nazi slogan (“for every man imprisoned by Hitler a hundred more were at liberty to oppose him”), “abrupt applause, and not necessarily planted, broke out, followed by a guttural ‘Heil Hitler’ en solo.”59 Newsreel shots of Hitler also “received a mild salvo of Bronx cheers.”60
After the promising debut in New York, however, I Was a Captive of Nazi Germany endured the stunted distribution prospects of an orphan film lacking the support system of a parent studio. Not until April 20, 1937, did Mannon secure a booking in Los Angeles. Playing up the local angle, the film was ballyhooed as “the story of a Hollywood girl in Naziland,” an innocent abroad whose head was “always in the shadow of the beheading ax.” Skittish newspaper ads deleted the party and place from the advertising, truncating the title to I Was a Captive.
Critical response to Isobel Steele’s season in hell ranged from tepid to contemptuous. As with Hitler’s Reign of Terror, reviewers felt duty bound to pan a work whose good intentions were no compensation for its dreadful artistry. “A blundering anti-Nazi propaganda film … crudely produced and performed,” cringed Frank S. Nugent at the New York Times. “There is too much need of a righteous denunciation of stupid despotism, bigotry, and narrow nationalism to entrust the attack to amateurs.”61
No doubt—but the professionals were missing in action. American moviegoers seeking insight into Hitler and Nazi Germany had to look elsewhere on the film program.
