JEAN BASINGER: A REVIEW OF BEN URWAND’S BOOK THE COLLABORATORS
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Did Jewish moguls in 1930s Hollywood take directions from Nazi officials when they edited their films for release? Actually, no.
According to the Chronicle of Higher Education, “a debate is raging” over Ben Urwand’s “The Collaboration: Hollywood’s Pact With Hitler.” The controversy lies in Mr. Urwand’s premise, clearly stated on his book jacket: “To continue doing business in Germany after Hitler’s ascent to power, Hollywood studios agreed not to make films that attacked the Nazis or condemned Germany’s persecution of Jews.” Mr. Urwand even writes, in his prologue, that “the studio heads, who were mostly immigrant Jews . . . followed the instructions of the German consul in Los Angeles.” This is a serious statement, as it implies an official, organized policy of political cooperation.
Mr. Urwand is correct to say that Hollywood moved slowly when it came to confronting political realities that might threaten its business. Between 1933 and 1937, Jews as a group more or less disappeared off the screen in American movies and major criticisms of Nazis didn’t appear. It is the attitude that Mr. Urwand takes toward this information that is disturbing. He doesn’t consider the larger context of studio censorship history and elevates nonspecific actions into concrete policies.
The author tells us that, while doing graduate work a few years ago, he saw “The Tramp and the Dictator,” a documentary about Charlie Chaplin’s 1940 film spoofing Hitler, and had an “aha!” moment. In the documentary, novelist/screenwriter Budd Schulberg said Louis B. Mayer (head of MGM) regularly screened films for an official at the German consulate and cut what he objected to. Galvanized by the possibility that Hollywood moguls might have cooperated with the Nazis, Mr. Urwand spent the next nine years researching the topic with a zealot’s energy. The result is something of a film historian’s nightmare.
Scholars have long been aware that Hollywood tried to keep a grip on lucrative foreign markets and, for that matter, to avoid offending domestic audiences. Changing movies in deference to parochial concerns was common practice. In 1915, the villain of “The Cheat” (played by the Japanese Sessue Hayakawa) was “a rich Oriental.” In the 1923 remake, he had become “a fake Hindu prince.” By the 1931 version, he was “a man who had just returned from the Orient.” In the 1940s and ’50s, Lena Horne’s musical numbers were cut from films released in the South, and Frank Capra was warned that “It’s a Wonderful Life” should delete the use of the Lord’s Prayer. (“Obtain a suitable prayer or it will be necessary to shoot an alternate scene for Great Britain.”)
In other words, there’s no news here. Mr. Urwand’s outrage seems to be a bit like that of Claude Rains in “Casablanca,” when he is “shocked, shocked” to find gambling going on at Rick’s Café Americain.
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The Collaboration
By Ben Urwand
(Harvard, 327 pages. $26.95)
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Writing about years in which Hollywood released hundreds of films, Mr. Urwand details only a small number to make his case. He doesn’t fully cover anti-fascist movies such as “Black Legion” (1936), ignores pro-democratic movie subtexts in films like “The Adventures of Robin Hood” (1938) and interprets a scene in “The House of Rothschild” (1934) as anti-Semitic because it shows a Jewish family hiding wealth from tax collectors. (In fact, many saw “Rothschild” as a sympathetic portrait of a wise patriarch.)
Mr. Urwand builds one of his cases around the 1933 script for “The Mad Dog of Europe.” Written by Herman Mankiewicz, the story strongly criticized Hitler. The project wasn’t attached to a particular studio, but the Production code office (under the leadership of Joseph Breen) warned moguls that they could be accused of making such a movie for their own propaganda purposes. The film was never made, although in 1940, when Hollywood had a different sense of Hitler, one with a very similar plot (“The Mortal Storm”) was released by MGM.
Mr. Urwand’s detailed research includes German documents and relies partly on information about Georg Gyssling, the vice consul in charge of the German Consulate in Los Angeles and undoubtedly the man Schulberg was referring to when he described Mayer’s discussions. Gyssling was known to be Hitler’s eyes and ears. He badgered studios constantly about any anti-German content he found on their production rosters and wrote threatening letters warning of boycotts. Mr. Urwand presents Gyssling as a real discovery, but scholars had made note of him earlier, as in Gerald Gardner’s 1987 “The Censorship Papers: Movie Censorship Letters From the Hays Office, 1934 to 1968.”
A book published earlier this year, “Hollywood and Hitler” by Brandeis professor Thomas Doherty, covers much of the same territory as Mr. Urwand. Mr. Doherty fully understands the studio system and how it juggled interference from its own internal agency, the Production Code Administration. He doesn’t deny the greed and fear that motivated studios, but he puts behavior in context, explaining how the vague Code guideline, which called for “all nations” to be treated “fairly,” was used for business convenience. Mr. Doherty calls Gyssling “Hitler’s man in Hollywood” but believes that studio heads were involved in day-to-day negotiations that weren’t collaborations but rather attempts to make a buck. It wasn’t admirable or courageous, but it didn’t make them Hitler’s pals.
Mr. Urwand’s book has little wit or style. There’s a welcome respite when he shares his research on Hitler’s love of American movies, including the revelation of his childlike rating system. Hitler had “good,” “very good,” “very nice and thrilling,” or “excellent” on one side, and “bad,” “very bad,” “particularly bad,” or “extraordinarily bad” on the other. A movie could also be listed as “switched off by order of the Führer,” an ominous review. (The news that Goebbels gave Hitler a set of Mickey Mouse cartoons one Christmas conjures a mind-boggling image of the Führer sitting by the holiday tree watching “Mickey’s Fire Brigade.”) But for the most part the author grinds forward.
Mr. Urwand’s book clamors for attention and makes sensation out of facts that film historians have already weighed. He has judged the past from the informed awareness of the present, elevating the bad judgment and greed of individuals into actual political collaboration. His book does not prove it.
Ms. Basinger is chairwoman of the department of film studies at Wesleyan University and the author, most recently, of “I Do and I Don’t: A History of Marriage in the Movies.”
A version of this article appeared September 17, 2013, on page A15 in the U.S. edition of The Wall Street Journal, with the headline: They Weren’t Following Orders.
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