By Tom Ryan
CINEMA
Hollywood and the Nazis on the Eve of War: The Case of The Mortal Storm
Alexis Pogorelskin
Bloomsbury, $190
From the vantage point of 2024, it might be difficult to fully appreciate the controversy that accompanied the release in 1940 of MGM’s adaptation of British novelist Phyllis Bottome’s The Mortal Storm.
Set in 1933, the film is a romantic melodrama starring James Stewart and Margaret Sullavan. But it’s also much more than that: the romance develops alongside the consequences of Hitler’s coming to power for a small university town in southern Germany, and the rise of a nationalist fervour fuelled by his promise to make Germany great again.
Margaret Sullavan, Thomas W. Ross and James Stewart in The Mortal Storm.Credit: FilmPublicityArchive/United Archives via Getty Images
Alexis Pogorelskin’s painstakingly researched book provides an insightful background to what all the fuss was about. Noting that, by 1941, The Mortal Storm was still “the only [American] feature film devoted to the plight of Europe’s Jews”, she proposes that the primary source of the noise was the antisemitism that drove much of the resistance to the US entry into World War II.
In the same year, America First, a national organisation committed to isolationism, protectionism and US nationalism, called for a boycott of the film because it “showed Nazis terrorizing a Jewish scientist”. In the first of several scenes to which America First was referring, a physiology professor (Frank Morgan) summons science to support his resistance to the idea that “non-Aryan” blood is any different from anybody else’s, only to be howled down by the Nazi supporters in his class, who’ve been emboldened by Hitler’s election.
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Pogorelskin points out that MGM, under the leadership of mogul Louis B. Mayer, had been greatly troubled from the start by the script’s identification of the professor as Jewish. As a result, over the protests of Bottome and screenwriter Claudine West, the character was referred to only as “non-Aryan” – which he remains until his disappearance into a concentration camp. Pogorelskin cites a letter Bottome wrote to a colleague in which she accuses Mayer and the other Jewish moguls in Hollywood of being “too timid to present their [own] case”.
Essentially, Hollywood and the Nazis on the Eve of War tells two overlapping stories. One tracks the route of the film from page to screen. Drawing on a wide range of published and unpublished source material, Pogorelskin, professor emerita of history at the University of Minnesota, traces the contributions of most of the key personnel involved (except, curiously, director Frank Borzage). She also outlines the various modifications made to the film because it was viewed as propaganda on behalf of those who believed that the US should involve itself in the hostilities taking place across the Atlantic.
Especially illuminating is her tracing of the influences on the shaping of the original novel. For Bottome, she explains, a key model was the American author and abolitionist Harriet Beecher Stowe. “In her plot and characters,” Pogorelskin writes, “she took inspiration from Stowe, hoping that The Mortal Storm would prove as influential in denouncing antisemitism as Uncle Tom’s Cabin had in denouncing slavery.”
At the same time, Bottome found herself having to deal with demands for two different versions of her book. First published in Britain in 1937, it only appeared three years later in the US, where its references to communism and its critique of American capitalism were softened and the role of its leading female character was expanded with an eye on a sale to Hollywood, where “particularly at MGM, feature films tended to be vehicles for female stars”.
The poster for The Mortal Storm.Credit: LMPC via Getty Images
The other thread running through Pogorelskin’s book examines how The Mortal Storm became a political football in the debate between isolationists and interventionists, exploring their sometimes complex motivations. She proposes that the attack by the US Senate’s isolationist-backed Interstate Commerce Commission on the Hollywood studios was significantly motivated by The Mortal Storm and served as a precursor for the notorious House Un-American Activities Committee a few years later.
However, she notes only in passing the similarities between what was happening in the US in the 1940s and what’s occurring now, there and elsewhere, with the rise of antisemitism, the similarities between America First and the MAGA movement, the disavowal of science by the fake-news brigade and the verbal thuggery of prominent public figures.
She also makes a strong case for how Hollywood studios were generally tiptoeing around in their treatment of the looming Nazi danger. Not wishing to kill the goose that lays the golden egg by alienating part of its audience, they effectively vetoed war movies, only a handful being made in the years preceding the US entry into the war. But, at the same time – and especially in light of the pending antitrust lawsuit against their way of doing business – they didn’t want to damage their relationship with the Roosevelt administration, whose anti-fascist agenda was steering the country towards intervention.
It’s here, in the place that The Mortal Storm occupied in the political terrain of the 1940s, and in the way in which America was contemplating Hitler and Nazism, that Pogorelskin’s chief interest lies. It’s in desperate need of a decent edit – the prose is sometimes laborious, there are annoying misspellings and inadvertent repetitions – but hers is an important book crammed with fascinating information.
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