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 Drawing on a wide range of published and unpublished source material, Pogorelskin, professor emerita of history at the University of Minnesota, traces the contributions of most of the key personnel involved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.”