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(Events leading up to September 1939)
With war in Spain having butchered a million people in the last year, it is becoming increasingly difficult to get romance into musicals with a war setting.
Variety
28 July 1937
By the mid 1930s the Hollywood studio system had reached the apogee of its glory. The American film industry had established a pattern of production which enabled it not only to weather the worst of the Depression but to thrive during those difficult years. Executives were fired and stars changed partners with frenetic abandon; writers wondered why none of their dialogue was ever spoken in the pictures they were working on and directors bemoaned the witless idiocies of the scripts that the studioâs delivery vans tossed on their front doorsteps. Through it all movies were written, produced, directed, edited, distributed and exhibited to the satisfaction of the film companies, their shareholders and their customers.
It was a devastatingly effective form of imperialism. Trade might have followed the flag in classic nineteenth-century imperialism but in the 1930s American influence spread abroad in the wake of Gableâs rough grin and Garboâs mirthless laugh. Coca-Cola, at a later date was just as economically aggressive but it left no imprint on the mind or soul as did Shirley Temple and Gary Cooper. American manners, American aspirations and, less fortunately, American speech patterns and syntax became comfortingly familiar to the countless millions of moviegoers.
The huge overseas market was, in the normal course of events, the area where the film companies picked up their profits as production costs were traditionally recovered by the North American rentals. High studio overheads, however, which, in the case of MGM, Paramount and Fox included the maintenance of large numbers of cinemas as well as the huge salaries of stars, producers and top executives, meant that European sales were particularly crucial to the continuing financial success of the studio system. Garboâs sound films were nearly all financial liabilities in the domestic market and, by the mid 1930s the profitability of her films rested almost entirely on their performance in Europe.
At the same time foreign countries were developing a sensitivity to Hollywood caricature that forced the studios unwillingly into the uncertain world of international diplomacy. When Josef von Sternbergâs The Devil is a Woman (1935) depicted a member of the Spanish Civil Guard as being drunk, the Spanish government instantly demanded an apology. The Hays Office, which was ceremonially wheeled out for such occasions, offered to mediate between the Spanish authorities and the offending company (Paramount) but the former insisted that the matter was a political one and could only be dealt with by a fully accredited representative of the State Department. The Hollywood Reporter revealed
It is admitted that today, due to the political situation throughout Europe, censorship on pictures touching on topics considered dangerous to those in power is tougher than ever. The picture companies are through with their former stand, âWeâll make it anywayâ. They will now listen to foreign departments whose business it is to keep closely in touch with problems confronting the sales departments abroad.1
It has long been accepted in Hollywood that certain countries had particular quirks. Japan slashed every scene in which there was kissing and in 1937 informed the American film industry that the country took great exception to a movie which explicitly showed a policeman unashamedly eating a banana in full view of the public. England disliked the use of the word âbumâ to mean âtrampâ and the British Government thoughtfully provided RKO with a âtechnical adviserâ to ensure that Gunga Din (1939) did not run contrary to official colonial policy. The Bitter Tea of General Yen was one of the few films Frank Capra ever made which was not a commercial success â a fact that can be attributed almost entirely to its being banned in the British Empire because of its treatment of the delicate subject of miscegenation. Egypt once deleted a sequence showing an escape from an orphanage on the grounds that âit set a bad example for schoolgirlsâ. These oddities, however, were all tolerated with reasonable good humour because they did not trouble the studios too greatly.
The uncertain political situation in Europe in the late 1930s was quite another story. Mussoliniâs motion picture bureau banned The Charge of the Light Brigade, Lives of a Bengal Lancer, Lloyds of London and Clive of India on the grounds that they contained âBritish propagandaâ. Ironically, Hollywood producers, dedicated as they were to the unalloyed pursuit of âentertainmentâ, had succeeded in driving out of the movies almost any considered political thought whatsoever. To have their escapist fantasies criticised as propaganda was most upsetting simply because the charges, even if untrue, were impossible to challenge. The fascist dictatorships simply refused to judge the Hollywood pictures on the same basis as their producers.
As the territory under the jurisdiction of the dictators grew ever larger, the financial profitability of Hollywood movies lessened proportionately. After the Anschluss, Nazi-occupied Austria impounded the money still remaining there from the proceeds of American film rentals. Hollywood studios had learned very quickly that the masters of the New Germany found their product to be infinitely resistable. Foxâs picture My Weakness (1933) was banned because the censor, appropriately enough, thought the lace panties on the girls would contaminate the national morality. Country Doctor (1936), the epic Twentieth Century-Fox dramatisation of the birth of the Dionne quins, bit the dust when Jean Hersholt was denied Aryan status. The studio produced every shred of evidence it could find to prove that Jean Hersholt was not then, nor had he ever been, a member of the Chosen People, but it was to no avail and the ban remained in force. The ultimate idiocy came in 1936 when, on the explicit orders of Hitler, the films of Mae West, Johnny Weissmuller, Francis Lederer, Fred Astaire, Ginger Rogers, Warner Oland and George Arliss were prohibited from exhibition in Germany. Weissmuller was Jewish, Lederer was Czech, Arliss had specialised in the portrayal of historical characters with Jewish overtones (Rothschild, Shylock and Disraeli) and Warner Oland had been responsible for that fiendish Oriental Untermensch Charlie Chan, but the connection of Mae West, and more particularly, Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers, with anything remotely kosher was never revealed. The only remaining conclusion is that a man who so revered Wagner was incapable of appreciating the finer delights of Top Hat and Swing Time and rather than risk admitting his own cultural philistinism, he simply decreed that no German worthy of the name should have the chance of sampling those aesthetic delights so cruelly denied to him.
However reluctantly, Hollywood was dragged by force of circumstances into the murky realms of American foreign policy. The mood of the film industry throughout the 1930s, like the mood of the country in general and that of Congress in particular, was overwhelmingly isolationist. The division between âisolationistsâ and âinternationalistsâ cut across traditional political groupings, although the internationalists were normally Democrats who lived in the larger cities. The centre of isolationism was, as ever, in the rural Mid-West.
The cause of the internationalists had been struck a violent blow in 1919 when the Senate refused to ratify the Treaty of Versailles which called for the establishment of the League of Nations. The isolationism of successive Republican administrations in the 1920s was succeeded by Rooseveltâs early leaning towards economic nationalism. Roosevelt knew perfectly well that co-operation with the decadent powers of Europe was not going to be a sound basis for a popular foreign policy in the 1930s. Everybody was aware that most of the European countries had defaulted on their war loans and popular mythology also held them responsible for nurturing the germs of the economic contagion which swept over the New World after the Wall Street crash.
Additionally, the pro-European internationalist cause was handicapped by the much publicised findings of a Congressional investigation into the profits and influence of the munitions industry. The chairman, Gerald P. Nye, one of the leaders of the isolationist movement, concluded that the munitions makers, in an unholy alliance with international bankers and businessmen, had been responsible for the entry of the United States into the First World War. His demand, fortified by popular support, that profit be somehow removed from the propagation of war, resulted in Congress passing the Pittman Neutrality Resolution in August 1935, by which the export of munitions from the United States was prohibited, as was the shipment of arms on American vessels to foreign belligerents. There was no doubt that the isolationists had reduced the risk of America becoming involved in an international war. They had also, unfortunately, given palpable encouragement to the aggressor nations of the world to become increasingly more aggressive.
Specific acts of aggression served only to strengthen isolationist tendencies. When Italy invaded Abyssinia Roosevelt, with one eye on the 1936 Presidential election, asked only for a moral embargo of shipments to Mussoliniâs forces. In fact, after the invasion American trade with Italian Africa increased nearly twentyfold. A public opinion poll taken in November 1935 which examined the desirability of the United States becoming involved in a foreign war for whatever idealistic purposes found that 67 per cent wanted no part of it and only 28 per cent were in favour of taking a positive stand against aggressor nations. Even then two thirds of the latter preferred economic sanctions to any form of military participation.
The invasion of Abyssinia, morally shocking though it undoubtedly was, had no very lasting effect on the conduct of Americans either in Washington or Hollywood. After all, film rentals from Abyssinia were low and the size of the Abyssinian vote in American politics was negligible. The treatment by the Nazis of the Jewish population under their control was a very different matter. Pressure was exerted on Washington by the American Jewish Committee, the American Jewish Congress and the B'nai Brith, while the Jewish vote was just starting to make its presence felt within the Roosevelt coalition of ethnic groups. When the Germans demanded apologies for all anti-Nazi Statements made by Jews and pro-Jewish sympathisers in America, the US government tried desperately to ensure that all such comments were unofficial. If, as A.J.P. Taylor suggests, appeasement in Britain was the result of a morally justifiable, carefully conceived policy, in America it was a mixture of wanton disregard of human suffering and spineless submission to the political strength of the isolationists.
The advent of the Spanish Civil War persuaded Hollywood to dip its little toe into the icy waters of foreign affairs. After all, it could hardly be avoided, even in darkest Peoria, Illinois. The faces of homeless refugees and helpless orphans stared out from the pages of the daily newspapers, the weekly news magazines and the newsreel screens. Documentaries made by Loyalist sympathisers such as Ernest Hemingway, Lilian Hellman and Joris Ivens were the first motion picture representations. The Spanish ABC, The Spanish Earth and Spain in Flames quickly fell foul of official wrath. Spain in Flames was banned in Ohio and Pennsylvania and was denounced by the Governor of the latter as âpure Communistic propaganda dressed up as a plea for democracyâ. Obviously they couldnât fool him that easily.2
In the ranks of the feature film Paramountâs The Last Train from Madrid (1937) had the dubious distinction of being the first Hollywood production to grapple with the complex moral and political issues of the war. Just so that nobody could accuse them of being political propagandists the studio savants took care to add certain âentertainmentâ values which involved turning the film into a sort of Grand Hotel on wheels. The New York Times pointed out that Paramountâs Spain, racked though it was by a civil war of unparalleled horror, bore a strong resemblance to MGMâs Ruritania and Selznickâs Zenda.3
Perhaps it was not surprising that The Last Train from Madrid should have been the first film whose story had satisfied the Hays Office. Anything slightly more adventurous got short shrift from the industryâs self-censorship body whose fear of public displeasure approached raging paranoia. Twentieth Century-Fox halted preparation on another Spanish Civil War story called Alcazar because of âprotestsâ and Universalâs Delay in the Sun was postponed indefinitely.
In 1937 Walter Wanger was an independent producer who, as a graduate of Dartmouth College, prided himself on being an intellectual cut above the stereotype of the boorish Hollywood producer. When he first broached the idea of a Spanish Civil War picture to the Hays Office, Joe Breen, the head of the Production Code Authority in Hollywood replied baldly, that any material âinvolved with or played againstâ such a background was, in his opinion, âhighly dangerousâ.
Nevertheless, the intrepid Wanger set out to chart the unknown depths of Hollywoodâs political nature. His first expedition acquired the distinguished services of Lewis Milestone and Clifford Odets. They, fired by the prospect of doing something excitingly different instantly set to work adapting the Ilya Ehrenburg book T...
