(PDF) (DOC) (JPG)January 27, 2014

(MAHWAH, NJ)  – His recently published book, Hollywood and Hitler, 1933-1939 (Columbia Press University, 2013), was the topic of a talk given by Brandeis University Professor Thomas Doherty on October 15 cosponsored by the Gross Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies and the Communications major’s Cinematheque Series. The program included clips from a number of relevant films, including several that had only recently been rediscovered.

At least until the outbreak of war in 1939, as Doherty pointed out, with the exception of Warner Brothers, the predominant attitude in Hollywood towards fascism was essentially one of denial and pragmatism. There was a belief that movie-going audiences would be turned off by politics. As Joseph I. Breen, the industry’s all-powerful lead censor put it:  “The purpose of the screen is to entertain and not to propagandize.” The studios had to contend, as well, with the German consul in Los Angeles, Georg Gyssling, the U.S. State Department and Breen, who instilled the fear that offending the Third Reich would lead to exclusion from the hitherto lucrative German market. As Doherty pointed out, the studios’ treatment of the Spanish Civil War and of fascist Italy was no less timid.

Doherty emphasized that at the same time the movie capital was also home to the Hollywood Anti-Nazi League (HANL).  One of the only organizations in the U.S. to confront the fascist threat, it included among its members such A-list  actors, directors and screen writers as Dorothy Parker, Dashiell Hammett, Ernst Lubitsch, Mervyn LeRoy, Sylvia Sidney, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Chico Marx, Benny Goodman, Fred MacMurray, Frederic March, Oscar Hammerstein II, and Eddie Cantor. The HANL alarmed studio heads to the point that they threatened to insert “political clauses” into their contracts forbidding such activity.

A cultural historian with a special interest in Hollywood cinema, Thomas Doherty is a professor of American Studies and chair of the American Studies Program at Brandeis University.  He is an associate editor for the film magazine Cineaste and film review editor for the Journal of American History. He completed his undergraduate education at Gonzaga University and has M.A. and Ph.D. degrees from the University of Iowa.

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