TELEVISION*
Fleeing Hitler for
a
haven in Hollywood
By DAVE SHIFLETT
BLOOMBERG NEWS
For Adolf Hitler, perhaps the only thing worse than a Jew was a Jew with a camera.
Hitler banned Jews from Germany’s thriving film industry soon after becoming chancellor in 1933, a sad story
with a silver lining told in Cinema’s exiles:
From Hitler to Hollywood which airs at 8 p.m. Saturday on KERA-TV (Channel 13).
Some 800 mostly Jewish exiles (actors, writers, directors, composers, set designers, and camera operators) made their
way to the U.S. during the next six years, eventually helping create films that earned 150 Oscar nominations and 20 Academy
Awards.
The two-hour special, narrated by Sigourney Weaver, brims with legends such as actors Peter Lorre, Hedy Lamarr and
Felix Bressart directors Billy Wilder, Fritz Lang and Henry Koster; and composers Frederick Hollander, Franz Waxman and Erich
Wolfgang Korngold.
There are also plenty of clips of the Fuhrer and his henchmen, at least
one of which, propaganda chief Joseph Goebbels, had a soft spot for films made by Jews.
The program starts with an overview of pre-Nazi Berlin, where Jews made up 5 percent of the population (compared with
1 percent overall in Germany) and a large part of an innovative film industry that produced such classics as The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, Metropolis and The Blue Angel.
One of the highlights of the PBS show is 28-year-old Marlene Dietrich’s screen test for The Blue Angel. She hops on a piano, striking a jarring chord as
she steps on the keyboard, the hikes her stockings and does a bit of warbling. One
suspects that her legs played a key role in landing the gig as Lola Lola, the cabaret girl.
She was one of the early émigrés, leaving for the U.S. on April 1, 1930, the night the film premiered in Berlin. She lager teamed with director Ernst Lubitsch to create an underground railroad for
refuge artists, many of whom initially headed for Paris and other points in Europe before finally streaming to America.
“We were changing countries more often than our shoes,” playwright Bertolt Brecht says.
Exiles took work wherever they could find it, including Westerns and horror movies, such as The Bride of Frankenstein [1936] and The Wolf Man [1941].
The American film industry didn’t initially show a united front against Hitler.
Warner Bros. stopped distributing films in Germany in 1935, but Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer and Paramount didn’t follow
suit until 1940. During the 1930s, MGM and Paramount even removed Jewish credits
to appease German censors, Weaver says.
Once Hollywood entered the war, it did so with both barrels blazing, producing about 160 anti-Nazi movies, including
To Be or Not to Be [1942], Confessions of
a Nazi Spy [1939], and, most notably, Casablanca, which won the Oscar for best
film in 1943. Exiles worked, in some capacity, on about a third of these films.
Life in America wasn’t easy, though. Most exiles didn’t succeed
in the industry, and those who did had to struggle.
“This golden Hollywood is a hell for some,” Hollander says. “I
never fought so hard.”
*The Dallas Morning News;
Friday, January 2, 2009; page 7E.
