Hollywood and the Nazis on the Eve of War

This book establishes the global cultural and political significance of MGM's 1940 film The Mortal Storm. A watershed cultural event, The Mortal Storm played a significant role in the raucous political debate over American intervention vs. isolationism between 1938 and 1941. Based on Phyllis Bottome's 1938 blockbuster anti-Nazi novel, the film adaptation triggered the first hostile Congressional investigation of Hollywood for ostensibly propagandizing for war.

Hollywood and the Nazis on the Eve of War exposes the anti-Semitism that underwrote Congressional antipathy to the film industry. Integrating detailed accounts of this fraught political context into the struggles to make the film, this book resets our understanding of Hollywood's complicated responses to the global threat of Nazism. Analysis of newly discovered archival documents and successive drafts of the film's scripts reveals a little known but transformative Hollywood story. The contested process of producing The Mortal Storm turns out to be shaped by Hollywood's anxieties about representing the fate of Europe's imperiled Jews. A historical saga in its own right, the struggle to name the Jew as Hitler's primary victim is revelatory in American film history of the late 1930s.

Set among other anti-Nazi films of the period, the story of this extraordinary struggle illuminates the fears, hostility, and heroic efforts of everyone involved in making The Mortal Storm, including MGM mogul Louis B. Mayer, producers and directors Sidney Franklin, Frank Borzage, and Victor Saville, the unstinting efforts of author Phyllis Bottome, actor Jimmy Stewart, and introducing screenwriter Claudine West who fought for the inclusion of the Jew.