Hitler Banned Jewish Filmmakers, Who Struck Back By Dave Shiflett (Bloomberg) – For Adolf Hitler, perhaps the only thing worse than a Jew was a Jew with a camera. Hitler banned Jews from Germany’s world-renowned 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 Jan. 1 on PBS at 9:30 p.m. New York time. Some 800 mostly-Jewish exiles, including actors, writers, directors, composers, set designers and camera operators made their way to the U.S. over the next six years, eventually helping create films earning 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 photogenic Fuhrer and his henchmen, at least one of whom – Joseph Goebbels -- had a soft spot for films made by Jews. The film starts with an overview of pre-Nazi Berlin. While 1 percent of the German population was Jewish, Weaver says, Jews made up around 5 percent of Berlin’s inhabitants. Many were part of the film industry, which produced innovative classics such as “The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari,” “Metropolis,” and “The Blue Angel.” In one of many segments featuring archived film, we see 28-year-old Marlene Dietrich’s “Blue Angel” screen test. She hops up on piano, sounding a jarring chord as she steps on the keyboard, then hikes her stockings and does a bit of warbling. One suspects her legs played a key role in landing the gig as Lola-Lola, the cabaret girl. She beat the exodus, departing for the U.S. on April 1, 1930, the night the film premiered in Berlin, yet would later team up with director Ernst Lubitsch to create an “underground railroad” for artistic exiles, many of whom initially headed for Paris and other points in Europe before finally steaming to America. “We were changing countries more often than our shoes,” Bertolt Brecht said. Exiles took work wherever they could find it, including westerns and horror movies such as “The Bride of Frankenstein”, “The Wolfman” -- an allegory of how Hitler seduced Germany – and “The Adventures of Robin Hood,” a movie about courage in the face of evil, Weaver says. Yet the American film industry did not initially show a united front against Hitler. While Warner Brothers stopped distributing films in Germany in 1935, Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer and Paramount didn’t stop until 1940, removing Jewish credits to appease German censors, Weaver adds. Once Hollywood entered the war, it did so with both barrels blazing, producing some 160 anti-Nazi movies including “To Be Or Not To Be,” “Confessions of a Nazi Spy” and, most notably, “Casablanca,” which won the Academy Award for Best Film in 1943. Exiles worked, in some capacity, on about a third of these films. Life in America was not easy. Most exiles did not succeed in the industry, and those who did had to struggle. “This golden Hollywood is a hell for some,” said composer Frederick Hollander. “I never fought so hard.” The show includes interesting asides. Soon after Hitler’s ascension propaganda chief Joseph Goebbels was asked to name some films he admired. Of the dozen named, 11 had been made by Jews. The first Cannes film festival, in 1939, screened only one film -- “The Hunchback of Notre Dame” -- before being cancelled due to Germany’s invasion of Poland. Hedy Lamarr disguised herself as a maid during her escape from Vienna in 1937. While America offered opportunity, émigrés did not totally escape the horrors, nor did they lose a longing for their home country. Billy Wilder, who came to the U.S. in 1934, was hired to film the horrors of the death camps. He lost three-quarters of his relatives, including his mother, in Auschwitz, according to the program. “It wasn’t my idea to leave,” Wilder says in an archived interview. “It was Hitler’s.” (Dave Shiflett is a critic for Bloomberg News. The opinions expressed are his own.)
