Daniel
Ankar's Imaginary Witness: Hollywood & the Holocaust
by Jay Blotcher
...offers
a startling timeline of denial. It began in early 20th-century
America. Eager to generate box-office hits by appealing to
American (read: WASP) values, Jewish studio executives and
actors agreed to obscure their religious background in the
industry, and steer clear of broaching the subject in films,
save for parading the occasional Eastern European stereotype.
This sentiment would metastasize by the late 30s and early
40s, when studio heads had a great stake in distributing hit
films to Germany. Why offend this booming market with potshots
at the fledgling brownshirts? The result was a hands-off policy
regarding Jewishthemed screenplays, much less any delving
into the storm brewing overseas. A 1938 Warner Brothers film
called Confessions of a Nazi Spy was a lone voice in the cinematic
wilderness.
If
there was any mention of the high-pitched, goose-stepping
martinet with the Chaplin mustache, now the Fatherland’s
Chancellor, it was made within the safety of Warner Brothers
cartoons. (Yep, that’s Daffy Duck giving a ridiculous
“Seig Heil.”) That is, until Chaplin himself stood
up, foreseeing the dire ramifications of 1938’s Kristallnacht
for German Jews. He wrote, produced, directed and starred
in a vehicle—half-satire, half-drama—that sought
to warn the world of Hitler. The Great Dictator, now a classic,
was decried when it first was screened in 1940 and even mistaken
by dunderheads as pro-Nazi.
Imaginary
Witness explains, but does not excuse, why honest, unsparing,
award-laden Holocaust classics like Schindler’s List
(1993) and The Pianist (2002)—notably, both filmed decades
after Hitler’s reign had ended—remain the exception
to American cinema. Directors Sidney Lumet, Steven Spielberg
and Vincent Sherman, as well as actor Rod Steiger (who starred
in Lumet’s wrenching 1965 film The Pawnbroker)...
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