Over there, over here
Ticket Stubs #16: Three groundbreaking but largely forgotten films about the Holocaust.
Ticket Stubs is a movie column reviewing new and not-so-new releases, Hollywood classics, nostalgic trash, and more obscure cinematic fare. This is Ticket Stubs #16.
Today is Holocaust Memorial Day and to mark the commemoration, I review three films that were among the very first to acknowledge or depict the Shoah. The remarkable None Shall Escape (1944) was made while the war was ongoing but forecast the defeat of Nazi Germany and the arraignment of its senior officers and bureaucrats before an international war crimes tribunal. The Stranger (1946), directed by Orson Welles, was the first Hollywood movie to feature documentary footage from the extermination camps. Finally, and most chilling of all, is Theresienstadt: A Documentary Film from the Jewish Settlement Area (1945), which was produced by the Nazis themselves in an effort to make their treatment of the Jews appear humane.
.השם יקום דמם
None Shall Escape
André De Toth, 1944
Among the earliest Hollywood movies to depict the Holocaust, None Shall Escape is a curiosity: written, produced and released during the war, it predicts an Allied victory followed by an international tribunal to try senior Nazis for war crimes and crimes against humanity.
Hungarian director André De Toth was best known as a director of westerns (Day of the Outlaw, Thunder Over the Plains, Riding Shotgun) and for his 1953 horror B-movie House of Wax, but he turns his hand to courtroom drama with this fictional trial of Reichskommissar Wilhelm Grimm (Alexander Knox), a nobody who became a somebody by rising through the ranks of the Nazi Party and returns as the vengeful overlord of a Polish village where he believes he was wronged between the wars.
The movie is largely forgotten but Grimm — nice touch on the name, by the way — is easily one of the cruellest, most sadistic Nazis ever to make it to the silver screen. He’s a murderer, a rapist, an extortionist, a book-burner, a snob, and a misogynist. He sends his own brother to a concentration camp, pimps out his ex-fiancee’s daughter to his oversexed officers, and shoots one of his men in the back — inside a church, no less. He’s so depraved he could actually lower the reputation of national socialism.
Grimm’s biography is related through witness testimony to the war crimes tribunal, including evidence from Catholic priest Father Warecki (Henry Travers), Grimm’s former fiancee Marja Pacierkowski (Marsha Hunt), and his brother Karl (Erik Rolf). He is an unfulfilled schoolmaster in the German village of Lidzbark who goes off to fight in the Great War, loses a leg, and returns to his hometown now under Polish sovereignty. He regards the Poles as peasants, scares off his fiancee Marja with his jingoism, and rapes a local girl to prove he’s good enough for a Polish woman. He later flees to Germany, joins the fledgling NSDAP, and turns in his socialist brother to the Gestapo. Following the outbreak of the Second World War, he returns to Lidzbark, now under German occupation, as viceroy of western Poland, accompanied by his nephew Willi (Billy Dawson). There he visits petty cruelties and great outrages on the local populace, in particular the Jews, and earns himself a place in the dock of the tribunal.
De Toth veers too often into melodrama but he is capable of scenes of sudden and sobering intensity. When Grimm begins deporting Jews to concentration camps, the local rabbi (Richard Hale) pleads to address his people one last time before the train departs and uses the moment to urge the doomed men and women to fight back. As the captives flee the train cars, Grimm orders his men to open fire until the station is littered with bullet-riddled bodies which his car unceremoniously drives over as he departs. The abrupt shift from sentiment to cold detachment is mildly harrowing.
The Nazis were adept propagandists and particularly so in their exploitation of the mass visual medium of the day to spread their message. De Toth nudges us to consider how easily film can be manipulated and how easily it can manipulate us with a scene in which Grimm’s goons round up the residents of Lidzbark, marshal them into a breadline, and order them to smile for the film camera brought along to document the benevolence of their Nazi captors. (They are warned their names and addresses will be noted if they fail to grin enthusiastically enough.) Barely are the necessary shots in the can than the serving cart is snatched away and the starving locals kept at bay by the German brutes.
Columbia Pictures marketed the movie on its peacetime setting and lobby cards hailed it ‘the most prophetic picture of our time — the blueprint for post-war trial of war criminals’. This prescriptive tone might land awkwardly on modern ears but it echoes the political commitment of many on-screen and behind the scenes. None Shall Escape is a fiercely and ideologically anti-fascist film and a number of those involved in the production were leftists and even communists. Screenwriter Lester Cole, a card-carrying member of the Communist Party, would later become one of the Hollywood Ten blacklisted for refusing to answer questions before the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC). Marsha Hunt was also blacklisted and although she was involved in the Hollywood Independent Citizens Committee of the Arts, Sciences and Professions (HICCASP), it was never established that she was a member of the Communist Party. (A few years ago, I wrote about Olivia de Havilland and Ronald Reagan’s unsuccessful bid to wrestle HICCASP from pro-Soviet control.) Canadian Alexander Knox, while not a Communist and never blacklisted, reportedly lost work over his left-wing views and opposition to HUAC.
None Shall Escape is one of the fieriest anti-fascist polemics ever to come out of Hollywood and its urgent exposé of the Holocaust as it was happening has the torrid immediacy of journalism. It is a punchy first draft of a monstrous history.
The Stranger
Orson Welles, 1946
Every movie is two movies: the movie the director set out to make and the movie he was allowed to make.
We watch the latter but there are sometimes glimpses of the former, in an awkward edit, a plot point that doesn’t quite fit, a shot lingered on a beat too long, haunted by a deeper meaning lost to the editing bay floor.
The Stranger is two movies. The first is a taut, noirish thriller about a Nazi-hunter on the trail of an escaped war criminal who comes to suspect a genial New England schoolmaster. The second is a post-war polemic on the ongoing threat of fascism and how it can insinuate itself, unnoticed at first, into even the most charming New England towns with the most genial schoolmasters. Director, (uncredited) writer, and star Orson Welles wanted to disturb the American complacency that fascism was a European barbarism, as far politically and morally from the American ethic as it was geographically from the American homeland. The Stranger is not a film that says it could happen here; it’s a film that says it is already here, waiting to happen.
The movie opens with the springing from prison of Konrad Meinike (Konstantin Shayne), a squirrelly Nazi war criminal who flees to the United States in search of Charles Rankin (Orson Welles), the alias of Franz Kindler, a notorious Third Reich officer who has set himself up in fictional Harper, Connecticut as a boarding school teacher and fiancé to Mary Longstreet (Loretta Young), daughter of a liberal Supreme Court justice. Canny old kraut he is, immunising himself from suspicion by marrying into the Yankee elite — and repairing the town clock in his spare time.
But Meinike didn’t merely escape detention; he was released on the orders of Mr. Wilson, an investigator with the United Nations War Crimes Commission played by Edward G. Robinson and only occasionally visible from behind a haze of pipe-smoke chugging forth from an ever-present briar. Wilson figures that Meinike will go to Kindler and he stalks the German in a series of moody, tense scenes as suspenseful as anything out of Hitchcock, all the way to Kindler’s new life in the picture postcard Harper. While Meinike has repented and become a Christian, Kindler remains a devout Nazi and longs for the day when the Germans regroup and resume battle against the Allies.
Once he figures out that Rankin is Kindler, Wilson begins building his case as an increasingly desperate Kindler goes to extreme lengths, including murder, to conceal his identity. Much of the tension comes from this cat-and-mouse set-up and from Mary’s gradual, screw-tightening realisation that her new husband isn’t who he says he is. She is underwriter of Kindler’s position in the community and as long as she remains loyal, the harder it will be to convince the rest of the town of the truth about him.
Somehow Wilson must convince her to break with her husband, shock open her innocent American eyes to the horrors of fascism, and so in the final act she is ushered into a room with a projector and a film reel already set up. The Stranger has largely been forgotten, even by Welles devotees, but here is where the movie enters the Hollywood history books: the reel contains brief clips of the mass graves discovered by the liberators of the death camps. Welles’s was the first American movie to feature documentary images of the Nazi atrocities against the Jews. Jack D. Grant of The Hollywood Reporter deemed the inclusion of the footage ‘inspired’.
Welles made The Stranger at a low point in his career, following a string of commercial failures and unrealised projects, and was obliged by producer Sam Spiegel to agree to cover the costs personally if he ran over schedule or budget. (In the event, he wrapped principal photography on time and under dollar.) These constraints make it all the more impressive that production designer Perry Ferguson built the town of Harper on the Universal backlot, complete with fully functional clock tower. This accommodates cinematographer Russell Metty’s mirroring camerawork, which conveys the impression that everyone in Harper is staring and being stared back at, a visual nod to the theme of American middle-class blindness to fascism even as it stalks amongst them.
Though the picture proved to be his most financially successful, Welles was reportedly dissatisfied with cuts Spiegel had made in an apparent attempt to tone down the political content. A prologue set in Latin America, underscoring the real-life escape of Nazis to that region, was dropped, as was a dinner table conversation in which Mary innocently recounts a favourite metaphor her husband uses to characterise the ideal system of government, a clock-mechanism analogy that plainly describes fascism but could be mistaken for any ideology in which a large and powerful state plays the leading role. What does survive is another exchange in which Kindler off-handedly dismisses Karl Marx’s German nationality on account of his Jewish ethnicity. A great many reviews and histories of the movie are impressed by this tell; I found it clunky and overbearing. That Wilson fails to grasp its significance until later makes this otherwise wily lawman appear momentarily slow.
For all it failed to meet the exacting standards Welles set for himself, it is nonetheless a moody, unsettling thriller with a disorienting effect on the viewer, thanks in part to what the academic Sheri Chinen Biesen calls its ‘abundant skewed and extremely low camera angles, shadows, smoke, geometric patterns, and wonderful elliptical cutting’. The Stranger is an off-kilter experience; watching it is like trying to walk in a straight line fresh off a swing ride. Critical opinion at the time was mixed. Writing in The Nation, James Agee called it ‘a tidy, engaging thriller’, and if that sounds a bit participation-trophies-for-all, he also said it was ‘much more graceful, intelligent, enjoyable than most other movies’. Pauline Kael damned it with the faintest praise, calling the movie ‘quite watchable’ and its screenplay ‘clever in a shallow way’ — ‘a smooth, proficient, somewhat languorous thriller, handsomely shot (by Russell Metty), with some showy long takes’. It is a flawed picture, but while Welles’s original, more political vision might have been sharper, the movie he was allowed to make is still absorbing.
The production, the last from International Pictures, was distributed through R.K.O. It is not a neglected classic but it is an adept and atmospheric thriller and proved that Welles could work fruitfully within the studio system — when he wanted to. It is said that the financial success of The Stranger helped Welles fund his next picture, the mesmeric Lady from Shanghai. Welles, Robinson and Young earn all their critical plaudits and then some, but Billy House warrants a mention for a charming turn as Mr. Potter, a portly store owner who spends his days playing checkers while telling customers to serve themselves. Who could blame him? With all those Nazis running around town, behind the counter is the safest place to be.
Theresienstadt: A Documentary Film from the Jewish Settlement Area
Kurt Gerron, 1945
There used to be a debate in Holocaust studies: did the Nazis know they were doing evil, or did they believe their actions were morally coherent within their Völkisch racialist ideology?
They knew. They believed the Jews were Untermenschen, but they knew there was something filthy about this belief. We know they knew because they went to great lengths to destroy evidence of their crimes against the Jews while letting records of their other iniquities (political, military, and bureaucratic) survive. They were aware that the mass deportations, the shootings, the gassings, and the medical experiments they inflicted on the Jews were a uniquely wicked enterprise, an offence against God and civilisation that would carry a heavy price should the Allies win the war. In extolling the Endlösung while burying the evidence, the Nazis were the original Holocaust deniers.
Denial involves not only the demolition of the truth but the fabrication of lies, and one of the most egregious attempted by the Third Reich is captured in Theresienstadt: A Documentary Film from the Jewish Settlement Area. Only fragments of the full film remain, one of which can be viewed on the website of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. Theresienstadt is a propaganda production inspired by the perverse though thoroughly unsurprising credulity of the International Committee of the Red Cross. In June 1944, at the insistence of the Danish government, the Nazis permitted two representatives of the Red Cross to tour the Theresienstadt ghetto and concentration camp in northwest Czechoslovakia and observe the conditions in which Danish Jews were being held. Those conditions were barbaric and, with more and more evidence of the Final Solution reaching the civilised world, the Germans spotted an opportunity for some propaganda.
As Yad Vashem notes: ‘In preparation for the commission’s visit more deportations to Auschwitz were carried out in order to reduce the overcrowding in the ghetto. Fake stores, a coffee house, bank, school, kindergartens and the like were opened and flower gardens were planted throughout the ghetto.’ The ruse worked so well that the Nazis decided to make a film about their Potemkin protectorate and how jolly life was in Theresienstadt, the ‘spa town’ where Jews could ‘retire in safety’. Jewish actor and director Kurt Gerron was conscripted to direct and Ivan Fric to photograph and the pseudo-documentary depicts Jews — all sport yellow ‘Jude’ stars — working in a leather goods factory, watching a soccer game, visiting the local library and attending public lectures on science and the arts.
A German-language narration tells us the Jews are performing ‘work of all kinds for the common good’ and adds: ‘Everyone who is able to work can immediately fit into the work process quickly and smoothly.’ (The words ‘everyone who is able to work’ carry a certain chill.) After work, we are told, ‘use of free time is left to the individual’ and we are shown footage of a seven-a-side soccer match in an old army barracks and other leisure activities.
We are even allowed into the communal showers to watch while the men wash themselves. The Jews are permitted no dignity, forced to put on this holiday camp charade even in the most intimate moments, all under the watchful eyes of the Schutzstaffel, who supervised production. It is unsettling to look into the prisoners’ eyes and see the phoney exuberance and the mortal terror behind it, the eyes of involuntary performers who know what awaits them if their performance is deemed unsatisfactory. You feel an unbearable shame watching Theresienstadt, the ignominy of a voyeur to the ultimate indecency. It is a feeling that does not leave you when the film has ended.
Theresienstadt, sometimes styled as The Führer Gives a City to the Jews, was shot on location in the Theresienstadt ghetto in August and September of 1944 but was not completed until the following year. Kurt Gerron did not live to see the finished film; the director and his wife were transported to Auschwitz and murdered in October 1944. Most of the Jews seen in the picture met the same fate. Of the 140,000 Jews held in Theresienstadt more than half were deported to extermination camps and a further 33,000 died in the ghetto itself. All that remains of them is a squalid reel of celluloid.
Thanks. I had never heard of any of those.
Thank you for sharing, I’d seen the last one and it’s chilling. The other two are now on the list!