Litvak in Anger

“[…] very few studios at that time would dare to make a picture of that kind. Jack and Harry· Warner let me do it. I had trouble in inducing them to do it. They got scared many times — they got scared even practically before we started the picture — but they finally let me do it, which is the most important thing.” Anatole Litvak, oral history.

Screenwriter John Wexley told Patrick McGilligan: “[…] we had big problems with the German embassy and consulate and with the German-American Bund. Then Martin Dies, who started the House Unamerican Activities Committee […] came to Warner Brothers to try to change Nazi Spy so that it would include anti-Communists as well as anti-Nazis. But the Communists had not done any espionage, so we couldn’t include them — besides which, we were dealing with an actual case. […] I saw Dies going out of Warner’s office as I went in through an anteroom. I told Warner, ‘I saw Dies coming out of here. Are you knuckling under to that pipsqueak congressman from Texas?’ He said, ‘Oh, I told him off. But if you could work in something about the pinkos.'”

Ben Urwand, in The Collaboration, writes about chief censor Joseph Breen’s concerns: “[…] he understood that a controversial picture by Warner Brothers might endanger the business of other studios still selling movies in Germany. Nevertheless, after going through the script, he was forced to admit that the picture was technically within the provisions of the Production Code: it represented Germany “honestly” and “fairly” because it told a story of espionage that had not only been verified in a court of law but was also common knowledge throughout the United States.”

CONFESSIONS OF A NAZI SPY (1939), which I first wrote about here, is fairly famous now as the film which sparked an international incident that could, in theory, have brought the US into WWII two years early in a timely fashion. Yet this raised profile doesn’t seem to have done that much for the reputation of its director.

By happy chance I stumbled on a copy of Ben Urwand’s controversial The Collaboration in my favourite charity shop (St, Columba’s Bookshop) — he devotes a good few pages to this movie, seeing it as the exception that proves his thesis that the Hollywood studios bent over backwards to appease Nazi Germany.

To denigrate the courage of Warner Bros in making an anti-Nazi film, Urwand says, “Despite all the drama and secrecy, however, Confessions of a Nazi Spy was by no means a great film. Warner Brothers claimed to have spent over $1.5 million on it, but the actual figure was closer to $650,000.” Firstly, I don’t see that the budget has any direct bearing on the film’s greatness or lack thereof, and I feel amusement and affection regarding the typical crooked and cheap way the studio operated here. Urwand is plain wrong to call it an obvious B-picture — even though star Edward G. Robinson doesn’t appear until comparatively late in the show, his presence is enough to lift it to A-picture status, even without the bonus value of Francis Lederer, George Sanders and Paul Lukas.

I’m grateful to Urwand for reporting that Joseph Goebbels was apparently delighted to see himself portrayed in a Hollywood film by Martin Kosleck, as well he might be — Kosleck is adpet at creepiness but is much better looking that Goebbels. “I myself play a main role and not even a particularly unpleasant one,” JG gloated in his diary.

But Hollywood has never made propaganda films to have an effect on the enemy, but on the American public first and allies second. Goebbels wrote,”I do not consider the film dangerous […] It arouses fear in our enemies rather than anger and hate.” Far be it from me to belittle Joe’s expertise in this field, but very possibly Americans needed to be alarmed first, before they could be aroused to aggression. I mean, that’s why Pearl Harbour was such a smashing success, surely?

The movie isn’t my favourite Litvak but I love that he and Warners made it. It has an unusual structure, simply following the development and then rolling-up of the Nazi spy operation, which

This movie comes from the period when Don Siegel was running the Warners montage department, and, under the deranged influence of Slavko Vorkapich over at MGM, was pushing the studio’s montages in a more radical, symbolic and visual ambitious direction. He has several good stories about his work on Litvak films. How true they are is known only to the principle characters, who are dead.

On CONFESSIONS, Siegel wanted to show Nazi propaganda leaflets dropped onto a city street. He figured out that the best way to show the content of the leaflets and their distribution almost at once would be to start on a tight view of a single flier, then have it drop away from the lens, revealing many more identical fliers all falling down upon the outraged citizenry from an appropriately great height.

So: a sturdy plank was projected from the roof of a tall building with a camera on the end of it, pointing straight down. An operator was to hold a leaflet in front of the lens, then let it go at the appropriate moment while assistants tossed hundreds more leaflets off the building, then he had to rack focus quickly from VERY CLOSE to INFINITY. This was being done without any permissions and so the hope was they’d be able to see genuine passers-by picking up the falling papers and reacting to them for real.

Siegel is asked if he wants to check the shot. Not wanting to “yeller out” in front of the boys, he agrees. So he squats on the plank and edges very carefully out over the void, the plank bouncing cheerfully with each movement of his (clenching, perspiring) buttocks.

Trembling, he looks through the viewfinder. Can’t see a damn thing, Maybe it’s not racked properly.

“Looks great!” he declares, and inches tremulously back to terra firma, or its nearest Los Angeles equivalent. He never knew if the operator was onto him. But the shot turned out fine, he says.

It’s not in the film, though — only the latter part of it:

CONFESSIONS OF A NAZI SPY stars Dr. Clitterhouse; Count Dracula – posing as Bellac Gordal; Addison DeWitt; Dr. Dohmler – Psychiatrist; Col. Dodge; May Emmerich; Angela Merrova; Woody Woodpecker; Howard Joyce; Spectator at Stoning (uncredited); Mike O’Reilly; “Concentration Camp” Ehrhardt; Captain Schultz; Reinhard Heydrich; Mrs. Barryman; Father Peter Lonergan; Norman Bissonette; Will, the Groundsman; Dwight Severn; Chief Inspector Bernie Ohls; and Adolf Hitler as himself.

Thanks to Karen Green and Columbia University for finding and supplying the Anatole Litvak oral history quoted above.

Watching the detectives

Kinda ran out of Warren William movies — except I found a couple more we can gloat over — so our Warren William Weekend Watch Party is now consuming George Sanders and Peter Lorre as the Saint and the Falcon and Mr. Moto, all of whom I have blogged about so I don’t need to keep you apprised, do I?

Pg. 17 #11

For several months past I have been planning my spare time upon a set regimen. I allow myself one hour a day for concentrated meditation. One of my favourite reveries is the idea of founding an institution from which you send out bills to people all over the world, and then sue them when they don’t pay. You get a commission from the lawyers your unfortunate victims employ to defend themselves.

*

‘Listen, Ragle,’ Black said. ‘You’re really making a mint out of this ‘green man’ contest, aren’t you?’ Envy was rampant on his face. ‘Couple of hours at it, and you’ve got a week’s pay right there.’

*

A few minutes later they were in the main business district of Greeneville. The driver swung in to the curb and stopped. He said, ‘This is about the middle of town, mister. Guess you can look up your party in the phone book and you’ll be all right. And there’s a taxi stand right across the street to get you wherever you’re going. Charge you a hell of a price, but they’ll get you there.’

*

And zombielike, halfway through the dinner, I lost the del Luca prize check for $25,000. Having tucked the check into the inside breast pocket of my jacket, I let my hand stray idly to that place and realized that it was gone. Did I “intend” to lose the money? Recently I had been deeply bothered that I was not deserving of the prize. I believe in the reality of the accidents we subconsciously perpetrate on ourselves, and so how easy it was for this loss to be not loss but a form of repudiation offshoot of that self-loathing (depression’s premier badge) by which I was persuaded that I could not be worthy of the prize, that I was in fact not worthy of any of the recognition that had come my way in the past few years.

*

In the evening we reached Santa Maria de Nieva as the last light was fading. On the way the boat ran aground and the propeller broke. While we were tied up on the bank replacing it, Indians watched us through the branches from their nearby hut, remaining silent and motionless, and they remained motionless as we set out again, going upstream. In Nieva, Jaime de Aguilar showed us gold dust, which he had folded neatly into a piece of stationery. The comandante in Pinglo makes hundreds of his Indian recruits pan for gold in the Rio Santiago, and he already owns sixty-five beer bottles filled with gold dust. I saw youthful soldiers working on a sand bank.

*

All over the nation girls started to earn their own money. Gold diggers whose lives had been the most tedious, readily took to exciting jobs as mannequins, models, and cover girls. Those with sufficient talent went on the stage. Nontalented beauties got jobs in Hollywood and the nonbeauties went into offices.

*

He is in Colour the most beautiful of his Race, in Symmetry the most Perfect, in Temper the most Docile, his Nature is so far from being offensive, that he is pleasing to all who honor him with their presence.

*

This week’s selection of passages from seven page seventeens from seven books on my living room shelving seems to focus on money, but also colour. It all started with the short section of the first Philip K. Dick novel I ever read, where Dick seems to be riffing, consciously or not, on manifestations of the colour green — from mint, to the little green man, to folding green to the green of envy. And from there on, everywhere I looked there seem to be green and gold or at least referencing colour, and the colour of money in particular.

A Dreadful Man, by Brian Aherne, extract from a letter from George Sanders; Time Out of Joint, by Philip K. Dick; What Mad Universe, by Fredric Brown; Darkness Visible, by William Styron; Conquest of the Useless, Reflections from the Making of Fitcarraldo, by Werner Herzog; Kiss Hollywood Goodbye, by Anita Loos; Learned Pigs and Fireproof Women, by Ricky Jay, from an advertisement for Toby the sapient pig;