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Jew and Not-Jew dr1 fall 2010

Page history last edited by Steven A Carr 13 years, 1 month ago

FrontPage | Jew and Not-Jewmedia

 

"Jew and Not-Jew: Anti-Semitism and the Postwar Hollywood Social Problem Film."  The Wandering View: Modern Jewish Experiences in World Cinema.  Lawrence Baron, ed.  Waltham MA: Brandeis U P, forthcoming. 

 

Condemning Anti-Semitism: Psycho-Pathology or Nasty Personal Habit?

 

crossfire.mov gentlemansagreement.mov

 

Both Crossfire (RKO, 1946) and Gentleman's Agreement (20th Century-Fox, 1947) have come to epitomize Hollywood's immediate post-war response to the Holocaust, which historians conventionally have characterized as not amounting to much of a response, either in tackling Nazism or in addressing the specifically Jewish dimension to the Nazi genocide.  Explicit counters to American anti-Semitism, both films at best implicitly invoked the European Holocaust by setting anti-Jewish attitudes against postwar domestic backdrops more familiar to American moviegoing audiences: Washington DC in Crossfire, and Manhattan and New England in Gentleman's Agreement.  If briefly, both films revealed a starkly bifurcated response to the Holocaust: heightened American consciousness of internal anti-Semitism as a serious social problem on the one hand; and the structuring absence of Nazi atrocities that newsreels had just a few years earlier had so vividly depicted on the other.  Then, just as quickly as the topic had entered the genre, anti-Semitism in the Hollywood social problem film disappeared from view.

 

Or so the story for Crossfire and Gentleman's Agreement goes.  In Hollywood and Anti-Semitism, I reiterated this view, arguing that both films "condemned anti-Semitism, not because of its prevalence, but because of its aberration" and that such views were completely at odds with American democratic and assimilationist ideals (281).  I still believe these films function this way, pitting anti-Semitism as a distinctly un-American presence co-existing but at odds with core values of American democracy.  There were indeed historical reasons why these films functioned this way, and why anti-Semitism as a subject just as quickly seemed to vanish from the social problem genre.  Indeed, afterGentleman's Agreement, Hollywood did not make a mainstream film that as explicitly tackled both anti-Semitism and the Holocaust until The Young Lions (20th Century-Fox, 1958).

 

There were political and economic reasons for this absence, though it likely was not a conscious decision.  A number of people have argued that anti-communism and its incipient American anti-Semitism had a chilling effect on Hollywood's treatment of the Holocaust.  However, this explanation alone fails to account for other pressures on the industry, or even potential benefits from not making a film that dealt overtly with the Holocaust.  Postwar discussions between Hollywood and those involved in postwar reconstruction of Europe typically stressed the need for films to help aid efforts at German re-education.  "The films... listed for use in Germany are entirely insufficient," General Robert A. McClure told a group of Hollywood executives at a meeting in occupied Germany on 4 July 1945.  "What can you gentleman do to help us in our main job of winning the peace" (United States, n. pag.)?  As one industry representative in Germany observed a few years later, so-called message pictures made by Hollywood were particularly unpopular in occupied Germany (qtd. in Segrave 171).  Eager to cooperate with postwar reconstruction efforts and tap new audiences, the film industry saw powerful incentives to favor making certain kinds of films over others, even if their actual efforts were not always successful or even worked at cross purposes.

 

In terms of what Crossfire and Gentleman's Agreement failed to do or launch, though, I've since revised the view of a bifurcated response to the Holocaust to consider what it is that these films were doing.  Each film addressed anti-Semitism within the constraints of the Hollywood social problem genre, explicitly referencing American anti-Semitism while only incidentally referencing the Holocaust.  Each film did so quite differently, with Crossfire depicting anti-Semitism as a psycho-pathological aberration, and Gentleman's Agreement depicting it as a nasty personal habit tolerated in polite society, but with corrosive consequences for democratic ideals.  While explicit reference to the Holocaust remained noticeably absent from these films, that absence is key to understanding the logic of a broad-based social consensus that emerged between Hollywood and the federal government: the injustice of anti-Semitism was that it singled out everyday people who just happened to be Jewish; and that American-style democracy upheld universal ideals that not only minimized religious, ethnic, or racial differences; but stubbornly denied they existed in the face of a normative, comprehensive national identity.

 

Whether psycho-pathological aberration or a nasty personal habit with corrosive effects upon democracy, this consensus view of anti-Semitism fit within the formula of the social problem film.  As Roffman and Purdy have argued, the Hollywood social problem film meant to

 

arouse indignation over some facet of contemporary life, carefully qualifying criticism so that it can in the end be reduced to simple causes, to a villain whose removal rectified the situation.  Allusions to the genuine concerns of the audience play up antisocial feelings only to exorcise them on safe targets contained within a dramatic rather than a social context (305).

 

Key to the resolution of the "problem" in Crossfire and Gentleman's Agreement, then, was the displacement and projection of anti-Semitism upon identifiable villains, such as a serial killer; or less viscerally, upon narrow-minded and petty individuals incapable of seeing the collective harm they inflict upon the democratic polity.  Most striking, though, is that even though both films were about anti-Semitism, neither one of them offered a Jewish protagonist.  From a dramatic standpoint, this was a key characteristic: their narratives were not about what it is like to be Jewish and encounter anti-Semitism, but what it is like to be not Jewish and encounter this phenomenon.  I will return to this point later.

 

The Social Problem Genre and Roosevelt's Four Freedoms

Both Crossfire and Gentleman's Agreement reflected a powerful, negotiated consensus where the Hollywood social problem genre could neatly align with President Rooosevelt's Four Freedoms.  These Freedoms, as articulated in the 6 January 1941 State of the Union address, presented a distinctly American vision of the modern world meant for wartime and postwar cultural export: freedom of speech, freedom of worship, freedom from want, and freedom from fear.  As a guiding set of principles in determining how Hollywood could better support the Roosevelt war effort, the Four Freedoms asserted the positive aspects of the American way of life, rather than demonize the enemy.

 

The revised view of what Crossfire and Gentleman's Agreement did offer, beyond just a repression of Nazi anti-Semitism, includes a kind of wish fulfillment for what American democracy, with warts and all, could offer the rest of the world as the world faced postwar reconstruction.  In a draft memo attempting to outline how government might offer better guidance to the film industry, the Office of War Information outlined the kinds of themes Hollywood should attempt.  When dealing with social problems, the memo, written late in the war in August 1944, advised that

 

Films dealing with the American domestic scene run the risk of presenting America in an unflattering light to foreign audiences unless the treatment maintains a balance on the positive rather than the negative side.  Thus, a film . . . should show that men of goodwill are actually in the majority, even though it is only a passive majority until aroused.  In other words, good should not only triumph over evil but the result should be brought about through wilful [sic] and purposeful action rather than through fortuitous circumstances.  The difficulties arising from these films are largely due to the problem or theme, but this principle should underlie the treatment of all films dealing with the seamy side of American life.  Showing our problems frankly and objectively reflects very well upon American freedom of discussion, but we must remember that movies are made for a mass audience not necessarily given to such reflection and analysis.  For this reason, the overall impact of a film should be one in which problems are shown with relation to the measure being taken to adjust them (Office of War Information 7-8).

 

With such guidance, the lack of explicit reference to the Holocaust did not necessarily stymie how actual audiences might have imagined these films in relation to Nazi anti-Semitism.  Rather, as the passage above indicates, the emergent consensus between government and Hollywood stressed the importance of winning the peace through promoting a realistic but ultimately positive view of America for mass consumption.

 

The narratives in both Crossfire and Gentleman's Agreement fit within this paradigm, and reflected the outcome of this consensual vision of America.  In Crossfire, the negative aspect of isolated pathological anti-Semitism gets outweighed by the civilian and military status quo "aroused" through "purposeful" investigation the ugly motivation for what slowly emerges as a hate crime.  When the police shoot the murderer at the end of the film, diligent good has triumphed over irrational evil.  Gentleman's Agreement functioned as a more complicated narrative, but it still fit the same basic formula.  An investigative reporter pretends to be Jewish in order to write an exposé on American anti-Semitism, and finds it completely endemic to polite society, including the workplace, schools, hotels, and even in his personal relationships.  While the film suggested that anti-Semitism is more prevalent than not, there are enough men and women "of goodwill" in the film to confront what the film portrays more as a tolerated than as a pathological evil.  The most interesting aspect of Gentleman's Agreement, though, is in how the reporter methodically rooted out instances of polite anti-Semitism in society, similar to how the homicide detective in Crossfire amassed evidence of a hate crime.  By the time the reporter in Gentleman's Agreement wrote his story, and has his mother approvingly read a passage from it, the film no longer needed to show a heretofore "passive majority" aroused.  His story had marshaled the preponderance of American history against an insidious personal habit.  Read by his mother, the passage implicitly invoked Nazism through both its metaphor of a fruit tree, and its invocation of the founding fathers as framed by Roosevelt's Four Freedoms:

 

gentlemansagreement_iwishyourfather.mov | Driving away from the inn, I knew all about every man or women had been told the job was filled when it wasn't.  Every youngster who had ever been turned down by a college or a summer camp.  I knew the rage that pitches through you when you see your own child shaken and dazed.  From that moment, I saw an unending attack by adults on kids of seven and eight and ten and twelve.  On adolescent boys and girls trying to get a job or an education or into medical school.  I knew that they had somehow had known it too.  They, those patient stubborn men who argued and wrote and fought and came up with the Constitution and the Bill of Rights.  They knew that the tree is known by its fruit, and that injustice corrupts a tree.  That its fruit withers and shrivels and falls at last to that dark ground of history, where other great hopes have rotted and died.  Where equality and freedom remain still the only choice for wholeness and soundness in a man or in a nation.

 

Upon finishing her reading of the passage, the mother solidified this consensual view of American history at a deeply personal level, observing that the recently deceased father "would have liked to have you say that, Phil."

 

Anti-Semitism and Being Not-Jewish

Neither Crossfire nor Gentleman's Agreement were simply about anti-Semitism, but rather were about encountering anti-Semitism from the perspective of not being Jewish.  Framing anti-Semitism as a social problem in this way was key to the consensual view of anti-Semitism as unjustly singling out individuals who just happened to be Jewish.  A pivotal scene from Gentleman's Agreement underscored this ideology.  In order to write his exposé on anti-Semitism, journalist Schuyler "Phil" Green realized that he can pose as being Jewish as he gazed into a bedroom mirror, effectively erasing the difference between him and his best friend Dave Goldman, who does happen to be Jewish:

 

 gentlemansagreement_iwasjewishfor6months.mov Dark hair, dark eyes, sure, so has Dave.  So have a lot of guys who aren't Jewish.  No accent, no mannerisms, neither has Dave.  Name: Phil Green.  Skip the Schuyler.  It might be anything: Phil Green!  Ma, it's a cinch!

 

When Phil asks his mother not to reveal his true identity to any new people she meets, she responds "if you're Jewish, I am too, I guess."

 

In keeping with the film noir genre, which stressed more tawdry social issues, the formulation for being not-Jewish appeared secondary to solving of a senseless murder in Crossfire.  In fact, the victim Joseph Samuels was the only apparent Jewish character in the film, and he got killed in the opening scene.  Like Gentleman's Agreement, though, Crossfire emphasized the point of being not-Jewish by underscoring the senselessness of the crime.  During an interrogation Finley, a homicide detective played by Robert Young, questions Mitch, a soldier wrongly held on the murder charge:

 

crossfire_hatesagoodmotive.mov 

 

MITCH: I didn't murder anyone.  Why would I murder him?  What motive would I have?

 

FINLEY: Maybe you didn't like him.  Maybe you hated him.  Hate's a good motive.

 

MITCH: Why would I hate him?  I hardly knew him.  I only talked to him for a couple of hours.  He seemed like a nice guy.

 

FINLEY: You knew he was a Jew.

 

MITCH: No...

 

FINLEY: You mean to say you didn't know he was Jewish?

 

MITCH: No, I didn't think about it.  What would that have to do with it?  What's that got to do with me?

 

The scene ends with another detective bringing in Samuels' medical discharge as a result of wounds he received at Okinawa, thus subtly refuting the canard that Jews evaded military service during World War II while other Americans fought what was essentially Jewish war.

 

The production history behind Crossfire underscores the fluidity of Jewish identity and its happenstance status relative to a larger umbrella of national identity.  In the original novel on which the film is based, The Brick Foxhole by future Hollywood director Richard Brooks, the murder victim is not Jewish but gay.  Given the film industry's self-regulation apparatus at the time, that narrative would have been rejected outright before RKO shot a frame of film.  While some have noted that in the postwar era, interchangeable gay and Jewish identities would suggest an intrinsic commonality between the two, the film's adaptation and domestication of a plot-line from a relatively obscure novel also pointed to a depiction that confronting anti-Semitism flowed from a universalized position of being not-Jewish, or not-gay for that matter.  In other words, the victim could indeed be anyone: black, Jew, or gay.  The depiction of a victim who coincidentally happened to hold a particular identity other than American, as well as the relatively fluid manner in which anyone could occupy that identity, became a hallmark for how American film depicted - and did not depict - the Jewish specificity of the Holocaust.

 

Conclusion

If such representations of anti-Semitism actually ended there, they arguably would have amounted to not much of a response.  However, the revised view of these films proposed here sees them not as an end point, but to use the terminology of media scholar John Fiske, as waystations pointing both to and through other, more varied and disjointed responses to anti-Semitism, Nazi or otherwise.  Elsewhere, I have discussed the possibility that American audiences well may have come to understand the European art film, such as Wanda Jakubowska's Polish 1948 film The Last Stage, as the appropriate mode of address to depict the Holocaust (Unseeable).  A scene from that film was the only depiction of a concentration camp appearing in The Diary of Anne Frank (20th Century-Fox, 1959), which otherwise takes place exclusively in Amsterdam.  Meanwhile, in de-emphasizing a specifically Jewish dimension to the Holocaust, and instead emphasizing universal ideals of democracy and assimilated pluralism, Hollywood, with the urging of the Roosevelt Administration, believed that it did offer a response to Nazism by notspecifically singling out Jews as victims of fascist ideology.

 

In continuing to reassess how Crossfire and Gentleman's Agreement addressed anti-Semitism and the Holocaust, this investigation needs to go beyond doing only a close reading of these films.  Ultimately, a comprehensive approach to studying these films would encompass a close reading, but also include tracing these productions from inception to consumption.  Researching the relevance of both of these films to the Holocaust, then, also would include both production and reception histories that use primary historical resources.  For production history, this involves archival research, such as studying studio memos and scripts.  However, even production history alone is insufficient, as this only would tell what Hollywood personnel might have intended, or how they imagined a particular audience.  Ultimately, a history of these films must include consideration of how actual and not imagined audiences made sense of these narratives.  This reception history would use film reviews, publicity, and discussions within the popular press to adequately understand the range of meanings actual audiences made of these narratives.

 

The revised view proposed here thus moves beyond looking at Crossfire and Gentleman's Agreement as discrete and ultimately failed confrontations of anti-Semitism trapped within the social problem genre, instead considering these films as part of a broader process of consent and negotiation between Hollywood, government, and audiences.  Analysis of these films ultimately must begin by examining the particular circumstances of their production, and how these films initially were laden with potential relevance to the Holocaust.  This analysis also must consider the ways in which these films underwent a highly regulated studio production process meant to standardize and to some extent domesticate the controversy inherent in these topics for a mass audience. Finally, this analysis must consider the ways in which these films emerged from that process overlaid with various publicity strategies meant to restore some of the films' resonance and narrative potential to speak to the Holocaust, even if that resonance and potential remained highly ambiguous.   An uncritical and ahistorical embrace of today's identity politics may miss how, by asserting a de-specified, universal identity, these films did offer a postwar response to the Holocaust.

 

For an extended version of this essay, including clips and primary documentation, go to http://stevenalancarr.pbworks.com.

 

I presented a version of this paper on 22 Nov 2010 at the Ottawa Jewish Community Centre, Ottawa ON, Canada.  I would like to express my gratitude to Deidre Butler, James Casteel, the Max and Tessie Zelikovitz Centre for Jewish Studies at Carleton U, and the audience in attendance that evening for the opportunity to share this earlier version.  Research for this article was supported by the Center for Advanced Holocaust Studies during a 2002-03 residential fellowship at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum.

 

Primary Works Cited

 

United States.  War Dept.  Bureau of Public Relations.  "Western Europe in the Wake of World War II, June 17-July 18, 1945, As Seen by a Group of American Motion Picture Industry Executives Visiting the European and Mediterranean Theatre of Operation As Guests of the Military Authorities."  By Francis S. Harmon.  [Washington DC]: n. p., 1945.

 

---.  Office of Emergency Management.  Office of War Information.  Motion Picture Bureau.  Overseas Branch.  New York Review Board.  "Draft Motion Picture Guidance."  24 Aug. 1944.  Ts.  Overseas Motion Picture Bureau, Aug-Sep 1944 Folder.  Records Relating to the Overseas Branch, Compiled 1945-1945.  Records of the Historian.  Record Group 208: Records of the Office of War Information, 1926-1951.  MLR Number NC148 6B Box 2.  National Archives and Records Administration, College Park MD.

 

Secondary Works Cited

 

Carr, Steven Alan.  Hollywood and Anti-Semitism: A Cultural History Up to World War II.  Cambridge Studies in the History of Mass Communication.  Cambridge UK: Cambridge U P, 2001.

 

---.  "'To Encompass the Unseeable': The Last Stage (1948; Times Film, 1949) and Auschwitz in the Mind of Cold War America."  Reimagining Jewish History in the Cold War.  Cold War Cultures: Transnational and Interdisciplinary Perspectives.  U of Texas at Austin, Austin TX.  1 Oct. 2010.  http://stevenalancarr.pbworks.com/The-Last-Stage.

 

Roffman, Peter, and Jim Purdy.  The Hollywood Social Problem Film: Madness, Despair, and Politics from the Depression to the Fifties. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1981.

 

Segrave, Kerry.  American Films Abroad: Hollywood's Domination of the World's Movie Screens from the 1890s to the Present. Jefferson, N.C: McFarland, 1997.

 

Filmography

Unless otherwise noted, all films are widely available on DVD.

 

Crossfire (RKO, 1946).

 

Diary of Anne Frank, The (20th Century-Fox, 1959).

 

Gentleman's Agreement (20th Century-Fox, 1947).

 

Last Stage, The (1948; Times Film, 1949).  Polart Distribution released this film in 2009 on DVD with new English subtitles.  I have not screened this version.

 

Young Lions, The (20th Century-Fox, 1958). 

 

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