Frame from movie trailerMargaret Sullavan in The Mortal Stormtheatrical trailerDan Dailey and James Stewart in the trailerMargaret Sullavan in the trailerOriginal theatrical trailer
The Mortal Storm was the first MGM production that dramatized the persecution of Jews under the Nazi regime in Germany during World War II, without explicitly using the word “Jew.”[3]
Plot
In the mountains of Germany near the Austrian border on January 30, 1933, Professor Viktor Roth, a distinguished "non-Aryan" professor who is adored by his students, celebrates his 60th birthday. His family consists of his wife Amelie, his daughter Freya, his young son Rudi and his adult stepsons Erich and Otto von Rohn. His class greets him with applause and a trophy presented by Martin Breitner and Fritz Marberg. The professor is proud of his family's "tolerance and sense of humor."
Suddenly, everything changes. The maid brings wonderful news: Adolf Hitler has become chancellor of Germany. Listening to the radio. Amelie worries about what will happen to free thinkers and non-Aryans.[4] The ecstatic young men leave for a meeting, but Martin demurs.
Martin, Fritz, and Freya meet at an inn, where Professor Werner is bullied by a gang for not singing along with the "Horst Wessel Song." Martin interferes and the bullies allow Werner to leave. Fritz delivers Martin an ultimatum: join the party or be wiped out with other "pacifist vermin," but Martin refuses. Outside, the gang is beating Werner. On the train ride home, Fritz criticizes Freya for behavior unbecoming the daughter of a "non-Aryan."
Professor Roth refuses to teach the doctrine of racial purity, and his classes are boycotted. Students, who are now all in uniform, rally to burn banned books.
When Martin brings Freya home, the waiting gang assaults him. Mrs. Roth intervenes, admonishing her sons, who move out of their home. Weeks later, Freya comes to Martin's mountain farm. She wants him to meet their friends at the inn. He confesses his love to her. Professor Werner appears, begging for help because he is soon to be arrested. That night, Martin takes him on skis through a secret pass to Austria while the women successfully resist police attempts to intimidate them.
Professor Roth is arrested and Freya begs Fritz to learn where the professor has been taken. Fritz reluctantly arranges a brief meeting between Viktor and his wife at the concentration camp where he is imprisoned. Viktor urges her to leave the country with Freya and Rudi.
Otto comes home with news that the professor has died, supposedly from a heart attack, but Freya believes that he was killed.
At the border, Freya is detained for carrying her father's unpublished manuscript. Martin's mother writes to tell Freya that Martin is waiting at the farm to take her to Austria. Martin and Freya drink from the bride cup, with Hilda's blessing. Elsewhere, the Nazis beat Elsa until she reveals the pass. A Gestapo officer testing Fritz's loyalty makes him leader of the ski patrol. Fritz orders them to fire at Martin and Freya as they attempt to ski to safety. Freya dies in Martin's arms in Austria.
In the Roths' home, Fritz tells Erich and Otto of Freya's death and flees, crying, "It was my duty!" Erich is furious that Martin is free and storms out of the house. Before Otto leaves, he recalls in his mind some conversations that had taken place there—some, words by his father. Over celestial music, a man speaks: "I said to a man who stood at a gate, Give me a light that I may tread safely into the unknown. And he replied, Go out into the darkness and put your hand into the hand of God. That shall be to you better than a light, and safer than a known way."
The film is based on the 1937 novel The Mortal Storm[6] by the British writer Phyllis Bottome, who had moved to Austria in 1924 when her husband Alban Ernan Forbes Dennis was posted there. Dennis was a British diplomat and a MI6 station head with responsibility for Austria, Hungary and Yugoslavia. In 1930, she moved to Munich. She witnessed the rise of fascism, the rise to power of the Nazi party and the transformation of Nazi Germany.
The film's script diverged considerably from the story told in the book, but Bottome felt that the film retained the book's essence. However, Bottome wrote: "What it is to be a Nazi has been shown with unequivocal sincerity and life-likeness, but in the scene between the Jewish professor and his son, Rudi, there was a watering down of courage. Those familiar with the father’s definition of a good Jew will miss its full significance in the film because the central idea has been overlaid by insignificant words."[7]The Mortal Storm was the only MGM movie to explicitly criticize the Nazi regime before America’s entry into World War IIin December 1941. The film, however, made only oblique references to its anti-Semetic policies.[8][9]
The Freya Roth character is the daughter of a Junker mother and a "non-Aryan" father. It is implied that Freya, her father and Rudi are Jews, but the word "Jew" is never actually used, and they are identified as "non-Aryans." However, in the scene where professor Roth is visited by his wife in the concentration camp, the sleeves of his shirt bear the large letter J (possibly to represent the yellow Star of David that Jews were forced by the Nazis to wear on their clothing).[10] Metro-Goldwyn-Meyer movie mogul Louis B. Meyer, was aware that Warner Bros. studio pictures had been banned in Germany after their release of the anti-Hitler Confessions of a Nazi Spy (1939). Meyer was loath to lose the lucrative German market. As such, MGM films were presented to the Nazi German consul for approval, and objectionable scenes were modified before the film’s release in Germany.[11][12]
The score by award-winning composer Bronislau Kaper and by Eugene Zador was credited to the pseudonym of Edward Kane. MGM paid $250 for the rights to the "Horst Wessel Song" for use in the 1938 film Three Comrades. However, with the World War II underway in 1940, the German publisher demanded script approval in return for usage of the song.[14] MGM ignored the request, and had Zador simply arrange the "Horst Wessel Lied" with English lyrics by Earl Brent. The English version of the song was titled "Close Up The Ranks".[15]
The film concludes with an excerpt from the poem "The Gate of the Year," which King George VI made famous when he quoted it during his Christmas 1939 radio broadcast.
Bosley Crowther of The New York Times calls The Mortal Storm "magnificently directed and acted ... a passionate drama, struck out of the deepest tragedy, which is comforting at this time only in its exposition of heroic stoicism."[16] Howard Barnes' review in the New York Herald Tribune laments that Europe was at war by the time of the film's release: "Less than a year ago, it would have had far more dramatic and emotional impact than it has at this time. ... It is not MGM's fault, but the timing on the making of The Mortal Storm has been extremely bad."[17]
A review in Variety states: "It is not the first of the anti-Nazi pictures, but it is the most effective film exposé to date of the totalitarian idea, a slugging indictment of the political and social theories advanced by Hitler. ... Performances are excellent."[1]Harrison's Reports writes: "This is the most powerful anti-Nazi picture yet produced. It excels in every department—that of acting, direction, production and photography."[2]Film Daily writes: "Because of its virulent exposition of Nazi methods, this film must be seen by every American ... Magnificently directed by Frank Borzage, pulsating with dramatic power, and played up to the hilt by a transcendingly skillful cast, it will electrify audiences wherever it is shown."[18]John Mosher of The New Yorker praises the film's story for being presented "without any theatrical nonsense" and adds, "What is outstanding about Frank Borzage's direction is its restraint. The cruel story is told without any of the highlights of horror. We feel that what lies behind is worse than what we are shown."[19]
The Mortal Storm ranks tenth on Film Daily's year-end nationwide poll of 546 critics naming the best films of 1940.[20]
The film holds a 100% fresh rating on Rotten Tomatoes based on 11 reviews.[21]
↑ Bogle, 2018: “The first American anti-Nazi film was Frank Borzage’s Mortal Storm, released in 1940, which still didn’t directly reference anti-Semitic persecution.”
↑ Blauvelt, 2021 p. 20-21: “[B]y June 1941, a Gallup poll found 79 percent of the American public remained opposed to entering the war,” though Europe had been at war since September 1939.
↑ Blauvelt, 2021 p. 21: See here for the euphemisms that avoid the explicit designation of film characters as Jews.
↑ Blauvelt, 2021 p. 6-7: On Warner Bros. ban. And: See image p. 7: Mayer “concerned with losing the German market…would run films by the Nazi German consul” for approval.
↑ Bogle, 2018: Throughout the 1930s, “the Hitler regime had final approval on more than 400 American films.”
Der Stürmer was a weekly German tabloid-format newspaper published from 1923 to the end of World War II by Julius Streicher, the Gauleiter of Franconia, with brief suspensions in publication due to legal difficulties. It was a significant part of Nazi propaganda, and was virulently anti-Semitic. The paper was not an official publication of the Nazi Party, but was published privately by Streicher. For this reason, the paper did not display the Nazi Party swastika in its logo.
The racial policy of Nazi Germany was a set of policies and laws implemented in Nazi Germany under the dictatorship of Adolf Hitler, based on pseudoscientific and racist doctrines asserting the superiority of the putative "Aryan race", which claimed scientific legitimacy. This was combined with a eugenics program that aimed for "racial hygiene" by compulsory sterilization and extermination of those who they saw as Untermenschen ("sub-humans"), which culminated in the Holocaust.
Margaret Brooke Sullavan was an American stage and film actress. She began her career onstage in 1929 with the University Players on Cape Cod, Massachusetts. In 1933, she caught the attention of film director John M. Stahl and made her screen debut that same year in Only Yesterday. She continued to be successful on stage and film, best known for The Shop Around the Corner.
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Friedrich "Fritz" Pfeffer was a German dentist and Jewish refugee who hid with Anne Frank and her family and the Van Pels family during the Nazi occupation of the Netherlands. He perished in the Neuengamme concentration camp in Northern Germany. Pfeffer was given the pseudonym Albert Dussel in Frank's diary, and remains known as such in many editions and adaptations of the publication.
The Eternal Jew is a 1940 antisemitic Nazi propaganda film, presented as a documentary. The film's initial German title was Der ewige Jude, the German term for the character of the "Wandering Jew" in medieval folklore. The film was directed by Fritz Hippler at the insistence of Nazi Germany's Minister of Propaganda, Joseph Goebbels.
Werner Goldberg was a German of half Jewish ancestry, or Mischling in Nazi terminology, who served briefly as a soldier during World War II. His image appeared in the Berliner Tageblatt as "The Ideal German Soldier".
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The German Nazi Party adopted and developed several racial hierarchical categorizations as an important part of its fascist ideology (Nazism) in order to justify enslavement, extermination, ethnic persecution and other atrocities against ethnicities which it deemed genetically or culturally inferior. The Aryan race is a pseudoscientific concept that emerged in the late-19th century to describe people who descend from the Proto-Indo-Europeans as a racial grouping and it was accepted by Nazi thinkers. The Nazis considered the putative "Aryan race" a superior "master race" with Germanic peoples as representative of Nordic race being best branch, and they considered Jews, mixed-race people, Slavs, Romani, Black People, and certain other ethnicities racially inferior subhumans, whose members were only suitable for slave labor and extermination. In these ethnicities, Jews were considered the most inferior. However, the Nazis considered Germanic peoples such as Germans to be significantly mixed between different races, including the East Baltic race being considered inferior by the Nazis, and that their citizens needed to be completely Nordicized after the war. The Nazis also considered some non-Germanic groups such as Sorbs, Northern Italians, and Greeks to be of Germanic and Nordic origin. Some non-Aryan ethnic groups such as the Japanese were considered to be partly superior, while some Indo-Europeans such as Slavs, Romani, and Indo-Aryan people people were considered inferior.
Phyllis Forbes Dennis was a British novelist and short story writer.
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The Mortal Storm is a 1937 novel by the British writer Phyllis Bottome. An anti-Nazi novel, it depicts the impact of Adolf Hitler's regime on a German family, and their conversion to resistance against the Third Reich.
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