Book Review

Canada and the United States

From the late 1930s until the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor, Americans fiercely debated the merits of an American entry into what would become World War II. The debate between isolationists and interventionists took place in the nation's magazines and newspapers, public forums, often broadcast on the national radio networks, and in hotly contested local, state, and national elections.	1
The one medium of communication that remained strangely silent as this debate raged across America was the Hollywood film industry. Hindered by a rigid censorship system and ever fearful of losing its huge foreign audience, the film industry shied away from films that depicted the rise of fascism, the Spanish Civil War, and the growing tensions in Asia and Europe. The one Hollywood studio that stood apart from this pattern was Warner Brothers. Long known for producing gritty, low-budget features based on contemporary social and political issues, the studio jumped into the debate over intervention with Confessions of a Nazi Spy (1939) and its glowing tribute to World War I hero Alvin York, Sergeant York (1941).	2
Michael E. Birdwell, curator of the Alvin York Papers, argues that it was Harry Warner, not studio head and brother Jack Warner, who was the impetus behind the studio's anti-Nazi features. Harry closely monitored Nazi activities in Germany and the United States. When Germany marched into Austria in 1938, he immediately suspended all Warner operations in Germany—in stark contrast to the rest of Hollywood which bent over backward trying to accommodate Adolf Hilter's Germany. That same year Harry refused to screen the March of Time newsreel Inside Germany in Warner theaters because he considered it pro-Nazi.	. . .