Book Review

Canada and the United States

It is generally accepted today among film historians that the 1930s and early 1940s was truly a dynamic period in Hollywood, both with regard to the evolution of cinematic form and the creation of film content that either implicitly or explicitly engaged topical sociopolitical issues. Concomitantly, the latter 1930s witnessed a fierce debate among Americans as to how to respond to the increasing menace of totalitarian regimes, most particularly that of Nazi Germany. A number of significant books and articles have been published over the past twenty years that to varying degrees address the movies' relationship to this issue, namely The Inquisition in Hollywood: Politics and the Film Community, 1930–1960 (1979), by Larry Ceplair and Steven Englund; The Star-Spangled Screen: The American World War II Film (1985), by Bernard F. Dick; and Hollywood War Films, 1937–1945 (1996), by Michael S. Shull and David E. Wilt. Collectively, these studies largely concluded that many prominent Hollywood personalties, and a significant number of the films that they produced before December 7, 1941, were in the forefront of this national debate in the United States, and that overwhelmingly the content of those relevant films was unequivocably prodemocratic and/or antifascist.

1

Saverio Giovacchini's use of contemporary studio documents and trade literature to further substantiate this thesis is impressive. He clearly identifies a creative symbiosis that began in the mid-1930s in America's filmmaking capital between a group of east-coast intellectuals, including writers Lillian Hellman and John Howard Lawson, and numerous German as well as other European émigrés who had escaped fascism, such as directors Fritz Lang and William Dieterle. Giovacchini invents the label of "democratic modernism" for this artistic phenomenon, that of inserting so-called political "realism" into the texts of many of the films on which these individuals were creatively involved.

. . .