#208: The Mortal Storm
After years of pretending it didn’t exist, Hollywood finally confronts the Nazi threat
This review was originally posted to Twitter on January 7, 2020.
Initial release: June 14, 1940
Director: Frank Borzage
From the early thirties up until about 1939, Hollywood shied away from anything that would piss off the Nazis, as Germany was a big market. But nothing lasts forever. After the invasion of Poland even notoriously controversy-averse MGM got in on the anti-Nazi trend with The Mortal Storm, a cautionary tale of how nationalism destroys families.
It’s January 30th, 1933, and Bavarian professor Roth is having a great 60th birthday… that is, until his stepsons and their friends ruin the birthday dinner with a political argument following the announcement of Hitler’s ascension to chancellor. His stepsons Erich and Otto are all in for Hitler as is their friend Fritz, but their other friend Martin is against it. It eventually winds up causing friction between Fritz and his fiance, the professor’s daughter Freya. Friendships and family are torn apart almost overnight.
Before long, Nazis prowl the streets of the idyllic little Bavarian college town that serves as the film’s backdrop; to a man, they’re all bullies, who hate opposing viewpoints, treat family and friends with suspicion, and beat an elderly man for not singing along to a nazi hymn. In the end, it’s up to Martin and Freya to get their families out of Germany, but things go awry, as they do. You won’t find any happy endings in this film; released as it was when the United States’ entry into the war seemed just a matter of time, it’s a pessimistic tragedy.
MGM was a studio so averse to losing the lucrative German market that when the Nazis took power, the studio fired all their Jewish employees, dropped Jewish names from credits, and one executive in MGM’s German branch was forced to divorce his Jewish wife. From 1933 until 1939, Hollywood shied away from anti-Nazi messages for the sake of the German market — much like Hollywood avoids offending China today. It wasn’t until Warner Brothers’ Confession of a Nazi Spy four months before the invasion of Poland that things changed. So while The Mortal Storm isn’t the first openly anti-Nazi film (and MGM still tried to skate controversy by never calling the Nazis Nazis, or naming the religion of Freya and her father) it’s the most important one, because it showed that even MGM had had enough.
Director Frank Borzage has constructed a gentle world full of happiness, turning up the schmaltziness to 11 and snapping off the knob… and yet, before half an hour is over, this idyllic, wintry paradise is darkened by the shadow of the Nazi jackboot. Martin and Freya are depicted as the last lovers left alive. Things like sentimentality and human relationships are explicitly disregarded, even despised, in the Nazi party — the consequences of which have yet to be realized by their friends. And in the end, a once-happy, warm home now stands empty, a family destroyed, and we’re treated to a few moments, seemingly from a disillusioned Otto’s perspective, as he examines what’s left of the house, thinking back to happier moments, and Martin’s free-thinking philosophy. More than the bible quotes that bookend this film, the ending is the real message of the film, about how poisonous ideology can destroy civil society, lead people to betray their friends and family, and in the end, hollow them from the inside out.
There are better anti-Nazi films, of course. And the Nazis have been the favorite villains of media for over 80 years — there’s no shortage of anti-Nazi sentiment in this day and age. But for even MGM to say “no more Nazis” makes this film an important milestone.
