Moguls, yes. Dictators, not so much. Which is the short way of saying that David Welky's long and dutiful study of Hollywood's relationship with the larger political world in the years prior to World War II is a lot less melodramatic than its title implies.
That's because Welky has the academic's tendency to get lost in the archives, stressing material only a professor can love. That's too bad, because there is a powerful story buried in this mound of material.
"The Moguls and the Dictators" is a tale of the movie industry's shedding its naivete and caution in order to speak belatedly, shyly, to a truly great issue in that period when the Great Depression imperiled everyone's profits, a heightened censorship curtailed Hollywood's creative freedom and the rise of Hitler's Germany foreshadowed (for the relative handful who perceived the threat) the coming of an unimaginably vast war.
As of 1933, when both Franklin D. Roosevelt and Hitler rose to power, Hollywood was largely concerned with the steadily increasing pressure to tone down the mild but valuable frankness of its films and with protecting its excellent German market, which the Nazis almost immediately began to threaten. (They knew an essentially Jewish business when they saw one.)
The official industry line -- promulgated by industry overseer Will Hays, and supported by Joseph E. Breen, chief censor -- was that the industry was the purveyor of "entertainment," without an ideologi- cal thought in its pretty little head.
This was not entirely true, especially at Warner Bros., many of whose movies ("I Am a Fugitive From a Chain Gang," "Wild Boys of the Road") were critical of American life and not averse to downbeat conclusions.
But let's not get ahead of the story. For all of Hollywood's import-export wrangles with friends (Britain) and foes (Italy), the essence of its problems were with Germany and with the failure both inside and outside the industry to face up to the rancid anti-Semitism that so poisoned prewar American life.
Hitlerism was the easier of these issues to deal with -- at least for Harry Warner. Al- most immediately after tak- ing power, the Nazis ordered the American studios to fire their Jewish employees in Germany.
Most did so; Warner did not. He shut down his German operations and became the leading anti-fascist among the American moguls while his peers continued doing business in Berlin -- some even after the beginning of hostilities in 1939.
