Katie Trumpener writes:

Susan Tegel, in Nazis and the Cinema, shows that these measures provided a framework for the making and showing of propaganda films. Roel vande Winkel and David Welch’s essay collection, Cinema and the Swastika, widens the picture much further. In the mid-1930s, the Nazis began covertly acquiring cinemas and cinema chains around the world, while at the same time expanding the international distribution of German films. They also pressed other Central European film industries to adopt anti-semitic employment practices modelled on their own. As a result, most Jewish actors and directors were forced out of Central, and then Western Europe. When the Nazis threatened to boycott their films, British studios were forced to consider the cost of employing émigré actors. The German consul in Los Angeles tried to exert similar pressure in Hollywood. American studio heads did their best to ignore his threats, but hesitated to produce overtly anti-Nazi films. (The first, Anatole Litvak’s Confessions of a Nazi Spy, was released only in 1939.)

(LRB 12 March 2009)

Palgrave | hardback 342 pp. |ISBN: 9781403994912