If you never before recognized the Three Stooges as among the very first in the cinema to expose Nazi Germany for what it was, perhaps it’s time. Seriously.
A recent New York Times piece previewed a book, “The Collaboration,”scheduled for release this fall and written by researcher and scholar Ben Urwand.
The book both exposes and accuses Hollywood’s largest moviemakers — MGM, Warner Bros., 20th Century Fox — as hideously bowing to the demands of Nazi censors in order to have their movies released in Germany, a large and steady commercial consumer of American movies.
Urwand reveals many documents showing Adolf Hitler’s front men to have had great and sustained influence in Hollywood and on its executives, starting with Hitler’s rise to the Reich chancellorship in January 1933, through to the inevitable outbreak of World War II in September 1939.
For example, the 1937 Academy Award winner “The Life of Emile Zola” told the story of the famous writer who risked his reputation as a beloved Frenchman to expose the French military’s treachery in convicting young artillery officer Alfred Dreyfus as a German spy. Starting in 1894, Dreyfus spent five years imprisoned on Devils Island off French Guyana before his appeal was heard.
Zola, the public point man in eventually proving Dreyfus’s innocence, stressed that Dreyfus was a convenient and easy target for national scapegoating because he was a Jew. A French major later was revealed to be the German spy.
Yet, incredibly, any mention of Dreyfus being Jewish was omitted or removed from that Warner Bros. movie at the insistence of Nazi “cultural agents” assigned to inspect Hollywood.
Urwand even cites several American-made movies that were never released at the insistence of Nazi screeners and Germany’s US-posted consuls.
The first American-made movie to unabashedly deliver the message to American audiences that Fascism was infecting — had infected — Europe came very late: 1939’s “Confessions of a Nazi Spy,” starring Edward G. Robinson.
Consider that the anti-Nazi classic “Casablanca” was released in 1942 — 11 months after the U.S. entered the war and more than three years after Poland was invaded to finally force the war.
Yet, in 1940, the Three Stooges, with Moe Howard, Larry Fine and Curly Howard — Moe, who looked remarkably like Hitler, threw on a mustache and portrayed a Hitler-lookalike, the dictator of Moronica, a clownish despot given to shouting angry, contradictory orders — starred in the Columbia Pictures short “You Nazty Spy.”
Watching “You Nazty Spy” as a kid — weekday afternoons on WPIX-Ch. 11 with Officer Joe Bolton reminding us not to try the Stooges eye-poking and head-hammering on other kids — I never considered that the Stooges were at the cinematic starting line in bashing Nazi Germany in the US; I figured the Stooges were just the latest with the silliest.
Heck, in that 1940 short the Stooges even exchanged Fascist salutes; their swastika-like armbands were impossible to miss. And even at ten years old, I knew that Moe was mocking Hitler.
But not until 50 years later, June 26 of this year, after reading Urwand’s book, did it strike me that Moe, Larry and Curly, as public cinematic enemies of Adolf Hitler’s Germany, were among the very first and with the most obvious most.
* * *
The Bio Channel, on the Fourth of July, included these biographies, and only these:
1) A biography of polygamist leader Warren Jeffs, sentenced to life for sexual assaults on children.
2) A biography of Jonestown, Guyana cultist and mass murderer Rev. Jim Jones.
3) A biography of the murderous young women in the Charles Manson cult.
That was it from the Bio Channel — on the Fourth of July.