FILM Hitler and Hollywood

Did Hitler Run Hollywood


Ben Urwand, Sunday Telegraph, 29 September 2013


His book:


The Collaboration, Harvard University Press.


Came across the article in a discarded Tel. mag. The digital version is the same text. The three page article by Urwand puffing his own book (or is it an extract?) is entertaining enough, particularly the bit about where scenes successively cut out of a film about Dreyfus end with a script that has no mention of him being a Jew at all, and is finally titled: The Life of Emile Zola [1937].


The Telegraph web version of the article has a photograph not in the paper.

A group of American motion picture executives take a trip up the Rhine on Hitler’s personal yacht. Eddie Mannix (second from right), Jack Warner (third from right).

has no date nor is it mentioned in the paper article.


David Denby in the New Yorker 23 Sept 2013, How Could Harvard Have Published Ben Urwand’s “The Collaboration”? explains the photo. He points out:

By July, 1945, Hitler, of course, was dead, and the executives embarked on his boat wearing Army uniforms. Why? Because, as Urwand relates, they had been invited to Germany by General George Marshall as a way to witness the destruction of Germany and to reëstablish their business in that country after the war.

All good stuff.


He then helpfully points us to Self-Styled Siren who takes up the cudgels. She herself points back to his cudgeling of The Collaboration. No,no, no, get out of the loop, read something completely different. Self-styled Siren has a luxuriously long piece on Bergman that is included in the Criterion Collection:


Autumn Sonata: Mothers, Daughters, and Monsters


By Farran Smith Nehme [16 September 2013 ]


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Must remind myself to put up a few more film blog links. (Have relied on 6 degrees to get to most film sites from my current small selection, though there are a lot more in Moleskine which may or may not work any longer. Notice a lot of the embedded YouTubes don’t).

They say writing a reminder backwards on your forehead is quite effective. Maybe a Bruce Lee-style bandana





with a slot for a sunflower yellow super-stick Post-It instead of the rising sun. Don’t recommend you pop down to the shops with it on. There again, once it’s off, you’re bound to forget to put it back on – so no new film links.


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As far as COTA is concerned, I must re-iterate, I see it as much as a database for my own purposes as a place where I write to an audience. And when it is some writing on something or other, it tends to be as if it was to one individual: a friend who I’m talking through some film thing with. Mind you, it ends up in a blog (where it can be more widely shared) because few people I know would be interested in the length of the cow scene in Satantango, and how I’m imagining the tracking! It’s that or in OneNote, which is a great for place to find things wot you wrote or gleaned.
The greatest number of hits are simply posts where I’ve linked to something. Monaco’s book being #1. It’s a pleasure to think people are Googling it and finding my finding of a digital version.