Codename Intelligentsia by Russell Campbell

Author:Russell Campbell
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: The History Press

Similarly, the German nationalist epic The Rebel (Der Rebell, 1932), released in its English-language version in August 1933, was an inducement for war, ‘a tocsin cry to the Germanic peoples to take revenge upon the French in 19— for the revenge taken by the French in 1919 for the revenge taken by the Germans in 1871 for what the French did about 1870.’ Significantly, the picture with its ‘barbarous vendetta-theme’ had been hailed by Propaganda Minister Goebbels; it had ‘as little merit as a film as a speech by Hitler has as an essay in reasoned persuasion or the theory of the Aryan race has as a serious contribution to anthropology.’16

The occasional film might carry a covert anti-militarist message. Thus Smilin’ Through (USA, 1932), a story of wartime love, ‘for all its saccharine and superficiality … helps us to hate their guns and long to destroy them from the face of the earth.’ But this was an exception. Reviewing I Was a Spy (UK, 1933), Montagu noted an alarming trend. Gone was the ‘engulfing of humanity by horror’ which was the way warfare was depicted in The Big Parade, All Quiet on the Western Front, Westfront 1918, and others of a few years past. In the new picture:

the sole dramatic contradiction is between a lauded desire to dish the enemy and a fright at the natural danger it puts one in, the consummation of the conflict is the enemy’s defeat … What attraction can this film have, save the rousing of chauvinistic passion? … One cannot escape the conclusion that, when the war-drums roll again and once more the shattered bodies begin to trickle back into the hospitals, the producers of this film will be able to comfort themselves with the reflection that they have helped to prepare each citizen to do his bit.17

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