CZM Rewind: Part Two: The Vampires Are On Our Side: Antifascism in Film

all the original vampires are on our side. Anyway, I hope you all are well, and here's an episode. Hello and welcome to Cool People Who Did Cool Stuff. I'm your host, Margaret Kiljoy, and every week I talk about rebels and revolutionaries and weirdos and I guess people who passed the basic I'm a bumbar of not liking Nazis and people I find interesting.

already listened to. Anyway. On Monday, we talked about German expressionist horror who and the people who fought Nazis, And today we're going to talk about Hollywood. It's a sleepy little town. Have you ever heard of Hollywood?

first American anti Nazi organization that wasn't specifically Jewish. Other organizations had started earlier, and a lot of the Hollywood Anti Nazi League was Communist like members of the Communist Party, but notably a lot of it wasn't. It was sort of a popular front against fascist influence in filmmaking. Practically who's who of Hollywood, including communist, liberal and conservative members actually, and including a bunch of refugees from the Nazis like

Fritz Lang, who we talked about last time. Chico Marx, the oldest Marx brother, was in it. M john Ford, who directed The Grapes of Wrath and basically like every movie at the time, was in it.

or I'm mad at right now? That's what you know people are doing or whatever, And it's like worth knowing because when you're like, oh, an anti Nazi league, well, threo was a whole league dedicated to being mad at like the Germans. Like in the nineteen thirties, if you were a right wing person in the United States, you were probably a fascist. You were probably at least sympathetic

to fascism. And there was this huge pro fascist movement in the US by people who once the US enters the war, people immediately drop off that Some people stay Nazis, but most people are like, Okay, well, we want to be American right wing people, not you know, our enemy right wing people or whatever. Right anyway. John Ford during World War Two, he joins the military as a filmmaker. He gets wounded twice filming battles. He lands at D Day, he films, and he got less cool as he got older.

He goes from fighting against McCarthyism to supporting Nixon and Reagan later but more important to the anti Nazi league and more personally. Really, it's actually not more important. It's just personal to me. My great grandfather was this tin pan alley songwriter who used to write songs in the nineteen twenties for this guy named Eddie Cantor. And Eddie Cantor was like this big vaudeville singer guy right, and he gave us be Eddie Cantor, not my great whatever

great grandfather, great great grandfather. He gave a speech at the inaugural party, and I just got really excited whenever I see his name, because I'm like, oh, maybe my great granddad was really cool. I don't know shit about my great granddad, and I'm not even gonna tell you his name because Nazis have already worked hard enough figure out who my family is anyway. Uh Okay. So they published not that there's like a through line to the

modern world or anything like that. So they published two papers, the Hollywood Anti Nazi News and Hollywood Now, which I feel like Hollywood Now is probably like a cleverer way to name your paper.

like that she was a Nazi or whatever. My argument is why this is obviously a lie, is that the Anti Nazi League was like boycotting him over it and making it really clear ahead of time and doing all of this press being like, don't host the Nazi lady with her Nazi propaganda, And he's like, oh, I just well, as an a political filmmaker, I'll just show you around this space. You know, I don't know why he is

that accent. He does not know that accent. So a Disney animator the main evidence of Disney as a Nazi. There's a lot of weird rumors and complicated things around it, but the like main single thing that I can point to and be like, no, he was a fucking Nazi. A Disney animator named Art Babbitt said quote, in the immediate years before we entered World War Two, there was a small but fiercely loyal I suppose legal following of

the Nazi Party. There were open meetings anyone could attend, and I wanted to see what was going on myself. On more than one occasion, I observed Walt Disney and his lawyer there, along with a lot of prominent Nazi afflicted Hollywood personalities. Disney was going to these meetings all the time. So my argument with that he was a Nazi is that he went to Nazi organized Yeah.

other bigotry happening in Hollywood films at the time. Like, I think it wasn't particularly exemplary, I mean, or like particularly standoutish, right, But but yeah, so people are like, oh, it wasn't a Nazi because he like didn't have personal bigotry against Jews necessarily his entire life. But my argument is that I literally am not thinking about that one way or the other because I don't have enough information.

I'm just saying he went to fucking Nazi medians and he was like super right wing, so I don't know, it's not hard right, And and some of his films were the last ones to be he was like trying to be buzz of the Nazis, and some of his films were the last American films to get banned in Germany during the war, and Gobels and all the rest.

They actually put together a plan to try and figure out if they could claim that Walt Disney was German so that they could get it, get his films to be allowed to continue to be played because they liked his film so much, because they were kind of right wing, you know, and so they were like put together this thing about whether or not they could get away with claiming he was born Walter Distler instead of Walt Disney. And that's not Disney's fault, like he didn't make sure

Goebels do that once the war started. And this is the other reason that people claim that he wasn't a Nazi. He absolutely like the rest of these fucking Nazis. As soon as the US entered the war against Germany. He was like, no, no, no, I'm an American right wing person and so now I'm anti Nazi. He was just a social conservative capitalist, and he made a whole bunch

of anti Nazis during the war because everyone did. But very few of the Hollywood studios were willing to stick their necks out in critique fascism at the time, like very very few. Foreign films made up about forty percent of movie revenue before World War two. This is like

before America entered the war. Basically, okay, and so they didn't want to rock the boat, right, because they're like, well, we want the foreign market and we want all the Nazi controlled areas to still show her movies and give us money. With one exception, the Warner Brothers okay, the most based Hollywood studio of the nineteen thirties. Harry and Jack Warner were the sons of a Jewish cobbler who had fled pogroms in Poland, and they didn't forget their roots.

Theirs was the first studio to criticize Hitler in a nineteen thirty three Looney Tunes cartoon called Bosco's Picture Show, in which Hitler is chasing someone around with a meat cleaver. The person they're chasing around is play by someone whose last name is Drante. But I forgot to write down his first.

these other major studios were Jewish too. It's almost like an ethnic heritage doesn't make you a good or bad person. Instead, it's your own actions that do that.

Hollywood had a self censorship board called the Production Code Administration, which was led by this anti Semite named Joseph Breen. And when I say anti Semite, I'm not, once again not trying to be like subtle here, because he wasn't very subtle. What he said what's wrong with Hollywood was all the quote lousy Jews and that ninety five percent of Jews were Eastern Jews, the scum of the earth.

compared the KKK to the Nazis. They made a nineteen thirty eight version of the Adventures of Robinhood that was like really transparently about the need to fight Nazis. And then they made a film that I had never heard of but made a big fucking we'll talk about what a big deal it was. They made a film called Confessions of a Nazi Spy. Either of you ever heard of.

this film. The Reich declared it would ban all films ever made by any of the actors in the film. Other studios wanted it to not come out because they were afraid the Nazis would ban all American films if this movie came out, which eventually the Nazis did ban

all American films. A PCA official wrote, are we ready to depart from the pleasant and profitable course of entertainment to engage in propaganda, to produce screen portrayals arousing controversy, conflict, racial, religious, and nationalistic antagonism, and outright human hatred?

and he didn't like. Griffith didn't like how many people were calling his movie racist and we're being quote unquote intolerant towards his Yeah movie that he then made a movie a couple of years later called Intolerance because he didn't like that people were so intolerant of his work.

school kids with swastikas on their sleeves. A few crummy blocks from our studio, Is that what you want in exchange for some crummy film royalties from Germany?

Confessions of a Nazi Spy. They received more than one hundred threatening letters and they have to hire extra security. They didn't do any publicity for it. The cast and cruise names were kept secret until like right before release, and they were hard to recruit casting crew in the first place. And it was like almost entirely made by German refugees and like committed anti fascists from the US.

And this movie was controversial. And when I say controversial, I'm going to quote from an article by Stephen J. Ross. Not everyone was enamored with the film. Nazi sympathizers in Milwaukee burned down the local Warner Brothers theater shortly after the movie opened. Angry citizens in other cities picketed theaters, slashed seats, and threatened exhibitors. In Poland, anti Semitic audiences hanged several theater owners in their movie houses for exhibiting

the films. Film Nazis burned the film everywhere they could exert pressure. Wow, so people like literally died for showing this anti fascist film, which is like the stakes that

I think sometimes gets forgotten about. You know, the film was carried to its premiere in an armored car and all the chicken shit celebrities didn't show up because not many of them did, but many of the like A list celebrities didn't show up because they were afraid of being seen as quote political, and their like excuse that they came up with MGM Studios through a birthday party for someone that night, like a surprise birthday party, like all of a sudden to give all their stars an

excuse to miss it. And there's some kind of like one of the most interesting parallels to me about this as everything in the world compares to the Spanish Civil War in my head, which is not true. But you

know whatever, my brain fixates on things. And the Americans who fought against fascism in the Spanish Civil War were called premature anti fascists and they were mistrusted and they had had trouble, like they would like later go and sign up for the army because being like, well, we fought not fascist before and we want to fight him again. And the army was like holding them at arm's length, being like, we don't trust you because you're too anti fascist,

because you were prematurely anti fascist. And this happens to the filmmakers and shit right, they're now under suspicion because they were anti fascist before the US government was officially anti fascist. And it was basically seen as as big of a deal as the birth of the nation. But from the opposite point of view. A Jewish film producer, Lou Edelman wrote to his bossy last night the motion picture, like the concept of the motion picture had a bar mitzvah.

It came of age. It said today I am a man, so big fucking deal. I've never heard of it. I kind of want to go watch.

various people opposed to fascism. But they had another there's another comparison I can make against with the Popular Front of Spain because the people fighting the Popular Front fighting fascism in Spain had a problem, and that problem was Stalin, because Stalin, you know, went around and like started shooting everyone else who didn't agree with him in the middle of the war and caused all this terrible shit. The

Hollywood Popular Front also had a problem. You want to guess what that problem was.

in case of Nazi aggression. So the Hollywood Anti Nazi League was created in that context in which the USSR wanted Americans to be anti Nazi. But have you ever heard of them? I keep asking I need to stop asking you questions. Have you ever heard of it? I don't like putting you on the spot like that.

out decades later. It carved up chunks of Eastern Europe and the Baltic states in Finland and said, okay, we can invade this, you can invade that. They just like split up the spoils of war with Nazi Germany. And the most dramatic effects of this, of course, is that Germany and the USSR both invaded Poland. And then they held like common parades where the Red Army and the weimarcht or whatever would like march around together and be like, we are friends. You know, people don't like talking about

this as much. And then the USSR conquered finn tried to conquer Finland, which gets called the Winter War, and the Finns put up a surprising resistance and the USSR seals about nine percent of the country instead of all of the country. And you know how the USSR. The the way that they got the USSR got that packed with Hitler is Stalin gave an order to quote purge the Foreign Ministry.

But the USSR tried to join Hitler basicallyops, yeah, exactly. Doesn't look great in retrospect. The biggest deal, of course, was how the USSR invaded a bunch of places and then sent millions of tons of food to Hitler, because there was the Western Powers had a blockade on Germany, you know, and so they would like send shit all the way from the eastern part of Russia. But there's

another thing that mattered at all of this too. All the communist parties in the West were forced to become anti anti fascist because now anti fascism so so communists in Parliament in France, like a few weeks earlier, had voted unanimously for war against Germany, but then they were like suddenly against the war and called it imperialist. It would be imperialist for France to attack Nazi Germany, m

because the Soviet Union was suddenly friends. Yeah, I guess there's always a bit of bastards in every episode about good people. And all the anti fascist organizations that were just communist front groups got dissolved, or sometimes they did worse than dissolve. The Hollywood Anti Nazi League didn't just dissolve, It joined the American Peace Mobilization, an organization dedicated to keeping the US from helping written in France, and they're fight against the fucking Nazis.

And then all of the people who were there because they were like communists loyal to the USSR stay and become anti anti fascists, got it, and they start fighting against military recruitment until of course the Nazis invade the USSR, and then they became the American People's Mobilization, and then they tried to get the US into the war, and then after the war, during the Cold War, they decide now they're pacifists and they become the National Committee to

win the peace. Mm hmm, which is I guess like my takeaway from this is it's cool to be a coalition with other anti fascists, but maybe don't trust the people who are only into it for some weird, other shady reason.

to the war. Megan Feenie, in an article for the site Movie, described Hollywood once the US was involved in the war, and said the war represented a pivotal moment in Hollywood history, one in which the US film industry came to take itself seriously as a significant socio political force. Hollywood's left liberal filmmakers ascended during the war, and in close collaboration with the Roosevelt administration, used fascism as a foil to redefine the so called American War on their

own terms, emphasizing popular democracy. Civil liberties were just tolerance, ethnic pluralism, and liberal internationalism. And so the anti war movies that were happening during the war weren't just we hate the Nazis from like kind of a right wing point of view. They were being made by the people who are like mostly being made by the people who are the most versed in being actually anti Nazi, being leftists,

you know. And this is in contrast to how later during the Cold War, starting the late forties, conservatives take control of Hollywood and bring Hollywood back to it's like so called a political past of being conservative, and you get the Red Scare, you get the Hollywood Blacklist. And at this point, at that point, the like leftists in Hollywood or even just the like anti censorship people in Hollywood kind of pivot to just being First Amendment groups.

Instead of being like fighting for liberal ideas in Hollywood, they're literally fighting for like, please just let us have fucking free speech.

worst things. Okay, anyway, it's this anti fascist era that gives us the Nazis the ultimate villain, and it also gives us the unfortunate like good war narrative and the idea that like America is the savior of humanity. And then I found it even more disturbing shit that even the lefties and liberals were doing at this time, or at least some of them were. So you know how like Nazis are like the ultimate villain right in Hollywood,

they didn't start out that way because of racism. More films with Nazis, like films with Nazis started off before the war like really got in, were like usually Nazis could be like redeemed right and like a lot of like Nazi collaborators like come around to see the light.

The Japanese, however, were presented as monsters, and the Japanese were to be fought in a similar way to other like classic monsters of the screen, the indigenous people of North America, who the US is, you know, continuing its war of genocide and expansion against So basically everyone can twist anti fascism into obnoxious propagandistic ends to do really bad things. That's my that's actually turned into more of

a bastard's episode than I thought. Okay, actually that we're about to get into the most complicated of them all.

April sixteenth, eighteen eighty nine. He grew up dirt fucking poor in South London to a probably Roma family in a community of like sex workers and buskers and like just like down and out folks coming up with the creative means by which to survive. He might have been born in Evardo the wagons that Roma folks would have, and he grew up more or less orphaned. And he's not even fucking seven years old when he's like clog

dancing on the streets outside bars for money. And you know what he could have done with that money, Caitlin Durante.

with a theater troop. At age seven, he learns physical comedy. He moves to America to make films in the nineteen tens, and by age twenty six, he's maybe the most famous man in the world. People refer to it as like the world was suffering from chaplain itis. He's like the symbol of popular culture. And there's two stories to tell about chaplain because and they're fucking messy to resolve with

each other. And I think that learning how to not necessarily resolve with these with each other, but understand them both, I think is like crucial. Sure, I'm gonna start with the bad story, because before I say cool shit about a guy, I want to say he sucks. He's a fucking monster. He is an early example of why Hollywood is a misogynist cesspool run by fucking predators. Yeah, he bragged to have slept with two thousand women in his lifetime.

He never trusted women. He constantly married children. He always waited until they were sixteen to marry them. His first wife, Mildred Harris, was sixteen when they got married. The story is that she feigned pregnancy to get married, but I don't know. That's his story, and I don't fucking trust anything he has to say. And once they got married, she wound up institutionalized for weeks, and when she divorced him, she cited cruelty as the reason for the divorce. He

was a literal groomer. His second wife, Lyda Gray, was twelve when they met. At sixteen, he started assaulting her, then married her while she was pregnant to avoid statutory rape charges. He tried to pressure her into an abortion and he also and she said no to that. And then so he tried to pick a random man her age to marry her to take the and then take care of the kid, and offered, like the man like two hundred thousand dollars to do this, Oh my god,

but she turned that down as well. So he married her and a little horror and told her to kill herself because Charlie Chaplin is the fucking worst. She was around nineteen when he divorced her. His next wife was a seventeen year old who he claims told him that she was twenty two. His final wife was thirty six years younger than him. He was fifty four, she was eighteen. She was terrified of him and regularly locked herself in her room to get away from him. He had tons

of children. He was constantly cruel to all of them. He got sued over parentage, lost that suit in nineteen twenty six. He described his ideal woman as I am not exactly in love with her, but she is entirely in love with me.

confidence to his viewers and to the world. He described how he survived in his youth by the exubriance that comes from utter confidence in yourself. Without it, you go down and defeat. And his main character the Little Tramp. No matter what happens, he picks himself up and he

trots off jauntily into the sunset. It's also the story of a person with an unshakable political moral compass with the largest blind spot the world has ever seen, an unshakable moral compass when it's applied on a geopolitical level instead of an interpersonal level. In the nineteen thirties, he did radio broadcast supporting the New Deal and his first talkie, his first non silent movie. He was like one of the last people to want to switch over to talkies

was The Great Dictator in nineteen forty. It came out before the US entered the war. His Little Tramp character is modified slightly into a Jewish barber, and he also plays a like really obvious Hitler clone. And it's the first and this is the first time that a Hollywood film acknowledges that the Nazis were specifically after the Jews. And I think it's interesting to me that also the fact that he was roma like this is something that affects him right right, and it brings us one of

the greatest moments in political Hollywood history. At the end of the film, the Jewish barber is mistaken for the dictator, and he goes up and he gives a speech, and the film gets rid of the fourth wall, much as Brecked and all the other people would have liked right and specifically as a way to counter propaganda, look directly at the camera and talk, which is interesting because I feel like, now if you did that, it would kind of read as propagandistic, and like this speech that he

gives is kind of propagandistic, but by breaking the fourth wall it ties into this art movement at the time of using that to get people to question shit. So the Jewish barber goes up, pretending to be the dictator, and he gives a speech about how we should destroy national borders, how we should never listen to despots, how soldiers should fight for democracy and against dictatorship, and I'm I'm going to read part of it. I don't want to rule or conquer anyone. I should like to help

everyone if possible, jew, gentile, black man, white. We all want to help one another. Human beings are like that. We want to live by each other's happiness, not for each by each other's misery. We don't want to hate and despise one another. In this world, there is room for everyone, and the good Earth is rich and can provide for everyone. The way of life can be free and beautiful. But we have lost the way. Greed has poisoned men's souls, has barricaded the world with hate, has

goose stepped us into misery and bloodshed. We have developed speed, but we have shut ourselves in. Machinery gives abundance. That gives abundance has left us in want. Our knowledge has made us cynical, our cleverness hard and unkind. We think too much and feel too little. More than machinery, we need humanity more than cleverness. We need kindness and gentleness. Without these qualities, life will be violent and all will

be lost. And he just goes on in this like complete not what people are fucking doing in movies at the time, And he spent two years making The Great Dictator, and all the while the English and American censors because England isn't at war at the start. England isn't at war with Nazi Germany either, and they're like, don't fucking make this movie. We're at peace with Hitler. You can't make fun of Hitler. And he basically is like, all right, well,

I'm going to hire all the movie halls myself. I'm the most famous man in the world, and I'm going to fucking make this anti Nazi film mm hm, because I fucking hate Hitler. And before he finishes it, war was on and France was conquered and England was at war with Germany and the US hadn't entered the war yet. It winds up his highest grossing film up to that date,

but it's controversial. A lot of the critics of the last speech was just him declaring communism, which is funny because it's a speech about democracy, like literally uses the word democracy over and over again. And the press starts to hate him at this point, and he literally tanks his career with this. All of his films afterwards play to his existing fan base but fail to attract new audiences because the press spends the rest of his life

attacking him. Sometimes the press gets it right and they attack him for being a fucking child, raping piece of shit, fucking absolute monster.

people on the radio. But while he's reading it, he's in a hall and Nazis, American Nazis in the audience are like jeering him and coughing really loudly and trying to disrupt the whole thing. And he also in his autobiography, he wrote about the film quote, had I known the actual horrors of the German concentration camps, I could not have made The Great Dictator. I could not have made fun of the homicidal insanity of the Nazis. However, I was determined to ridicule their mystic bilge about a pure

blooded race. And uh, it seems like you you can react as this like tension or weirdness, like.

and Russia. I don't care that they're communists, right, I hate Nazis. In the middle of his autobiography, while talking about the speeches he was giving he like and all the flaks he got, he stops and then spends like a paragraph talking about the tits of some lady that he saw. Because he's a piece of shit, there's no other. He gets labeled a communist, which he denies his entire life because he wasn't a communist. He called himself two

things instead. This part makes me sad. He called himself a peacemonger, and he called himself an anarchist, and I don't want him. In nineteen fifty seven, he put out a king in New York and he's playing a king and his own ten year old son plays a kid who choose him out about how evil giant corporations are and how national borders is like shitty and the whole thing is this anti McCarthy film. And the same year he says he's an anarchist, he says, as for politics,

an anarchist, I hate governments and rules and fetters. Can't stand caged animals. People must be free, except obviously not except teenage.

though you're not. And this should be a story about a Roma born anarchist filmmaker makes himself into the greatest star in the world, gambles at all to pressure the US government publican too go into war against the Nazi empire, and instead it's a story about a gross fucking man who ripped teenagers who went to parties, and his way of entertaining people at parties was to mimic a woman having an orgasm. So fuck you, Charlie Chaplin for fucking

all that up. When Chaplain died, some grave robbers still his body and they held it for ransom. They called up one of his ex wives and was like, we've got Chaplain. She says, so what and hangs up the phone.

and leftism that flows through filmmaking. So what we've learned here today is that Shrek uh, not the ogre with the donkey friend, but Max Shrek, as far as we know, Yeah, it wasn't a real life monster slash predatory vampire literally like but yeah, there's I mean, I'm glad there were

people I never quite understand. I don't know, I've complicated feelings about this because on one hand, Hollywood and many, many of not most film industries around the world are I mean, they're all for sure capitalists, and they are you know, priority number one is to make entertainment, is

you know, to entertain and some of that. But but I think a lot of people conflate that entertainment has to be completely escapist and cannot also be informative or you know, getting behind a particular movement or like political ideology or like, I don't know, the people who are like, no, entertainment should just be strictly entertainment all the time, one hundred percent and not anything that has any sort of

like political message, I don't trust those people. Yeah, because while a lot of the entertainment I like is very strictly you know, like silly, mindless, escapist media, a lot of it is also very political or like, you know, has some kind of message that could be perceived as political. So anyone who's like entertainment should never be political, I

don't Again, I don't, I just don't agree. So for the people who are willing to with their platform and with their art form and entertainment also push a political agenda, especially if that political agenda is anti fascist. That's rock and roll. So good for them, and fuck Charlie Chaplin and.

and they're both Titanic related. So really just filling out the trifecta of my personality. We've got Titanic, Paddington, and now are r R.