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524 MOTION PICTURES I922-I945
dinner a splendid windup of the London visit, leaving a vivid impression of our mutual interests and our common goal.
The following day, after a luncheon at the Carlisle House, we took the boat train to Southampton and boarded the Normandie, along with a big group of our old friends and with Mistinguette and a company of French dancers who, we all admitted, considerably enlivened the homeward crossing.
Because our films so well depict the life of a free people under democratic government, the Axis nations virtually declared war on them long before Pearl Harbor. This film war had begun in Germany soon after the Nazis came to power in 1933. The Nuremberg laws imposed Nazi supervision upon all the German branches of our American film companies. Censorship by the Nazi Propaganda Bureau also was included among these elaborate devices to prevent the showing of outstanding American pictures.
The Nazis not only feared the effects of American films on their own people, but thev also feared their influence on world opinion. They took all the measures they could to combat the release of our pictures in Latin America and the Far East as well. Their activities in the International Film Chamber, which they formed with representatives of other countries in Europe, but which was essentially an Axis instrument, were aimed primarily at reducing the markets for American pictures on the European continent. With the growing tension there as the war clouds darkened, political censorship became particularly severe.
An interesting bit of honest evidence on the other side came from pre-war Germany, where with characteristic German thoroughness Dr. Franz Loelsch, industrial physician to the Bavarian Government, reported on tests made there. Said Dr. Koelsch :
We find in Germany that the increasing popularity of motion pictures leads more and more to the whole family taking its recreation as a unit. That is great progress from a sociological standpoint. Tests which we made of the psychological effect of American motion pictures brought us to the conclusion that the inevitability of punishment, as portrayed in plots under the safeguards voluntarily adopted by the producers in the United States, tend to make the screen a positive deterrent from crime.
Foreign governments have always found difficulty in objecting to American films on ideological or propaganda grounds. The scrupulous care observed by American producers in following the Production Code has barred such charges from any serious basis of truth. It is their natural, healthful, ingenuous freedom from propaganda that has made our films not only palatable but refreshing to people living under widely differing civilizations.