We use Optical Character Recognition (OCR) during our scanning and processing workflow to make the content of each page searchable. You can view the automatically generated text below as well as copy and paste individual pieces of text to quote in your own work.
Text recognition is never 100% accurate. Many parts of the scanned page may not be reflected in the OCR text output, including: images, page layout, certain fonts or handwriting.
FOREIGN RELATIONS 525
I can think of no more ironical illustration than the strange case of Hitler himself, the number-one enemy of the American motion picture industry— officially! In 1937, Sinclair Lewis' story, It Can't Happen Here, was absolutely banned in Germany because it was a bitter portrayal of how a dictator can rob a people of their freedom. But a dispatch to the New York Times by its Stockholm representative on November 14, 1943, presented the following interesting revelation:
Hitler is a great film fan and is disinclined to forgo this pleasure while traveling— hence a moving picture theatre on wheels. He likes especially American films, and wherever his army or navy is able to seize any late American releases, the reels are speeded to him for a showing.
Last week a nice windfall reached him this way when the Germans confiscated a large number of copies of the more recent American films aboard the Swedish liner Drottningholm, returning from Scotland after a voyage with exchanged prisoners of war.
The Germans took off the films at their Kristiansand control port in Norway. So this week Hitler has been able to see Walt Disney's Bambi, and Qrash Dive, starring Tyrone Power, Cairo, starring von Stroheim, and Coney Island featuring Betty Grable.
The Fuehrer thus betrayed, quite without intention, the essential reason why American pictures have a future. Everybody likes them.
One grimly humorous side light on the influence of American pictures, as symbolized by the "stars," appeared in an item carried by Newsweek in January of 1948. The story told how in Russia the pictures of Clark Gable, Dorothy Lamour, and others were found over and over in beauty parlors, barbershops, and wherever people were apt to gather informally. Then came the crushing order: "This unique advertising of American cinema trash . . . the output of trashy displays with portraits of Hollywood cinema actors, is categorically forbidden."
Maybe the Russians knew what they were doing! Maybe there is more explosive democracy in our pictures than we realize. In my annual report for 1944 I wrote: "The vitality of all our democratic processes depends upon the freedom of communication among free men." That's just what Russia fears!
I want to close this attempt at defining the international impact of American motion pictures by quoting a statement I have heard Governor Milliken repeatedly make at the headquarters of the Association in New York:
"From this office, through the channels of the industry we represent, go out more currents of thought, world-wide, than from any other single source."
That's something worth mulling over!