Popular Culture Review Vol. 10, No. 2, August 1999 | Page 62

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Popular Culture Review

ventionists like John Howard Lawson, the writer of Blockade (1938, US, Wanger/
Warners, dir: William Dieterle), one of the first anti-fascist films produced by
Hollywood, America had a moral obligation to involve itself in this fight against
fascism. The aforementioned Blockade was probably the first film made in Holly
wood that directly addressed the issue of fascism, and it signaled the growing
influence of liberalism in Hollywood, an influence that would be curtailed from
1947 on, with the emergence of HUAC. Even though Blockade's script was wa
tered down by Warners who were under pressure from the Breen office and from
their foreign markets (Koppes and Black 24-27), the film was significant as it
represented a first attempt to deal with the immediate, worldwide threat of fas
cism. It was another example of Warner Brothers’ interest in political and social
matters, an interest motivated by commercial and ideological factors. Naturally,
Warners was primarily concerned with making money, but the heads of the studio
were also vehemently anti-Nazi, especially after the murder, in 1936, of Warners’
chief salesman, Joe Kaufmann, in Berlin by the Nazis (Shindler 23). Warners
would become the studio most associated with the war effort, especially after 1941.
Perhaps the best known of the anti-fascist films before 1941 was Fritz Lang’s
Confessions o f a Nazi Spy (1939, US, Warners), which located the fascist threat
not only in Europe, but also in America among immigrant Germans. The success
of this film led some Hollywood studios to adopt a more interventionist attitude,
an attitude that was reflected in film output after 1941.
Many of the war films and political thrillers made by Hollywood during
the war used the conventions of established genres, a point that has been made by
Koppes and Black: “The studios quickly grafted the war upon their traditional
formula pictures” (61). As profit was always uppermost in the minds of the studio
heads, the war was, to some extent, exploited. Studios knew that many of their
audience members were directly affected by the war and thus would have an inter
est in spending their money going to see films that might help them “share” the
experience of those who were away. As many commentators have noted, films
dealing with the war could, by their very nature, run into problems as the fighting
changed the facts every day (Koppes and Black 67). Such is the case with
Tourneur’s Days o f Glory, a film produced at a specific time, for a specific cause.
By the time Tourneur made Berlin Express, the huge changes that had enveloped
Euro-American relations had rendered the earlier film obsolete and potentially
dangerous. The same can be observed when one looks at Berlin Express, a film
written in 1946, shot in 1947, and released in 1948, by which time it had already
been overtaken by new political attitudes and events in both Europe and America.
Of all the films made by Jacques Tourneur in a rather uneven career.
Days o f Glory is surely one of his weakest. It was a film that Tourneur himself had
little time for, calling it “atrocious” and criticizing its “stylization” (Tavernier 50;