Reconstructed interview in 1934 doc "Hitler's Reign of Terror"
Seen at MoMA’s annual “To Save and Project” series of recent archival cine-discoveries and restorations (and screening again Monday afternoon, October 28), two bargain-basement, off-Hollywood anti-Nazi films from the mid 1930s—both virtually unknown here and doubly rare in that they first appeared at a time so few such statements were made.
“Hitler’s Reign of Terror” (1934) directed by and featuring roving reporter Cornelius Vanderbilt, Jr. is a clumsy piece of work (all the more so for having been recut after World War II broke out in 1939) but it has an undeniable and at times startling immediacy. Filming in Germany in the spring of 1933, Vanderbilt managed to smuggle out a few rolls of 16mm sound footage of a frenzied rally complete with Hitler rant—and also document what looks to have been a huge street demonstration in Vienna celebrating the Nazi seizure of power in Berlin. (Vanderbilt’s trip to Austria also includes a stopover in Hitler’s bleak-looking home village.)
“I Was a Captive of Nazi Germany” (1936) directed by Alfred T. Mannon is a docu-drama starring Isobel Lillian Steele—an American music student and party girl, arrested in Berlin on suspicion of espionage in the summer of 1934 and incarcerated on harsh conditions for four months until a US senator managed to get her free—as herself. Based on Steele’s newspaper tell-all, “Captive” was released to coincide with the opening of the 1936 Berlin Olympics. Frank Nugent’s New York Times review called the movie “less an exposé of Nazi persecution than a mirror for Miss Steele’s rather amazing unsophistication…. A dupe of an obvious spy ring and an equally obvious Communist agitator, she plunged blindly into an elephant trap and when caught proclaimed that she was an American citizen.”
A gawky diffident gal always on the verge of saying nerts Steele doesn’t inspire much sympathy but, as first-hand reconstruction of Nazi Germany, “Captive” does have some telling details (Berlin cabs with printed signs to inform the public that they don’t serve Jews) and like “Hitler’s Reign of Terror” it preserves the discomfiting novelty of the Third Reich, the sense of an unfolding story too huge to grasp. Confronted with a happily regimented society founded on organized cruelty, both movies are cautionary but confounded. “If you view Germany only as a spectator it’s a great show—but nobody seems to know what it means,” Vanderbilt muses as one point.
