Sean Burns
If you walked in a minute or two late and missed the ominous opening shots of gathering clouds, one could easily misconstrue from the beginning of The Mortal Storm that you were watching a cutesy family comedy. The first few scenes of Frank Borzage’s stark 1940 political drama follow university professor Victor Roth on his 60th birthday. Played by Frank Morgan — better known to audiences as The Wizard of Oz — the cuddly old eccentric keeps dropping hints about what day it is to his friends and colleagues, all of whom pretend to have forgotten the occasion before surprising him with elaborate birthday gifts and tributes. Everybody loves Professor Roth.
The mood is festive and bright in their little alpine village when the professor’s birthday dinner turns into an engagement party for Roth’s daughter Freya (Margaret Sullavan) and her longtime suitor Fritz Marberg (Robert Young). This comes as a great disappointment to family friend Martin Breitner (James Stewart), who we quickly ascertain has always had eyes for Freya. Amid the congratulations and jubilation, an excited maid bursts into the room.
“I have the most wonderful news,” she announces, “Adolf Hitler has been appointed chancellor of Germany!”
Everyone at the party is overjoyed and starts toasting to a brighter future for their country. That is, everyone except for Professor Roth and his pacifist pal Martin. Stewart’s wary reticence cuts through the clinking glasses and celebratory speeches. It’s one of those scenes that remind you why Jimmy Stewart was Jimmy Stewart, and there’s a comfort in realizing that there’s no way this all-American avatar of decency is going to behave like a good German. Martin’s got some issues with this Hitler fella, and he’s even more concerned for his friend Professor Roth, who – in the parlance of the film – is a “non-Aryan.”
Based on a 1937 novel by Phyllis Bottome, The Mortal Storm chronicles the rise of the Third Reich not via a sweeping historical epic, but rather through its effects on one family and their sleepy little mountain community. All the more harrowing for being so small and personal, the movie cuts close to the bone in the way few wartime dramas do. It’s also shockingly early, only the second Hollywood movie to confront the Nazi menace head-on. The ever-belligerent Jack Warner’s Confessions of a Nazi Spy beat it to theaters by a year, but that didn’t stop the Congressional yahoos in Charles Lindbergh’s “America First” goon squad from hauling MGM owner Nicholas Schenck in front of the Clark Committee hearings on Propaganda in Motion Pictures, heartily denouncing The Mortal Storm on the Senate floor a mere three months before Pearl Harbor.
Joseph Goebbels enjoyed the picture even less than Lindbergh did, and banned any future MGM movies from screening in Germany. (Those are two thumbs down any filmmaker would be proud to earn.)
Borzage is best known these days for the gloriously unhinged screwball comedy History Is Made at Night, but what’s so powerful about The Mortal Storm is its restraint. We see the creeping insidiousness with which fascism infects the people of this tight-knit community. We watch neighbors slowly begin to shun each other, and then worse as the bullying inevitably becomes physical. It’s as gradual as the proverbial frog in a boiling pot, until finally, family members are firing on each other in the film’s harrowing conclusion.
Before that, Professor Roth runs afoul of the new regime by refusing to teach junk race science. It’s no coincidence that the Reich’s first targets are at the university, as it’s impossible for an idiotic ideology to thrive where knowledge is valued. The beloved professor is drummed out of the school and into a concentration camp for having the gall to insist that there’s no physiological difference between the blood of Aryans and “non-Aryans.” (Such terminology was a concession to the skittish studio. The world “Jew” is never said aloud in the film, but in the camp scene you can spot Roth wearing an armband emblazoned with the letter “J.”)
The same year The Mortal Storm was released, Stewart also starred in The Philadelphia Story, drunkenly carrying around an unconscious Katherine Hepburn while singing “Over the Rainbow.” (He carries Sullavan in this film under startlingly different circumstances.) Sullavan, Stewart and Morgan had all just appeared together earlier that year in Ernst Lubitsch’s The Shop Around the Corner, maybe the most effervescent romantic comedy ever made. But nobody sings “Over The Rainbow” in their follow-up, and the Wizard of Oz dies in a concentration camp. A few months after The Mortal Storm was released and seven days after winning an Oscar for The Philadelphia Story, Stewart enlisted in the Army.
I can’t imagine what seeing this movie must have been like for audiences when it was first released. But I can tell you how unsettling it is to watch The Mortal Storm now. Maybe 85 years ago it might have been distracting to watch Hollywood movie stars playing Germans who slip into authoritarianism, but now their American accents just make the movie seem more sickeningly timely. I was lucky enough to see a rare 35mm print at the historic Somerville Theatre as part of their popular “F—k the Nazis” series, and watching it projected on film in a beautifully restored, 111-year-old movie palace made the experience feel almost haunted. The audience filed out afterward in stunned silence.
The film’s epilogue returns us to the now empty rooms where those saccharine early scenes took place. We hear ghostly echoes of the characters’ voices on the soundtrack, lost to a history we seem doomed to repeat.
“The Mortal Storm” is streaming on HBO Max.
