The mood is festive and bright in their little alpine village when the professor\u2019s birthday dinner turns into an engagement party for Roth\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cI have the most wonderful news,\u201d she announces, \u201cAdolf Hitler has been appointed chancellor of Germany!\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
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\u2019s wary reticence cuts through the clinking glasses and celebratory speeches. It\u2019s one of those scenes that remind you why Jimmy Stewart was Jimmy Stewart, and there\u2019s a comfort in realizing that there\u2019s no way this all-American avatar of decency is going to behave like a good German. Martin\u2019s got some issues with this Hitler fella, and he\u2019s even more concerned for his friend Professor Roth, who \u2013 in the parlance of the film \u2013 is a \u201cnon-Aryan.\u201d <\/p>\n\n\n\n
Based on a 1937 novel by Phyllis Bottome, The Mortal Storm<\/em> 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\u2019s also shockingly early, only the second Hollywood movie to confront the Nazi menace head-on. The ever-belligerent Jack Warner\u2019s Confessions of a Nazi Spy<\/em> beat it to theaters by a year, but that didn\u2019t stop the Congressional yahoos in Charles Lindbergh\u2019s \u201cAmerica First\u201d 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<\/em> on the Senate floor a mere three months before Pearl Harbor.<\/p>\n\n\n\n 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.)<\/p>\n\n\n\n Borzage is best known these days for the gloriously unhinged screwball comedy History Is Made at Night<\/em>,<\/a> but what\u2019s so powerful about The Mortal Storm<\/em> 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\u2019s as gradual as the proverbial frog in a boiling pot, until finally, family members are firing on each other in the film\u2019s harrowing conclusion.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Before that, Professor Roth runs afoul of the new regime by refusing to teach junk race science. It\u2019s no coincidence that the Reich\u2019s first targets are at the university, as it\u2019s 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\u2019s no physiological difference between the blood of Aryans and \u201cnon-Aryans.\u201d (Such terminology was a concession to the skittish studio. The world \u201cJew\u201d is never said aloud in the film, but in the camp scene you can spot Roth wearing an armband emblazoned with the letter \u201cJ.\u201d)<\/p>\n\n\n\n The same year The Mortal Storm<\/em> was released, Stewart also starred in The Philadelphia Story<\/em>, drunkenly carrying around an unconscious Katherine Hepburn while singing \u201cOver the Rainbow.\u201d (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\u2019s The Shop Around the Corner<\/em>, maybe the most effervescent romantic comedy ever made. But nobody sings \u201cOver The Rainbow\u201d in their follow-up, and the Wizard of Oz dies in a concentration camp. A few months after The Mortal Storm<\/em> was released and seven days after winning an Oscar for The Philadelphia Story<\/em>, Stewart enlisted in the Army.<\/p>\n\n\n\n I can\u2019t 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<\/em> 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<\/a> as part of their popular \u201cF\u2014k the Nazis\u201d series<\/a>, 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The film\u2019s epilogue returns us to the now empty rooms where those saccharine early scenes took place. We hear ghostly echoes of the characters\u2019 voices on the soundtrack, lost to a history we seem doomed to repeat.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cThe Mortal Storm\u201d is streaming on HBO Max<\/a>.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/06\/MortalStorm-still-1024x667.webp\")
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