On New Year's Day, I watched a very good documentary on PBS called "Cinema's Exiles," about mostly Jewish filmmakers who fled Germany after Hitler came to power and worked in Hollywood.
It was two hours long and went beyond "the usual suspects." They showed footage from "Asphalt" and "People on sunday," and they had what must have been Fritz lang's home movies from life in California. The filmmakers crammed a lot into two hours. A very few things were a little dippy. (I fail to see how "the Wolf Man" is an allegory about Hitler. "The spiral Staircase," okay, I sort of see some anti-Nazi allegorical message there, but not "The Wolf Man.") But they had TV interviews with Fritz Lang, Robert Siodmak, Billy Wilder and Fred Zinnemann.
They mentioned that one of the editors who won the Oscar for "Prizzi's Honor" had come to Hollywood as a refugee from Hitler. that made me wonder which film is the last Weimar-Hollywood film?
A very good production.
PBS Documentary "Cinema's Exiles"
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Mr. Arkadin
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I enjoyed the documentary, but found that identifying some of the individuals shown in the rare photos included in the film might have helped viewers. I was particularly touched by the attempts of Paul Kohner to get people out of Germany.
If you're interested in this subject, you might enjoy City of Nets: A Portrait of Hollywood in the 1940's by Otto Friedrich which I've found does a great job of describing the sometimes uneasy relations between the very American LA and the wealth of talent that poured into the city from Nazi Europe. Another good book about this might be Strangers in Paradise: The Hollywood émigrés, 1933-1950 by John Russell Taylor, which gives a brief, occasionally vivid overview of the period.
The screenwriter (and occasional actress) Salka Viertel, who had the closest thing to a salon in the Hollywood of her time, wrote about the artistic emigrants' first hand experience in her autobiography The Kindness of Strangers. Though I wouldn't trust it entirely for dates and such, since it needs to be taken with a few grains of salt, it is interesting. Viertel may be best remembered as a close friend and collaborator of Garbo, though Viertel's life seems a bit more complicated than it appears and she was very much the center of a very starry group of émigrés, so you might find yourself sitting between Bertolt Brecht and Fritz Kortner or Thomas Mann and Marcel Dalio at one of her open house parties.
If you're interested in this subject, you might enjoy City of Nets: A Portrait of Hollywood in the 1940's by Otto Friedrich which I've found does a great job of describing the sometimes uneasy relations between the very American LA and the wealth of talent that poured into the city from Nazi Europe. Another good book about this might be Strangers in Paradise: The Hollywood émigrés, 1933-1950 by John Russell Taylor, which gives a brief, occasionally vivid overview of the period.
The screenwriter (and occasional actress) Salka Viertel, who had the closest thing to a salon in the Hollywood of her time, wrote about the artistic emigrants' first hand experience in her autobiography The Kindness of Strangers. Though I wouldn't trust it entirely for dates and such, since it needs to be taken with a few grains of salt, it is interesting. Viertel may be best remembered as a close friend and collaborator of Garbo, though Viertel's life seems a bit more complicated than it appears and she was very much the center of a very starry group of émigrés, so you might find yourself sitting between Bertolt Brecht and Fritz Kortner or Thomas Mann and Marcel Dalio at one of her open house parties.