The Mortal Storm (1940)

☆ ☆ ☆ ☆

The Mortal Storm (1940) – F. Borzage

Perhaps this film is all the more unsettling because, despite its blistering attack on the authoritarianism of Hitler’s government, no one in Hollywood could yet know the magnitude of the evil being enacted and/or contemplated in Nazi Germany at that point. Now 75 years later, at a “safe” distance, a viewer is forced to contemplate “could it happen again?”  It does seem unlikely…but politicians who espouse keeping Muslims out of their countries or locking refugees up in detention centres for unspecified periods of time seem to be moving us closer to that alternate reality.  But back in 1940, Jimmy Stewart is prepared to stand up to the other young people who have fallen in with Hitler (including Roberts Young and Stack), because he wants to be free to think what he wants.  He is in love with Margaret Sullavan who is the daughter of a famous (presumably Jewish) professor (played by Frank Morgan) who is arrested for teaching that the blood of people from all races is chemically and biologically identical.  Although the Nazi sympathizers are portrayed extremely negatively, this is less a political treatise and more a story of thwarted romance, as Stewart’s love for Sullavan is complicated when the authorities force him to flee the country but then prevent her from doing so.  A daring escape becomes the only way out.  If only they knew then that Austria would not be far enough away.