Reply To: Watching movies made during WWII?

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#726142
charliehall
Participant

“Should I be taking such enjoyment from a movie that was made in 1939, a time that was so horrible for our us in Europe?”

It is a reminder of how Americans were so clueless and disinterested in what was going on across the Atlantic.

You should also see “Gone With the Wind” by the same director, produced in the same year, to see the the sanitized portrayal of chattel slavery.

But also see the 1940 film “The Great Dictator”, a bitter satire of Hitler and the Nazis directed by (and starring) Charlie Chaplin. It was the first anti-Nazi movie made in America (1940) and Chaplin’s first talking picture. Chaplin (who was not Jewish) hated Hitler and the Nazis but he later said that he could not have made a satirical movie had he know how bad things really were. “The Great Dictator” was very popular in the US and the UK and helped increase popular support for the anti-Nazi cause.