BOOTLEG FILES 809: “Lambeth Walk – Nazi Style” (1942 short that riffs on “Triumph of the Will” with a soundtrack featuring an instrumental version of “The Lambeth Walk”).
LAST SEEN: On YouTube.
AMERICAN HOME VIDEO: In public domain anthologies.
REASON FOR BOOTLEG STATUS: Unauthorized use of Leni Riefenstahl’s film coupled with music clearance issues.
CHANCES OF SEEING A COMMERCIAL DVD RELEASE: It is out there, rights clearance be damned.
Some humor is timeless – think of Shakespeare’s comedies, Mark Twain’s novels and the Three Stooges’ knockabout. But with some humor, time is not an ally and it can difficult for later generations to appreciate what their predecessors were laughing about.
One example of humor that isn’t quite as funny today as it was yesteryear is a two-minute short film that goes under a variety of titles but is perhaps best known as “Lambeth Walk – Nazi Style.” When this was first shown in 1942, it created a mild sensation on both sides of World War II. Viewed today, however, it is difficult to appreciate its value without understanding the context behind its creation.
“The Lambeth Walk” was a jaunty song-and-dance number from the 1937 British stage musical “Me and My Girl.” The dance was a walking strut while the accompanying tune was a celebration of the Cockney London culture. If you’ve never heard it, here is the number from the 1939 film version of “Me and My Girl.”
In class-conscious England, the song was an unlikely hit – and even King George VI and his wife Queen Elizabeth were fans. The Cockney cultural resonance was not as impactful on the other side of the Atlantic, but the song’s playful lyrics and melody caught the fancy of various big bands, including Duke Ellington’s.
The song also created something of a craze across the European continent, which was on the verge of rupturing into war. In Germany, the song was retitled “Lambert’s Nachtlokal” and the dance was popular in clubs that focused on swing music. But when a Nazi Party official denounced the song and accompanying dance as “Jewish mischief and animalistic hopping,” it had the opposite effect on the German public – they kept singing and dancing to it, even during World War II.
In 1942, while the war was still raging, “The Lambeth Walk” was still playing on radios on both sides of the conflict. As a propaganda tweak, an official in the British Ministry of Information named Charles A. Ridley decided to adapt the sprightly dance associated with “The Lambeth Walk” and use it to ridicule Hitler’s Nazi military. Ridley took a print of Leni Riefenstahl’s “Triumph of the Will” without the filmmaker’s knowledge – hey, it was wartime and intellectual property concerns were the last thing on anyone’s mind – and re-edited the work to fit an instrumental version of “The Lambeth Walk.”
Ridley re-edited the film to show marching Nazi soldiers parading to the tune, but he played around with the footage and had the soldiers marching backwards as well as forwards. Hitler was shown giving manic hand gestures and facial emotions to the song’s jolly melody. For audiences in 1942, the sight of the Third Reich’s military power being reduced to pompous figures worthy of ridicule was a happy distraction for British moviegoers who were already into their third year of a grueling war.
The British Ministry of Information released the film without credits to U.K. theaters. In the U.S., producer Leslie Winik picked up the film and retitled it “Schichlegruber Doing the Lambeth Walk” – the “Schichlegruber” reference was a slur used by Americans in reference to Hitler’s father Alois, who was the illegitimate child of Maria Schicklgruber. (She later married Johann Georg Hiedler, with Alois taking on his stepfather’s surname that would be reconfigured from Hiedler to Hitler.) Winik put his name on the film’s credits as producer (which was dishonest, to put it mildly) and claimed the “Gestapo ‘Hep-Cats’” assisted in the presentation.
Amazingly, prints of the film wound up in Nazi-controlled Europe. German propaganda chief Josef Goebbels allegedly saw the film and was enraged to see his Master Race reduced to buffoonery. Reportedly, prints of the film were smuggled into Nazi-occupied Denmark and resistance fighters managed to get the footage seen in the nation’s cinemas. Today, however, the film isn’t anywhere as effective as Chaplin’s “The Great Dictator” or the Three Stooges’ anti-Nazi romps with Moe Howard as Hitler, and “The Lambeth Walk” is mostly unknown to anyone who is not a classic theater buff, but back in the day it offered a much-needed lift to war-weary audiences.
“Lambeth Walk – Nazi-Style” is sort of in a grey area today. The film was always in the public domain, and the footage has been featured in home entertainment releases offering copyright-free wartime films. But the “Triumph of the Will” footage is copyright protected and it is not likely that the creators “The Lambeth Walk” signed away the rights to their song forever to aid the British war effort.
However, this two-minute bit of nonsense can easily be found online. And while it may not seem particularly uproarious by contemporary standards, there was a time when it gave a much needed stab at a vile regime while providing free peoples with a smile during their grimmest hours.
IMPORTANT NOTICE: While this weekly column acknowledges the presence of rare film and television productions through the so-called collector-to-collector market, this should not be seen as encouraging or condoning the unauthorized duplication and distribution of copyright-protected material, either through DVDs or Blu-ray discs or through postings on Internet video sites.
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