BOOTLEG FILES 896: “Professor Mamlock” (1938 Soviet drama focused on Nazi anti-Semitism).
LAST SEEN: On YouTube.
AMERICAN HOME VIDEO: None.
REASON FOR BOOTLEG STATUS: It fell through the cracks.
CHANCES OF SEEING A COMMERCIAL DVD RELEASE: If any film deserves a release, this is it.
After Adolf Hitler’s rise to power and his subsequent persecution of Germany’s Jewish population, the Hollywood film industry found itself in a quandary. Many of the studios were owned and operated by Jewish businessmen who were not supportive of Hitler’s anti-Semitic policies – and many German creative artists who fled Hitler’s Germany were welcomed in the Hollywood studios. But at the same time, the German market was a lucrative export destination for Hollywood films and the studios did not want to jeopardize the revenue stream they enjoyed from German cinemas. As a result, no Hollywood film criticized Nazi policies against its Jewish population, while “Confessions of a Nazi Spy” released by Warner Bros. in May 1939 broke the taboo of clearly identify Hitler’s government as an enemy to Americans.
Oddly, the first feature film to call out Nazi anti-Semitism came from a country that was not known for its democratic values – Joseph Stalin’s Soviet Union, which put forth the 1938 feature “Professor Mamlock” as a harsh condemnation of Germany’s despicable treatment of its Jewish citizens. The film created a controversy when it was shown in the United States but today is nearly forgotten by everyone except scholars of Holocaust-focused films.
“Professor Mamlock” is based on a play by Friedrich Wolf, a German Communist playwright who left his homeland in 1933 and emigrated to Moscow. The play centered on a prominent Jewish surgeon and decorated World War I veteran who is prevented from practicing medicine after the Nazis take power. The play was staged in several European capitals and in New York, and it was during a Moscow theater production that Austrian-born filmmaker Gerbert Moritsevich Rappaport (who settled in the Soviet Union in 1936) saw the potential for filming “Professor Mamlock.” Stalin himself reportedly gave the greenlight to create a film version, with Russian filmmaker Adolf Minkin collaborating with Rappaport on the production.
The film version of “Professor Mamlock” makes some significant alterations to Wolf’s play, most notably in highlighting the depiction of Nazi persecution of Communists along with the anti-Semitic campaigns. The character of the professor’s son Rolf, a Communist anti-fascist agitator, is given a larger role in the film and is shown as both a beacon of physical power – he is first seen doing gymnastics on the parallel bars – and as a politicized activist who openly praises Marx and Lenin and expresses his desire to fight against the fascists in pursuit of a Communist paradise. Rolf suffers for his politics through torture by Nazi captors, but he emerges as a modern Communist hero.
(SPOILER ALERT) Mamlock’s character is also emotionally strengthened, to the point that the play’s ending with his suicide as a broken man was changed to having him assassinated after giving an impassioned anti-fascist speech.
The film expands on the play’s most harrowing scene, where SA militia fighters storm into the hospital operating room and order Mamlock’s expulsion. The thuggish intruders write “JUDE” across Mamlock’s operating tunic and parade him through the hospital and out into the street. Semyon Mezhinsky plays Mamlock with a dignified sense of purpose and he dominates the scene by refusing to cower and grovel in the midst of this unconscionable humiliation. Indeed, the performance is so strong that Edward G. Robinson would later claim that he wished he could play the role in an American remake of “Professor Mamlock.”
“Professor Mamlock” resonated with Stalin, who ordered it be shown in the widest possible distribution across the Soviet Union. The film opened in New York two months after its Soviet premiere and it had the distinction of being the first Soviet film to be approved by the Production Code of America. The New York Times critic Frank Nugent declared, “That long-overdue indictment of Nazi persecution of the Jews has arrived at last. As we might have expected, it has come from Russia, which is beyond Hollywood’s anxiety about the foreign market.” And the film took on a greater importance when the Kristallnacht pogrom occurred in Germany two days after the New York premiere.
“Professor Mamlock” would be the runner-up for the New York Film Critics Circle Award as Best Foreign Film – “Grand Illusion” won the prize – and it was cited as being among the Top 10 Foreign Films of 1938 by the National Board of Review. Outside of New York, however, audiences had difficulty seeing the film. The local censorship board in Chicago called it “purely Jewish and Communist propaganda against Germany” and banned it from being exhibited, while the state film censors for Ohio, Massachusetts and Rhode Island prevented its release for similar reasons.
The film’s international release was also checkered. British censors would not allow it be seen in 1938 due to diplomatic pressure – it was feared that it would heat up an already tense relation between Britain and Germany – but it was eventually released once World War II began. After the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact in August 1939, it was banned in the Soviet Union – it was put back into theaters after Hitler invaded the Soviet Union in June 1941. German audiences didn’t see the film until 1947; the East German film industry made its own version in 1961.
But since that era, “Professor Mamlock” has been mostly out of circulation. I don’t believe the film was ever shown on American television and it was never made available in an American home entertainment release. There is an unauthorized upload of the film on YouTube, but it is not from the English subtitled print – YouTube has its own closed captioning translation of Russian into English, which is a bit wobbly but nonetheless captures the tone of this amazing production.
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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