Watch on the Rhine (1943)

It’s easy to watch Watch on the Rhine (1943) as a call to America to acknowledge the danger of Naziism. That’s loud and clear -- and very moving. But it functions as a historic document in its astonishing limitation, as well. Even as it extolls America’s embrace of freedom on the world stage it portrays without irony or questioning America’s own moral problem, the inheritance of slavery and its inherent dehumanization of its own people. While the heroes fight fascism abroad the film implicitly countenances the fascism of racism in America. 

Dashiell Hammett wrote the screenplay, based on his romantic and writing partner Lillian Hellman’s Broadway success, with her additional scenes and dialogue. Both were bright, liberal minds, sensitive writers, committed to the ideals of American democracy and militant defenders of humanity against the Nazis. 

Yet for all those credentials, they set the Bette Davis’s family home on a plush plantation a drive away from Washington. The family has black servants whom the matriarch orders around imperiously. If there’s any liberalism in the writers’ view of these blacks it’s restricted to a bit of eye-rolling sass. Otherwise the blacks here are simply the plantation stereotype -- especially the two wide-eyed mutes brought from the garden to shuffle the sofa. The servants have no exchange with the Davis heroine or the Paul Lucas saintly hero. They're kept in their place.  

The film has some other problems. The three children seem terribly wooden today and the early dialogue is arch and artificial, surprisingly so given Hammett’s dab hand at the vernacular. The fact the children have been raised in Europe may preclude their having the innocence of American energy, but they weaken the film. And often the dialogue is a snowball of speeches. But it’s 1943 wartime and its heart is in the right place.

But is it? When this film was made America’s liberal intelligentsia had apparently not yet recognized the injustice of its racism. That’s this film’s real statement to us now. Like Hellman and Hammett we may think we’ve achieved a state of moral awareness and courage -- but what blinkers might we be wearing unawares today? For that we have to wake for future artists and critics to expose us. 

***

If you watch the film on the Warner Night at the Movies DVD there’s another hidden bonus. In the Ozzie Nelson musical short, the soldier who tries to roust Ozzie out of bed is a pre-stardom, uncredited Clark Gable. We recognize the voice -- and the ears.