Focus Features

Sergei Eisenstein
Alexander Nevsky (1938)

Frustrated by the constant interference of Kremlin censors and the accusations of sentimentality levelled against The General Line (1929), Sergei Eisenstein spent several years travelling in France, the USA and Mexico. Denied the opportunity to complete An American Tragedy and Que Viva Mexico!, he returned home to have projects like MMM, Moscow and The Black Consul blocked by Boris Shumyatsky, the chairman of the central film body Soyuzkino, who also destroyed the master montagist's reputation by withholding his much-cherished pastorale, Bezhin Meadow (1935), for being formalist and ideologically unsound. 

In 1937, Eisenstein was developing an epic about the Spanish Civil War with the African-American singer Paul Robeson when Mosfilm offered him a biopic of Alexander Nevsky, as Stalin believed that a reconstruction of 13th-century Novgorod's victory over the Teutonic Knights would alert the public to the imminent threat posed to the Motherland by the Third Reich. Keen to conduct experiments in the technique of integrated sound and image he called ‘vertical montage,’ Eisenstein accepted the commission confident that he would be afforded greater creative latitude than had been the case under the now-liquidated Shumyatsky, as so little was known about the Grand Prince that neither academics nor apparatchiks could countermand his scenario.

Alexander Nevsky

One of the few certain facts was that Nevsky had been a returning hero, after being expelled for interfering in Novgorod's affairs after his victory over the Swedes in 1240. But rather than making covert references to his own situation, Eisenstein cast the patron of solidarity in Stalin's image and had Nikolai Cherkasov adopt a selfless determination as Nevsky calls the peasants to arms, orders the affluent to bend to the will of the people and organises the artisans into mass producing arms for the struggle. But it's his mastery of military tactics on the frozen Lake Peipus that earns Nevsky the iconic status that is reinforced by his victory in mounted combat over the enemy's Grand Master.

Having pandered to the cult of personality, exhorted the people to stand firm against an invading foe and warned potential aggressors of the nation's indomitability, Eisenstein was convinced he had extolled the virtues of the Soviet Union and its titanic leader. Yet the Kremlin still imposed probable KGB spy Piotr Pavlenko as his co-screenwriter, while the majority of the cast and crew was drawn from Party loyalists to ensure adherence to the state-prescribed style of Socialist Realism. Moreover, when the script was published in Znamya, Eisenstein was inundated with suggestions from everyone from intellectuals to schoolchildren, with Stalin himself excising several scenes that diminished the warrior-saint's allegorical heroism.

Desperate to regain his position and bolster his personal safety, Eisenstein played the jingoist to promote the picture and was rewarded with the Order of Lenin. However, Alexander Nevsky was withdrawn from circulation in order to avoid offending Hitler after the conclusion of the Nazi-Soviet Pact in August 1939 and it remained banned until Operation Barbarossa was launched two years later, when Stalin made it compulsory viewing across the country. Moreover, Eisenstein was again restored to favour and set to make a symbolic epic about Ivan the Terrible.

Next: Fred Zinnemann and The Search (1948)

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Sergei Eisenstein
Alexander Nevsky (1938)

Frustrated by the constant interference of Kremlin censors and the accusations of sentimentality levelled against The General Line (1929), Sergei Eisenstein spent several years travelling in France, the USA and Mexico. Denied the opportunity to complete An American Tragedy and Que Viva Mexico!, he returned home to have projects like MMM, Moscow and The Black Consul blocked by Boris Shumyatsky, the chairman of the central film body Soyuzkino, who also destroyed the master montagist's reputation by withholding his much-cherished pastorale, Bezhin Meadow (1935), for being formalist and ideologically unsound. 

In 1937, Eisenstein was developing an epic about the Spanish Civil War with the African-American singer Paul Robeson when Mosfilm offered him a biopic of Alexander Nevsky, as Stalin believed that a reconstruction of 13th-century Novgorod's victory over the Teutonic Knights would alert the public to the imminent threat posed to the Motherland by the Third Reich. Keen to conduct experiments in the technique of integrated sound and image he called ‘vertical montage,’ Eisenstein accepted the commission confident that he would be afforded greater creative latitude than had been the case under the now-liquidated Shumyatsky, as so little was known about the Grand Prince that neither academics nor apparatchiks could countermand his scenario.

Alexander Nevsky

One of the few certain facts was that Nevsky had been a returning hero, after being expelled for interfering in Novgorod's affairs after his victory over the Swedes in 1240. But rather than making covert references to his own situation, Eisenstein cast the patron of solidarity in Stalin's image and had Nikolai Cherkasov adopt a selfless determination as Nevsky calls the peasants to arms, orders the affluent to bend to the will of the people and organises the artisans into mass producing arms for the struggle. But it's his mastery of military tactics on the frozen Lake Peipus that earns Nevsky the iconic status that is reinforced by his victory in mounted combat over the enemy's Grand Master.

Having pandered to the cult of personality, exhorted the people to stand firm against an invading foe and warned potential aggressors of the nation's indomitability, Eisenstein was convinced he had extolled the virtues of the Soviet Union and its titanic leader. Yet the Kremlin still imposed probable KGB spy Piotr Pavlenko as his co-screenwriter, while the majority of the cast and crew was drawn from Party loyalists to ensure adherence to the state-prescribed style of Socialist Realism. Moreover, when the script was published in Znamya, Eisenstein was inundated with suggestions from everyone from intellectuals to schoolchildren, with Stalin himself excising several scenes that diminished the warrior-saint's allegorical heroism.

Desperate to regain his position and bolster his personal safety, Eisenstein played the jingoist to promote the picture and was rewarded with the Order of Lenin. However, Alexander Nevsky was withdrawn from circulation in order to avoid offending Hitler after the conclusion of the Nazi-Soviet Pact in August 1939 and it remained banned until Operation Barbarossa was launched two years later, when Stalin made it compulsory viewing across the country. Moreover, Eisenstein was again restored to favour and set to make a symbolic epic about Ivan the Terrible.

Next: Fred Zinnemann and The Search (1948)

Fred Zinnemann

Fred Zinnemann
The Search (1948)

Unlike many in Hollywood's Germanic diaspora, Vienna-born Fred Zinnemann had left Berlin during the Weimar era, as production had slowed so much after the coming of sound that he decided to apprentice himself to a studio to learn about the new techniques. The experience he gained as an assistant to documentary pioneer Robert Flaherty was to stand him in good stead when he came to make The Search, which he insisted bore a greater resemblance to reality than The Seventh Cross (1944), a mid-30s melodrama had starred Spencer Tracy as a concentration camp escapee and which had been made around the time that Zinnemann's own parents became part of the Final Solution. However, Zinnemann was only awarded the picture because he was on suspension at MGM for refusing inferior material and the studio loaned him to Praesens Films to ease the strain on its postwar payroll.

Swiss producer Lazar Wechsler had been inspired by photographer Thérèse Bonney's book, Europe's Children, and the Oscar-winning screenplay was based on interviews with dozens of `unaccompanied' children at camps run by the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration. The story centres on Ivan Jandl, a 10 year-old Holocaust survivor who escapes from a Displaced Persons billet because he thinks that the Red Cross ambulance transporting him is a mobile gas chamber. However, he is found among the ruins by GI Montgomery Clift, who restores the boy's faith in human nature and seeks permission from UNRRA official Aline MacMahon to take him Stateside. However, they are unaware that Jandl's mother, Jarmila Novotna, is desperately searching for him.

The Search

Keen to take “the raw materials of history in order to make a dramatic document” and shooting with a skeleton crew in Nuremberg, Munich, Würzburg and Frankfurt, Zinnemann achieved an authenticity that was indebted to Vittorio De Sica's neo-realist charmer Shoeshine (1946) and “rubble films” like Wolfgang Staudte's The Murderers Are Among Us (1946) and Roberto Rossellini's Germany, Year Zero (1947) – which would also inspire Billy Wilder's A Foreign Affair (1948). Indeed, the realism often terrified the young volunteers playing the refugees and Jandl (who had been discovered performing at a Prague radio station) was so distressed by having his head shaved and hearing Zinnemann's German accent that he would only take direction from Czech assistant, Mila Melanova.

Tensions arose frequently at the converted garage in Zürich where the interiors were filmed, as Clift deeply resented the fact that while mention was made of Auschwitz, Dachau and Bergen-Belsen, there was no explicit denunciation of the Shoah. Zinnemann himself later regretted that he had not made American audiences more fully aware of the horrors he had witnessed across Central Europe. But he always maintained that he had been obliged to moderate the truth, as “otherwise, people would have been unable to bear it.”

Zinnemann's homecoming helped revitalise his career and he would revisit the Nazi era in his penultimate feature, Julia (1977) – although little of the footage was shot on German soil. Returning home did little for Ivan Jandl, however. Despite being presented with a special Academy Award, he was disbarred from drama school and denied the opportunity to make further films, as the newly installed Communist regime accused him of willingly participating in American propaganda. He died a forgotten man in 1987.

Next: Billy Wilder and A Foreign Affair (1948)

Billy Wilder

Billy Wilder
A Foreign Affair (1948)

Despite growing up in the Austro-Hungarian Empire, Billy Wilder was an Americanophile from an early age. Therefore, he probably felt elation rather than dislocation on arriving in Hollywood in 1934 after fleeing fascism. However, his screen career had begun in Berlin and he was sufficiently affected by his return in 1945 as a colonel in the US Army's Division of Psychological Warfare to produce this snapshot of the divided capital. By blending docu-realism, studio escapism and acerbic satire, Wilder hoped to coerce German audiences into facing up to their responsibility for acquiescing in the murderous tyranny of the Third Reich. But, with the American characters proving as venal as the vanquished, this ended up being anything but an exercise in j'accusery, as Wilder's affection for the city saw the dismay he had experienced while denazifying the national film industry and editing the Holocaust documentary Death Mills dissipate into a bittersweet nostalgia.

Wilder persuaded Jean Arthur to come out of retirement to play an Iowa Congresswoman, who forms part of a delegation visiting Berlin to gauge the moral of American troops. She is shocked by the devastation she witnesses during Colonel Millard Mitchell's guided tour of the city, but she is more concerned by the relationship that Captain John Lund has forged with torch singer Marlene Dietrich, who is known to have consorted with high-ranking Nazis. However, Arthur learns something of the realities being endured by the besieged populace and comes to wonder whether there might after all be such a thing as a Good German when she is arrested in a nightclub raid and Dietrich helps secure her release.

A Foreign Affair

Although the action opens with a parody of Hitler's descent from the clouds in Leni Riefenstahl's propagandist masterclass, Triumph of the Will (1935), Wilder acknowledged the gravity of the situation by referencing the realist style achieved in the “rubble films” that had already inspired such Hollywood outings as Fred Zinnemann's The Search (1947) and Arthur Seaton's The Big Lift (1948). However, having just completed The Emperor Waltz (1948), in which Bing Crosby's brash American gramophone salesman had romanced Countess Joan Fontaine at the imperial court of Franz Josef, he allowed something of that film's yearning for the innocence of yesteryear to pervade proceedings, with the homage to The Blue Angel (1930), Marlene Dietrich's breakthrough collaboration with Josef von Sternberg, being as unmistakable as the canny ideological inversion of Ernst Lubitsch's Ninotchka (1939) – which Wilder had written with Charles Brackett – and the allusions to the plucky heroism that Jean Arthur had demonstrated in Frank Capra's caustic feel-good classics, Mr. Deeds Goes to Town (1936) and Mr. Smith Goes to Washington (1939).

By using Weimar kitsch and Tinseltown shtick to mask his tainted emotions, Wilder succeeded in blurring the lines between Dietrich's glamorised lorelei and Arthur's buttoned-down mädchen. Yet Berlin and Iowa still evidently represented the European and American sides of the exile's creative temperament and he returned to a topic that pained as much as it fascinated him in the US-made POW drama, Stalag 17 (1953), and the biting, location-shot Cold War romp, One, Two, Three (1961), which starred James Cagney as a Coca-Cola rep in West Berlin, whose job depends on preventing his boss's daughter from marrying a Communist.

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