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    Take 59

    Joe Leydon's movie bucket list continues with Confessions of a Nazi Spy

    Joe Leydon
    Sep 4, 2011 | 8:30 pm

    Editor's Note: Joe Leydon is determined to review a movie he's never seen before every week in the year before he turns 60. This is his second installment.

    One of the first mainstream, major-studio American movies to explicitly warn against the menace posed by fascism both aboard and at home, Confessions of a Nazi Spy (1939) also is one of the relatively few Hollywood productions of any sort ever to be disdainfully criticized — and robustly defended— on the floor of the U.S. Senate.

    It’s a corking good ripped-from-the-headlines melodrama, brisk and brash in the unmistakable style that defined Warner Bros. films of its period. And like many of those other Warners films, this one basically is a rousingly entertaining crime story about a blunt-spoken, hard-charging lawman bent on taking down wily outlaws backed by thuggish henchmen and cretinous confederates.

    The big difference in Confessions is, the good guy – FBI agent Edward Renard – is portrayed by Edward G. Robinson, a pit-bullish dynamo who’d previously made his mark playing criminally inclined hard cases in Little Caesar and other Warners gangster flicks. And the bad guys are Nazi spies, Gestapo goons, and subversive spokesmen for the German-American Bund.

    Confessions of a Nazi Spy wound up being a box-office hit. But that wasn’t enough to mollify various non-interventionist firebrands in Washington who wanted to investigate “war propaganda disseminated by the motion picture industry," specifically, movies such as Charlie Chaplin’s The Great Dictator, Fritz Lang’s Man Hunt and, yes, Confessions of a Nazi Spy.

    Dr. Karl Kassel (Paul Lukas), a German immigrant, seems thoroughly assimilated — he’s even a Navy reserve officer! — and red-white-and-bluish. But no: He’s really a fervent National Socialist who’s doing his bit to make the whole world go to heil by delivering fiery speeches at Bund rallies, exhorting his fellow German transplants (and gullible native-born citizens) in New York and elsewhere to support Adolf Hitler and join the Fatherland’s campaign to “save America from the chaos that breeds democracy and racial equality.”

    On rare occasions, Kassel must employ uniformed “German patriots” to subdue dissenters in his audience. (Ward Bond, who, just three year later, would play an ex-con seeking to claim a bounty on Der Fuhrer in the exuberantly daft B-movie Hitler – Dead or Alive, has a memorable cameo as war vet who’s shouted down, and beaten up, when he rails against Nazism: “We don’t want any –isms in this country except Americanism!”)

    Much more often, however, Kassel’s words resound well with useful fools such as Kurt Schneider (Francis Lederer), a malcontent who’s so certain that he’s destined for greatness that he never bothers to hold down a steady job – we learn that, years earlier, he spent prison time for being a military deserter – and is all too willing to perform, for a price, services that might gain him the place he richly deserves in the inner circle of the Master Race.

    Fairly early on, it’s obvious that Schneider isn’t the sharpest knife in the schnitzel store: He actually tries to make contact with Nazi spylords by writing an application letter to a German newspaper. Amazingly enough, however, this is not viewed as a bad career by a potential employer, a haughty Kraut who comments: “The Americans are a very simple-minded people. One doesn’t need a wolf where a weasel will do.”

    And so German intelligence chief Franz Schlager (George Sanders, sporting a whitewall haircut and a Teutonic screw-you sneer) sails to America to offer Schneider sliding-scale payments for any info on military armaments and troop stationing.

    It doesn’t take long for Schneider to screw up conspicuously enough to eventually alert G-man Renard, an eagle-eyed patriot who’s long suspected the existence of a Nazi spy network in the good ol’ US of A. Openly scornful of the delusional dim bulb in his sights, Renard berates Schneider in a contemptuous harangue.

    How contemptuous? Well, try to imagine Edwin G. Robinson barking these lines: “He’s been listening to speeches and reading pamphlets about Nazi Germany, and believing them. Unfortunately, there are hundreds like him in America – hysterical, half-witted crackpots who go Hitler-happy from overindulgence in propaganda that makes them believe that they’re Supermen.”

    Renard plays Schneider like a violin, deftly appealing to the preening loser’s vanity while getting him to give names, more names, and names of people who haven’t even been born yet. (OK, I’m making up that last part – but it’s not much of an exaggeration.) After that, it’s just a matter of connecting the dots to make small-timers rat on big cheeses, all without the messy necessity of enhanced interrogation techniques. (One character takes pains to emphasize: “Don’t worry, there’s not a third degree with the Federal Bureau of Investigation.”)

    The lucky spies wind up in a New York courtroom before a gravely outraged judge. The unlucky ones are transported, unwillingly, back to the Fatherland to face displeased Nazi overlords.

    Cue the uplifting speeches and dire warnings, passionately delivered before the final credits roll as “America the Beautiful” swells on the soundtrack. (No, I’m not making up that.)

    Part of what makes all of this so fascinating – and occasionally, as I discovered while watching the film for my Take 59 project, absolutely gobsmacking – is the fact that, back in 1939, when Confessions of a Nazi Spy was produced and released, the US had an official policy of neutrality toward Germany and, perhaps more important, the U.S. film industry’s censoriously conservative Production Code Administration routinely neutered or entirely removed anything that smacked of negative criticism of foreign governments in American movies.

    As Clayton R. Koppes and Gregory D. Black note in their invaluable history Hollywood Goes to War, PCA chief Joseph Breen was one of many fervent non-interventionists among film-industry higher-ups who didn’t want anything appearing in Hollywood movies that might upset foreign leaders – and lead to the banning of all Hollywood releases in countries controlled by those leaders — or give American ticketbuyers (and Washington politicians) the idea that studio chiefs were pushing for active American involvement in what appeared to be an inevitable war in Europe.

    As a 1938 PCA internal memo fretted: “Are we ready to depart from the pleasant and profitable course of entertainment, to engage in propaganda?”

    That the events depicted in Confessions of a Nazi Spy were based on real-life events – Nazi spies actually were caught and tried in New York in 1938, thanks in part to the efforts of a G-man not unlike the one played by Robinson – didn’t entirely mollify Breen. (Nor did the factual basis for the scenario deter the German consul in Los Angeles from warning Breen that production of Confessions might lead to “difficulties.”)

    But the unabashedly anti-fascist mogul Jack Warner forged ahead anyway, defying all suggestions to soft-pedal what he and his filmmakers saw as Nazi Germany’s threat to the American way of life. Unlike, say, Idiot’s Delight, the 1936 Broadway hit that had to be transported from the Italian Alps to an unnamed European Country, and scrubbed of any unpleasant remarks about Benito Mussolini, before a movie adaptation could be released, Confessions switched back and forth between a New York infiltrated by Nazi spies and Bund propagandists, and a Germany where swastika-emblazoned bad guys hail Hitler – whose image appears in prominently displayed photos and portraits — and plot deviltry.

    Confessions of a Nazi Spy wound up being a box-office hit. But that wasn’t enough to mollify various non-interventionist firebrands in Washington, D.C. Gerald P. Nye, an isolationist Republican senator from North Dakota, loomed large among those who called in 1941 for a specially empanelled subcommittee of the Committee on Interstate Commerce to investigate “war propaganda disseminated by the motion picture industry," specifically, movies such as Charlie Chaplin’s The Great Dictator, Fritz Lang’s Man Hunt (in which Walter Pidgeon plays a big-game hunter who considers taking a shot at Hitler) and, yes, Confessions of a Nazi Spy.

    It’s worth noting that Harry M. Warner, present of Warner Bros., appeared before the subcommittee and, in a prepared statement, defended Confessions of a Nazi Spy: “I cannot conceive how any patriotic citizen could object to a picture accurately recording a danger already existing in our country… Civic, patriotic and labor organizations endorsed this picture. Hundreds of thousands of movie patrons paid to see it.”

    It’s also worth noting that the subcommittee hearings on “interventionist propaganda” were adjourned on Sept. 16, 1941. On Dec. 8, the day after Pearl Harbor, they were permanently abandoned.

    Joe Leydon writes about movies on MovingPictureBlog

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    Movie Review

    How to Train Your Dragon remake puts a fresh twist on the original

    Alex Bentley
    Jun 12, 2025 | 4:14 pm
    Toothless and Mason Thames in How to Train Your Dragon
    Photo courtesy of Universal Pictures
    Toothless and Mason Thames in How to Train Your Dragon.

    Let’s get it out of the way right at the top: The new live-action How to Train Your Dragon, coming a mere 15 years after the original animated film, serves no real purpose other than to make more money for Universal Pictures and Dreamworks Pictures. However, unlike Disney’s approach toward remaking their animated movies, this attempt manages to succeed on its own merits instead of being a half-baked vessel for nostalgia.

    As fans will remember, Hiccup (Mason Thames) lives in Berk, a town on a remote island populated by Vikings who constantly have to defend themselves against rampaging dragons. Hiccup’s dad, Stoick (Gerard Butler), is the community’s vaunted leader, with a legacy that seems impossible for Hiccup to measure up to, especially since he’s stuck in the armory alongside Gobber (Nick Frost).

    But Hiccup has a knack for inventions, and his use of one new weapon during a dragon attack takes down a feared Night Fury. Finding the wounded dragon deep in the forest, Hiccup decides against killing it, leading to an unexpected bond between the two of them. Most of the film shows Hiccup trying to prove himself to his townspeople, including the fierce Astrid (Nico Parker), while also nursing the dragon he dubs Toothless back to health with the help of another one of his ingenious creations.

    Written and directed by Dean DeBlois (who’s had the same roles on all four HTTYD films), the film is most notable for how engaging it is despite it retelling a story many already know and love. The biggest reason for this is a pivot away from telling a story mainly for kids toward one that feels like an extremely light version of Game of Thrones. Almost right away, there are real stakes for the people in the film, and the way DeBlois and his team stage the scenes, the danger can be felt by the audience.

    This sense of “realness” comes through especially well in the scenes between Hiccup and Toothless. The design of Toothless is faithful to the original, but the CGI makes the dragon feel amazingly believable. And when they start flying, the film literally and metaphorically takes off. At multiple points, the camera seems to have trouble keeping them in frame, a smart move toward verisimilitude when the filmmakers clearly could have made it an overly smooth watching experience.

    Even though it’s more serious than the original, the film still has plenty of fun to offer. Characters like Gobber (who replaces his two missing limbs with odd contraptions) and the ragtag group of teenagers who come to be in awe of Hiccup’s skills at taming dragons provide more than a few laughs. Hiccup isn’t quite as goofy as he was when voiced by Jay Baruchel, which turns out to be a good thing as his sense of purpose amps up the drama of the story.

    Thames’ performance gets better and better as the film goes along, as Hiccup goes from town whipping boy toward hero. He really shines in the last act when he’s given a few scenes that show off his acting range. Parker is equally good, demonstrating the girl power needed for the role, but also the softness of a potential love interest. Butler, the only actor reprising their voice role, is a great presence who sells the outsized personality of Stoick.

    Against the odds, this new version of How to Train Your Dragon is equal to the success of the first film, accomplishing the goal of making it feel like you’re watching the story for the first time. If live-action remakes are going to continue to come out, future filmmakers should study this film for how to respect both the history of the franchise and the audience paying good money to be entertained.

    ---

    How to Train Your Dragon opens in theaters on June 13.

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