That Time Jews Mocked Christian Nazis in a Pre-Code Screwball Comedy

The Oberammergau Passion Play and The Twentieth Century

The hubs and I have developed a taste for Pre-Code films. The early talkies tackled a host of risqué and taboo topics before the Hays Office went and spoiled all the fun, and they did so in delightfully lurid fashion. There are Pre-Code movies with near-nudity (Gold Diggers of 1933); heavily implied sexual favors (Babyface); prostitution (Wild Boys of the Road); lesbianism (Morocco); drug addiction (Three on a Match); and even polyamory (Design for Living).

In fact, Pre-Code films address just about every shocking and uncomfortable topic outside the then-mainstream, except racism and antisemitism. There’s exceptions, sure. Imitation of Life, for instance, explores racial passing, and Counselor at Law implies a Jewish attorney is rejected by the WASP establishment (although the movie also portrays said attorney engaged in insider trading). But viewing the Pre-Code canon as a whole, these movies are outliers. Early Hollywood wasn’t much interested in creating social commentary about racial and ethnic minorities.

The absence of antisemitism as a theme in Pre-Code film seems especially surprising, given so many in the Hollywood machine were Jewish, from studio owners and executives (Mayer, Warner, Zukor), to directors (Wyler, LeRoy, Lubitsch), to countless screenwriters and actors.

There’s many rationales for this absence. In my view, it was fundamentally a business decision. Hollywood calculated that movies about antisemitism simply wouldn’t have mass-market appeal, especially for Americans who had never so much as met a Jew. Besides, the Pre-Code era coincided with the height of Father Coughlin’s popularity, with his radio broadcast reaching 30-40 million listeners around 1932-1934. At that time, Coughlin wasn’t the full-throttle Nazi cheerleader he became in the late 30s. Even so, he wasn’t shy about blaming Jews for the Depression economy, often decrying them as a conspiracy of “modern Shylocks”, “money-lenders,” and “international bankers”. And given Coughlin’s reach, an awful lot of Americans apparently agreed with him.

Better, then, for studios to stick to what sold: sex and violence. Better to give the masses Jean Harlow strutting in her lingerie, or a gleefully sociopathic James Cagney shooting-them-up, then shoving a grapefruit in Mae Clark’s face.

Still: with so many Hollywood Jews being immigrants from Eastern Europe, and with the Nazis rising to power in Germany, you’d think there’d be at least some pushback to antisemitism in Pre-Code film. You’d expect at least one Pre-Code movie to address antisemitism as the hatred it is, as an existential threat to Jews. And yet there’s no direct response to either antisemitism or Nazism until 1939’s Confessions of a Nazi Spy, released just prior to the outbreak of World War II.

However, there’s an indirect response — and it’s a subversive, comedic one, too. In that sense, it’s a very Jewish response. And it involves two bearded Bavarian Passion Play actors on a train.

The Twentieth Century: All Aboard the Crazy Train

Although this point is debated, many consider 1934’s The Twentieth Century Hollywood’s first screwball comedy. The movie checks all the boxes of the genre: rapid-fire dialogue that’s heavy on zingers, ridiculous predicaments, and, most importantly, an epic battle of the sexes. In The Twentieth Century this battle is pitched between megalomaniac theater director Oscar Jaffe, played by John Barrymore, and his protegé-turned-diva Lily Garland (née Mildred Plotkin), played by Carole Lombard.

I won’t get into the specifics of the plot; for the curious, a good summation is found here. But I must say that Barrymore’s wild hair and razor-thin mustache are a delight and most certainly the inspiration for Gene Wilder’s in Young Frankenstein. And screenwriters Ben Hecht and Charles MacArthur knew how to crank out perfect lines, my favorite being: “He won’t kill himself, it would please too many people.”

But back to those beards.

A series of farcical twists lands Jaffe on board the Twentieth Century, a train heading from Chicago to New York. Jaffe is desperate: He’s in an artistic slump, he’s suffered a string of theatrical flops, and now he’s dogged by creditors. Garland has dumped him for Hollywood, yet he’s convinced he can lure her back by offering her the stage role of a lifetime. But with no new play and no money, he has no idea how.

Enter two bearded Bavarians into Jaffe’s cabin. If you click on the video below, it should take you right to the beginning of the clip where you can watch Barrymore’s exchange with them. If that fails, please adjust the video player bar to around 55:10 and let ‘er rip until the beards leave.

The Bavarians fall to their knees, ingratiating themselves to Jaffe with cries of “Maestro!” And then they reveal their status as actors in the Oberammergau Passion Play — a revelation that inspires Jaffe to mount an extravagant, over-the-top theatrical Passion Play, starring Garland, of course.

Now, when I watched this clip, I knew nothing about the Oberammergau Passion Play. So at first glance, the entrance of the two goofball Passion Players struck me as nothing more than another zany device to move the plot forward.

But it’s more than a plot device. It’s a delicious act of rebellion.

Goebbels, Hitler and Oberammergau

The Oberammergau Passion Play was first performed by the residents of Oberammergau, Germany in 1634 in gratitude for escaping the Black Death. It’s been performed every decade since and continues today.

In both its length and scope, it is undeniably epic. By the time The Twentieth Century was released, the Passion Play cast had grown to several hundred, all natives or long-term residents of Oberammergau (today, the cast numbers around 2,000). As for the play itself, it was (and is!) an all-day affair, beginning at 8 in the morning and not concluding until 5 or 6 in the evening — a good eight hours, relieved by a long lunch break.

In the 1930s, the Play adhered to a 19th century script that depicted the life and death of Jesus while going heavy on the medieval antisemitic tropes. How heavy and how medieval? Well, to take a couple typical examples:

• The Jewish religious authorities were portrayed as an evil cabal, hell-bent on destroying Jesus out of spite, greed, and a hunger for raw power. In contrast, Pilate was portrayed as a reasonable guy, unfairly coerced by the Jews into ordering Jesus’s crucifixion.

• The Jewish crowd was portrayed as lustily celebrating Jesus’s death, not-so-subtly implying collective Jewish guilt. Some of the choice lines the crowd shouted were: “He dies on the cross. Hail Israel! The enemy is overthrown! Long live the synagogue!”

In case the dialogue wasn’t obvious enough, the costuming also hammered home the prevailing theme of “Jews Bad.” The Jewish high priests wore horned helmets, and Judas was dressed in “poison-yellow garb,” also known as “coward’s yellow.”

Privately, the Nazis weren’t so big on Christianity. But all the foregoing piqued their interest in the Oberammergau Passion Play as a useful bit of anti-Jewish propaganda. So in 1930, Hitler attended the Passion Play with Goebbels in tow (photo thanks to the Heinrich Hoffmann Photo Gallery).

According to his diary entry following the performance, Goebbels was all over the performance:

“Perhaps a touch of kitsch at times, but on the whole full of folk taste. Truly magnificent are Christ’s farewell in Bethania and the Last Supper scene. Everything still smells slightly of earth. The choir full of dignity and serenity. Despite its length, it hardly feels long. I went with great skepticism, yet I am glad I saw it. It is teeming with propaganda. Our movement is spreading everywhere . . . I’m still completely full of impressions from the Passion. And glad that such a thing still exists in Germany. One must lead the people back to the sources of their national identity. Then they will regain security and instinct. The scenes before Pilate were practically textbook lessons about the Jew. That’s how he always did it, and that’s how he still does it today. Only fools change, but not the spirit and the man himself. He remains eternally the same Adam.”

Hitler returned to attend a special Jubilee performance of the Play in 1934 (commemorating 300 years of the production). By this point, Goebbels’ Ministry of Public Enlightenment and Propaganda ordered the official poster for the Jubilee to read “Deutschland ruft Euch!”, or “Germany calls You!”

Self-Aware and Subversive

So now that we have a little history to place Oberammergau in context, let’s return to that scene in the 20th Century. Upon re-examination it’s not just funny, but absolutely ballsy.

John Barrymore’s extolling of the Oberammergau Players as “the purest branch of the theater,” and “the only true actors”, is a sly dig at the Nazi fixation on a Master Race. It’s also a self-deprecating metatextual gag. Barrymore compares the “purity” of the Passion Players to the overdone theatrics of “cheap Broadway hams.” Yet Barrymore himself was a major Broadway actor before breaking into film, playing hammy roles like - and please forgive me, here — Hamlet.

But the real “sly dig” at the Nazis is that the two actors portraying the Passion Players are not only Jewish, but fairly recent German-Jewish immigrants. “Second Beard” is played by Lee Kohlmar, a Bavarian Jew who moved to Hollywood to direct and become a prolific character actor. And “First Beard” is none other than Herman Bing, known to most as the voice of the ringmaster in Disney’s Dumbo. (Bing provided comedic relief in scores of 30s movies by spoofing his own accent).

Knowing this makes the satire all the more scathing when Bing cheerfully pipes up, “I am the Judas!” On an obvious level, he’s skewering the idea of Jewish guilt for the betrayal of Jesus. But on a subtextual level, he’s associating himself with “coward’s yellow” — the color Jews were forced to wear in medieval Europe, the same shade the Nazis would use when they began forcing Jews to self-identify with badges a few short years after The Twentieth Century’s release.

This has to be one of the first instances on film where Jewish performers mock antisemitism by adopting its trappings. It’s mischievous and self-aware and, essentially, the same gag Sacha Baron Cohen pulls when, as Borat, he goes on a Holocaust-denial rant.

And Jewish screenwriter Ben Hecht managed to slip the whole bit in right before Hays Code enforcement was passed off in 1934 to Joseph Breen — the guy who once wrote to the editor of a Jesuit weekly that Jews “seem to think of nothing but money making and sexual indulgence . . . Ninety-five percent of these folks are Jews of an Eastern European lineage. They are, probably, the scum of the scum of the earth.” Once Breen became the chief Code Cop, he demanded anti-Nazi, anti-German films be toned down, if not outright blocked, as “Jewish propaganda.” (He later changed his tune.)

My Pitch

The Twentieth Century was released when antisemitism was largely confined to the Right. But like everything else, antisemitism has now “diversified” and spread to a varied and assorted array of online influencers, celebrities, and Dark Triad freaks. It’s a sad state of affairs when some kid can text a potential employer that he “doesn’t want to work for Jews,” and it’s anyone’s guess whether the kid’s a Nazi or a Democratic Socialist.

I say it’s high time for another cinematic spoof of antisemites that takes its cues from The Twentieth Century. Hear me out: a movie where a thinly-veiled Nick Fuentes character and a thinly-veiled Hasan Piker character put aside their political differences and unite over their shared loathing of the Jewish people. Together, they join forces to root out the covert Jews they fear have infiltrated their respective inner circles. Working title is It’s the Joos and it should star the guy who plays Jean-Ralphio on Parks and Recreation.

Realistically, I know that movie hasn’t a shot in hell in being made. But at least I can comfort myself with the auditioning Hitlers of The Producers, all of whom with the exception of one are Jewish (my favorite being Zale Kessler as Jason Green. I fondly recall watching Zale’s performances at Sacramento’s Music Circus theater, and he absolutely slays Haben Sie Gehurt Das Deutsche Band?). Enjoy!