A tip from Fritz and Bert

Nazis or not, collaboration and resistance are still what they were

Sometimes the extreme malevolence of Tubby and his goons and the fast pace of their rampage seems unprecedented. I think back for example at the furor caused by the appointment for the anti-environmentalist James Watt as Reagan’s Secretary of the Interior in 1981. Reagan had a lot of old rightwing Republican hands who knew how to look normal and keep it on the downlow, but Watt was a religious maniac and a prick who made his extremism clear. I guess they felt like they could have one guy who was really out there, as a treat for the Sagebrush Rebellion types. Anyway they had their fun (and accepted the bad publicity) with Watt for a couple of years and then he made some extra-offensive remarks and some Senators got shirty and Reagan let his old pal Judge Clark have the job, to pretty much the same effect.

By contrast, the Trump II cabinet is almost wholly made up of even worse goons and freaks who not only don’t hide it but seem to be constantly trying to outdo one another at shocking the sensibilities of decent people. Some, like the madman Kennedy, who’s literally running American medical science into a ditch, would not have gotten anywhere near a GOP-sponsored microphone let alone the cabinet even in Reagan’s time. Seems new, right?

But sometimes you run into something that tells you, on the contrary, there’s a lot going on here that’s on repeat from other eras, and that knowledge can be comforting.

The Criterion Channel is running a “Noir and the Blacklist” series. It’s got several great movies in which blacklisted auteurs and actors were involved, though the relationship between the material and the leftist politics that got them in trouble is often either subtextual or absent. I suppose you could make a case for social critique in Gun Crazy, but to me it’s a stretch. Brute Force is more on the money; along with the never-had-a-chance noir thing, we have prisoners trying to make something slightly less awful of their little society (including a newsroom!) but thwarted by the sadistic and duplicitous screw Captain Munsey, who can work the carrot but much prefers the stick, eventually forcing an upheaval that has you rooting for (and getting!) his gruesome murder. That one’s not too hard to figure out.

Before last weekend I hadn’t seen Fritz Lang’s Hangmen Also Die!, though, and it came as kind of a shock, not so much for the heroes and villains — it was made during the war and hating Nazis was still OK — as for the theme, which directly touches on some things going on right this minute.

The story, credited to Lang and “Bert Brecht” — that is, Bertolt, in his only Hollywood credit — takes off from the real-life assassination of Reinhard Heydrich, a top Nazi killed by Czech patriots in the occupied Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia. The mainspring of action is the attempts by the assassin, surgeon Franticek Svoboda, to stay uncaptured, which is not wholly nor even primarily a matter of self-preservation, as we’re given to understand the Czech resistance is counting on keeping him around as a leader (“You have no right to surrender”) and as an inspiration.

Keeping Svoboda safe, though, gets to be fraught, as he inadvertently involves the Novotny family, via the impulsive intervention of daughter Anna and the more willful intervention of paterfamilias Stephen Novotny, a former university professor and patriot. And the Gestapo are working hard to sniff them out. In fact they’re taking hostages by the hundreds. But, the resistance leader tells Svobada, “What is 400 lives? This is a war of millions... and the execution of Heydrich is only one battle in that war.”

Lang and Brecht aren’t giving us a lot of character shading. The Nazis are vicious to the Czechs and given to petty cruelties among themselves, complete monsters. (In fact we have a cynical, bibulous, even occasionally gemütlich Gestapo inspector, Gruber, who seems mainly on the job to keep the Nazis from getting too tedious.) Most of the Czechs are shown to be at least sympathetic to the resistance — as we see in a bit of shocking minor violence when some townspeople suspect Anna of planning to inform to the Gestapo — and several of them wind up surrendering their lives.

The brewer Emil Czaka, played by frequent Hollywood patsy-player Gene Lockhart, isn’t too subtle either. He’s a coward and a suckup to the Reich, and by the time we see him at a resistance meeting trying to screw things up by pushing for the assassin’s surrender, we not only know he’s a plant (as some of the other plotters suspect), we also assume he’s been muscled into it by his Nazi bosses. Gruber reserves special if amused contempt for Czaka and even extorts money from him for police protection when he whines about his fear of being found out by the patriots.

Which, inevitably, does him no good. Czaka gets the perks of his treason — government contracts, a good table at the local swell restaurant — but in the end the Nazis are only willing to do so much (that is to say, not enough) to protect him. In fact (mild spoiler) they wind up the agents of his demise. The Czechs, meanwhile, know that there’s no compromise with the Nazis that will actually work — not for any individual, and not for the cause. “There will be no end until they have the assassin,” somebody says. “There will be no end anyway,” says Professor Novotny.

The great thing about a solid metaphor is it works large and small. Right now this ain’t quite a Reich. There aren’t many people under direct mortal threat, though some wrongfully-removed guys in Tubby’s Salvadoran death camp certainly are (and some might already have been killed). Tony Evers, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, and other targets of Tom Homan’s ham-handed threats are probably safe for the moment, though given how quickly things have escalated I can’t say how long that’ll hold. We’ve yet to see how far they’re willing to take it.

But we already know how it goes with collaborators. The universities and law firms that jumped when Trump demanded it are starting to look like they took a bad bet, as some of their colleagues and competitors are making a fight of it and some judges are coming to their assistance. That’s good, and maybe that’ll be an end to it. Maybe not. In any case, the message Lang and Brecht were bringing seems pretty relevant still.