Recently, I was ripping apart the binding of a volume of Boxoffice® back issues when I spotted the ad that is displayed below. (Let us pause while I assure my publisher that by "ripping" I mean "carefully disassembling"). I was struck by it because it was announcing that not only had Korda done something, but apparently he had done it before. I remembered the name Korda. Alexander Korda. He was known for making lavish costume dramas and was the first director ever knighted, starting a chain of ridiculousness that I may have to personally end if I ever hear this: Sir Guy and Lady Ritchie (which, of course, would also make her Lady Madonna).

The ad touts Korda's outstanding talent discoveries though Sabu would be the answer if you were playing "One of These Things Is Not Like the Other." Oscar-nominated Merle Oberon certainly deserves her place here, but I suspect the reason she's at the top of the pile is that her husband, the soon to be Sir Alexander, paid for the ad. Oberon was severely injured in an automobile accident a few years before this ad appeared and her face was so scarred that several years later a new light was developed so that she would photograph well. The "Obie" is still used today. Look at my headshot at the top left of this page. I'm not really that handsome. The Obie can be your friend, too.

So, Korda was a star maker and if you've read this far it is time for your reward. Before we get to the good stuff, you'll need to click the Korda ad. I'll wait.

If everything is wired up correctly, the overleaf should now be in view announcing Alexander Korda's flaming new discovery—Corrine Luchaire; in a woman behind bars picture, no less. YES! (If you don't see the ad I've just described my cell will ring at any moment).

Prison Without Bars, starring French teen Luchaire, was an English-language remake of a film from the previous year. I doubt that you've heard of Corrine Luchaire—her career was a short one for reasons I'll soon reveal and they're juicy. I now have the attention of my sisters.

1939 was not only a year of unmatched Hollywood product—Gone With the Wind, The Wizard of Oz, Stagecoach, Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, The Hunchback of Notre Dame, Wuthering Heights (with the future Lady Korda)—it was a year when Hollywood brought out the American flag. Fervently anti-Nazi, Hollywood began to speak out politically for the first time. Chaplin was lensing The Great Dictator, Warners was releasing Confessions of a Nazi Spy and the Russian film, Concentration Camp.

Adolph Hitler (or maybe it was Dick Shawn), in a rant before the Reichstag in 1939, said this in response to Hollywood gaining a spine:

"Announcements by American film companies that they intend to produce anti-Nazi—that is, anti-German—films can but induce us to produce anti-Semetic films in Germany. Here, too, our opponents should not permit themselves any delusions as to the effectiveness of what we can do. There will be very many states and peoples who will show great understanding for supllementary instructions of this kind on such an important subject. We believe that if the Jewish international campaign of hatred by press and propaganda could be checked, good understanding would very quickly be established between the peoples."

In a vibrant response belittling "the Austrian housepainter" Boxoffice® editor Maurice Kann ended with this:

"The verbal bullying before the Reichstag stooges, as a consequence, must not collapse any backbones. It must not strike terror into any courageous plans already made in Hollywood or brewing along lines exposing terrorism to a world which must strike back it it is not to be engulfed in a political and economic ideology at direct odds with the fundementals of free thinking and free action. It simply must not be."

Many studios ran ads in trade journals exhorting theater owners to show these politically-charged, pro-American films nakedly appealing to their patriotism. Not all exhibitors were on board, however; here is J. F. Schlez of the Columbia Theatre in Columbia, North Carolina:

"Our reason for cancelling "Nazi Spy" is that it is a propoganda film. After showing "Blockade" [a rather benign Fonda film set against the Spanish Civil War" - K note], we swore off. The prime purpose of any theatre is to entertain. Our patrons are 100% native stock and don't care for European squabbles. Of course we are all sorry for the existing conditions over there, but that is all. Senator Reynolds has already told how we feel about it and he is right. We are NOT showing 'Nazi Spy'."

The charming Senator of whom he spoke was Robert Rice Reynolds, a Nazi sympathizer who was lucky he wasn't shot for treason.

But Hollywood ignored racist fascists like Mr. Schlez and continued to press their point in print, in business and on screen.

Leni Riefenstahl came to town around this time to show Olympia and was not only rebuffed, she was run out of town on a schiene. A Boxoffice® reporter attended a roundtable interview with Riefenstahl where she asked the man, referring to coverage of her country, "Why don't you write about the good things?" His wry reply: "What is there that I could possibly write about?"

And, therefore, it is sadly ironic that Alexander Korda, a Hungarian Jew, would trumpet the gamine Luchaire so blaringly in the pages of Boxoffice® that year because, as it turns out, Mlle. Luchaire would have been right at home collecting her winnings with the very Vichy Claude Rains at Rick's Cafe Americain in Casablanca. For Korda and Luchaire it would not be the beginning of a beautiful friendship.

When the ad you now have to scroll up to see went to press, Corrine Luchaire was the teenage mistress of Otto Abetz the Nazi Ambassador to France. She made her only films in 1939, including Prison Without Bars. Later, Abetz was tried for war crimes, but beat the rap just long enough to get himself smashed up on der autobahn. Luchaire's father, Jean Luchaire, was a journalist and publisher who not only collaborated with the Germans after France fell, but found himself facing a firing squad after the war. Their aim was sure and true. In the same year her father was shot, Corrine Luchaire was sentenced to a decade's worth of dégradation nationale—the loss of basic rights. She authored an autobiography before succumbing to tuberculocis just before her 28th birthday.

Dégradation nationale—can we do that to Brittney?

Now, in this week's Timecode I'll give you a peek at three very different studio ads from 1939—including Confessions of a Nazi Spy—as they appeared in the pages of Boxoffice®. Make sure you start from left to right. Let the clicking begin.

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