The Three Stooges vs. Hitler

Moe Howard was the first American actor to impersonate Hitler, predating Chaplin’s The Great Dictator by nine months. For that, he got on Hitler’s death list.
by Lynn Rapaport

  Until the late 1930s the American movie industry was economically dependent on a world market for the success of its products. In Europe, more than 35,000 theaters showed American movies regularly. Although Adolf Hitler loved movies, he resisted seeing himself portrayed on screen. Under Nazi control, the German film industry forbade characterizations of Hitler as subject matter for film. Hitler was only to appear in newsreels and documentaries, and he wanted no artificial Hitlers as rivals.

   Movies that dealt realistically with Adolf Hitler and Nazi Germany were likely to be banned overseas. Hollywood feared that unless they avoided social and political issues, and only produced films considered “wholesome” and “pure entertainment,” the federal government would censor the movies or break up the industry.

  In 1934, spearheaded by William Harrison Hays, the Motion Picture Producers and Distributors of America created a production code (PCA) that imposed sharp restrictions on how movies treated a wide range of subjects. Article X of the Production Code stated: “The history, institution, prominent people and citizenry of all nations shall be presented fairly. No picture shall be produced that tends to incite bigotry or hatred among peoples of differing races, religions or national origins.” This code was designed to secure the universal appeal of Hollywood movies and their financial success throughout the world. Many films made in the early 1930s with political messages were removed from circulation until the 1960s.

   The United States, in the throes of the Great Depression, followed an isolationist foreign policy to keep out of the war. Most Americans were unwilling to be drawn into European power struggles or to take sides between Hitler and his intended victims.
 
  When the Second World War erupted in 1939, a Gallup poll showed that 96 percent of Americans opposed entering the war. Despite the Hays Code, politicians still suspected ideological aims in Hollywood films. Depending on the critic’s political stripes, some saw isolationist propaganda, others saw interventionist propaganda.

   Indeed, North Dakota Senator Gerald P. Nye, an isolationist, charged Hollywood with making feature films that were propaganda vehicles to mobilize the American public for war.

  But despite the widespread presence and significant influence of Jews in the American film industry in the 1930s, Hollywood discreetly avoided making overtly anti-Nazi films. This attitude remained unchanged until the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor in December 1941.

  In 1934, The Three Stooges signed with Columbia Studios to make eight two-reel comedies, or “shorts,” annually, for a fee of $60,000 per year, which was divided evenly among the three performers. Two-reelers were in great demand by movie theaters across the country. Long before the advent of “coming attractions,” shorts were considered “curtain raisers,” to be shown before the full-length feature movie. Film historians estimate that by the late 1930s, about 88 million Americans – two-thirds of the country’s population – frequented their neighborhood movie houses weekly. There were approximately 17,500 theatres in the country then. Moviegoers were entertained by two-reel comedy shorts, newsreels and, sometimes, cartoons before each full-length feature.

   The Stooges knew that with hard work, luck, and determination they could become household names by being seen by audiences nationwide on a weekly basis.

   Between 1934 and 1959, the Three Stooges made 190 short subjects for Columbia Studios. Of these 190 Columbia shorts, eight dealt directly with the Second World War. Five were anti-Nazi: You Nazty Spy! (1940), its sequel, I’ll Never Heil Again (1941), Back From the Front (1943), They Stooge to Conga (1943) and Higher Than a Kite (1943). Two were anti-Japanese: The Yokes On Me (1944) and No Dough Boys (1944) – and the eighth short, Gents Without Cents (1944) dealt with World War II on the home front.

   While Charlie Chaplin envisioned the plot for a film about a mustached Jewish barber mistaken for the Führer, the German consulate in Los Angeles complained, and the Hays office told United Artists, the releasing company, that Chaplin “would run into censorship trouble.” German sympathizers threatened to vandalize and set off stink bombs in theaters showing the film.

   Shorts, however, were not regulated in the same way as feature films. The Three Stooges were unnoticed or ignored by the

censors. In mid-1939, Jules White, head of Columbia Pictures Shorts Department and long-time producer and director of the Three Stooges comedies, walked into his brother Sam’s office and said that he was planning a comedy about Hitler. Moe would be Hitler, Curly would be Göring, and Larry would be Goebbels. Sam told his brother that the situation in Europe was grim, and asked if he could make it funny. “I’ll make it funny,” Jules replied.

   Filming began on December 5, 1939. It was shot quickly, in seven days. Cutting was finished on December 26, 1939, and on January 19, 1940 Columbia pictures released its 44th Three Stooges comedy, You Nazty Spy. The film cost about $18,500 to make, and preceded the release of Charlie Chaplin’s The Great Dictator by nine months. Moe Howard of the Three Stooges was the first American actor to lampoon Hitler in film. It was also his favorite Three Stooges short.

   In You Nazty Spy, three cabinet members, Mr. Ixnay, Mr. Onay and Mr. Amscray (pig-latin for Nix, No and Scram), are discussing solutions to the economic woes of their Kingdom, Moronica. Since the King of Moronica wants peace, which is not economically profitable, the cabinet members plot his overthrow, institute a dictator and start a war. They find Moe Hailstone, who with his cronies, Larry and Curly, is busy wallpapering the dining room.

  They offer him the greatest opportunity of his life – to be a dictator. Pondering it, Moe runs his hand through his hair. Scratching under his nose, he accidentally attaches a piece of dark wallpaper that was stuck to his finger. The tape mustache makes him look like Hitler. When Moe asks what a dictator does, he’s told, “He makes speeches to the people promising them plenty, gives them nothing and takes everything.”

   Moronica gets a new flag – snakes entwined into the shape of a swastika, and a slogan, “Moronica for Morons.” There is talk of a beer hall putsch, Moe orders a book burning, and sends an innocent man to a “concentrated camp.” Moe plans the conquest of the country Starvania and assembles the famous Peace Conference of Oompola, arguing for a corridor through the country, Double Crossia. In the end, Moe plans to throw his country’s dissidents to the lions. Instead, the Three Stooges get eaten by the lions, and the film ends with a burping lion wearing the Reichsführer’s hat.

   Although the Stooges are killed in You Nazty Spy, they are back running Moronica in the sequel, I’ll Never Heil Again, released in July 1941, five months before Pearl Harbor. Hailstone is bent on world domination, and fights with the Axis powers for control. In both shorts, their confrontations are treated as games--checkers and basketball – and are resolved with the demise of Hitler, the Nazis and the Axis powers.

  The Three Stooges were anti-heroes, flaunting their Jewishness at a time when assimilation and ethnic self-denial were integral to the American film industry. Using comedy form the Stooges shatter the image of Hitler and the Nazis. Moe’s lampooning of Hitler is mindful of a Purim masquerade, when we dress up as Haman only so that we can hiss at his name.

  All of the Stooges’ families had fled anti-Semitic persecution in Europe in the late 1800s, and in a small way the two-reelers helped bring the Nazi threat to the forefront of moviegoers’ attention. While the Jewish immigrants who founded the motion picture business were reticent to critique Nazi Germany on film, the Stooges wore their Jewishness unselfconsciously, and maligned the man who was exterminating their people back in Europe. So who had the last laugh? Columbia Studios, which made money on the popular shorts.

   Lynn Rapaport is an associate professor of sociology at Pomona College. She is the author of Jews in Germany After the Holocaust: Memory, Identity and Jewish-German Relations and is working on a project on how the Holocaust is portrayed in popular culture.

To Laugh or Not to Laugh? Holocaust Movie Comedies
When: Monday, March 29, 2:15-3:45 p.m.
Where: Hilton Gaslamp, 401 K St., Gaslamp
$10 per day. Part of the Western Jewish Studies Association Conference. For more information, contact (619) 594-5338 or lbaron@mail.sdsu.edu.


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