This Mortal Storm

Frank Borzage's This Mortal Storm (1940) observes a peculiar convention:  set entirely in the Bavarian Alps, the film's sympathetic characters speak plainly with American Midwest accents, but the film's Nazi's snarl and smirk and their diction is made sinister by their heavy and obtrusive German accents.  (In this film, a Gestapo officer actually mutters:  "Ve haf vays of may-kink young girls talk!")  But, of course, all the characters both good and bad are Germans and, indeed, some of them are members of the same family.  The most remarkable thing about this curious approach to the way people speak in the film is that it isn't immediately obvious that this unnatural convention is in place.  I didn't exactly notice that the bad Germans spoke in accent and the good ones sounded like Indiana Hoosiers until sitting down to write this note.  Perhaps, this is a testament to the film's excellence -- uniformly gripping throughout its 88 minute length, Borzage's film is a powerful and disquieting experience, excellently acted, and, indeed, (sadly) relevant to our political plight today (April 2018).

Set in 1933, the film involves what we would call "a blended family" today.  Kindly Professor Roth teaches physiology at an university in a picturesque Bavarian town. Prof. Roth has just turned 60, an achievement that he is too humble to announce to the world but too vain to treat as inconsequential -- he is covertly (or not so covertly) very satisfied with himself.  (Roth is played by Frank Norton, the actor who played the "great and powerful Oz" in the 1939 film about The Wonderful Wizard of Oz.)  Roth's wife has two sons, one of the played by a very young Robert Stack -- these boys seem to be about 20 -- as well a beautiful daughter, Freya, who is the oldest of these siblings (Freya may be Roth's daughter by an unnamed first wife -- her exact status is unclear.)  Professor Roth and his wife also have one younger son who may be ten or twelve.  The film begins on Roth's birthday.  He goes to his class where he is surprised and gratified to find himself lionized -- the students sing Gaudeamus Igitur in his honor and give him a little trophy, a statue of Siegfried, it seems, brandishing a sword.  But all is not well.  At a family dinner with birthday cake that evening, servants announce that the radio has just reported that Hitler has become Chancellor of the Reich.  Roth who says that he is "non-Aryan" is concerned, but doesn't think that the political developments in Berlin will affect him far away in the Bavarian Alps.  In fact, the announcement results in a violent quarrel at the dinner table -- Roth's two step-sons are members of the Nazi party and they strongly endorse Hitler.  Freya is opposed to Hitler and the little boy doesn't know what to think.  Freya's pompous and condescending fiancée, played by Robert Young (later TV's Marcus Welby) is a Nazi as well and he joins the two stepsons in hailing Hitler as Germany's salvation.  Things quickly deteriorate.  There is street-fighting and non-Aryans, as they are called in this movie, are beaten up.  A veterinarian, Martin (played by Jimmy Stewart) is a close friend of the family.  He stands up against the thugs and gets thrashed himself.  Freya (Margaret Sullavan) denounces her fiancée and breaks off the relationship, confessing that she loves the veterinarian, and enemy of Fascism, Jimmy Stewart's noble Martin.  In his classroom, Nazi goons demand that Professor Roth distinguish between pure German blood and nasty non-Aryan blood -- when he refuses to support this dubious proposition, Roth loses his job and, in fact, ends up in a concentration camp.  Jimmy Stewart's Martin has to save a "non-Aryan" threatened with death and he takes him on skis over a dangerous pass in the mountains to Innsbruck, reputedly a haven against Nazi aggression.  Freya pleads with her ex-fiancée for the release of the weak and elderly Prof. Roth.  The Nazi storm trooper won't help her except to set up a last meeting between Roth and his wife. In the next scene, Roth is reported dead and the rest of the family decides to flee Germany.  At the Austrian border, Freya is detained because she is carrying her deceased father's manuscript, his book about blood physiology.  Trapped in Germany, she despairs.  But Martin, learning of her plight, crosses the border surreptitiously and, with the Gestapo closing in, the two lovers escape on skis into the mountains.  On the border, a German patrol headed by Freya's ex-fiancée, tracks down the lovers and shoots Freya.  She bleeds to death before Martin can get her to the nearest town -- the film ends with someone reciting a poem that I didn't know over an image of footprints filling up with snow in the storm. 

Borzage's film is crammed with incidents.  Maria Ouspenskaya, as Martin's mother, whispers portentously and a teenage maid in the veterinarian's household (who secretly loves the gentle Jimmy Stewart) is tortured.  Books are burned and there are barroom fights and rallies with Nazis singing patriotic songs.  The script effectively dramatizes chaos within one family -- the Professor's sons who have claimed undying love for their stepfather in the opening scenes denouncing him openly to the authorities as the film progresses.  The acting is uniformly excellent -- the clash of emotions on Robert Taylor's face when Freya pleads with him and, then, later when he stands atop a slick of Freya's blood in the snowfield is extraordinary.  Taylor plays a man who is not really bad -- he just wants to get along with others, but this leads him into all sorts of evil.  Although the film is a melodrama, it's consistently understated -- the scene in which Roth's wife, soon to be his widow, meets the old man in a darkened cell is heartbreaking particularly because nothing is overplayed:  the old professor, obviously much worn down, appears from darkness and, then, vanishes again into a dark corridor, the last time we see him alive.  Margaret Sullavan as the heroine takes a little "getting used to" -- she's not really conventionally pretty:  she has a squashed-looking Slavic face with sleepy-looking wounded eyes a bit like Shelley Winters.  However, as the film progresses she becomes warmer and her heroism in attempting to cross the brutal Alpine pass is touching -- of course, she dies melodramatically, expressing her love for Martin as he carries  her in his arms through a Teutonic forest, but it's melodrama in a good cause and not really offensive.  The camerawork wavers between Expressionist chiaroscuro and sophisticated large-scale scenes in the lecture hall or at the family dinner-table or in crowded taverns.  There are several very impressive downhill skiing scenes that are exuberant and persuasive except for the inserts that, of course, are ill-advised -- people shown in profile with scarves blowing in a fictional wind as a fictional landscape is rear-projected behind them.  The Alpine scenes with the patrols playing cat-and-mouse with the refugees are thrilling and reminiscent of the last five minutes of Renoir's great The Grand Illusion.  Of course, the savage irony is that escape to Innsbruck is meaningless -- the Nazis will be there soon enough.  (The German - Austrian Anschluss was March 1938). It's interesting to see that many of the interior shots are made from a low angle and feature looming, grim-looking ceilings boxing in the characters -- indeed, the film is very frightening:  the scenes at the border on the train will induce a queasy feeling in even the most hardened viewer. 

It's a false equivalence and I don't mean this note to sound a hysterical alarum, but... there's too much similarity between our politics at this moment in the United States and the situation shown in the film for me to fail to note certain, shall we say, family resemblances...   At this moment, the truth is suborned to perjury and lies are told with exuberant abandon and there's a vicious strong man in power that a sizeable percentage of the population will support whatever he does.  Watching this film, one feels exhausted and intimidated and, more than a little bit, scared.  Of course, the vile Donald Trump is no Hitler but there's something about this present feverish delirium, this nightmare that doesn't ever exactly break, that makes me recommend this film to you.  Note how quickly, a happy family is destroyed by internal political dissension and observe, also, how swiftly a crowd of smiling admirers becomes a brutal mob.  This enervating atmosphere of hatred in our country is really becoming too much too bear.