Thomas Doherty's impressive study of Hollywood's relationship with Nazi Germany is a story of appeasement, accommodation, and courage, set against an ominous backdrop of intolerance and conflict. Hollywood and Hitler is a natural subject for Doherty, whose Pre-Code Hollywood (1999) and Projections of War (1993) bracketed the era he scrutinizes here.

Although studio heads, most of them Jews of Eastern European origin, despised Hitler, they saw Germany as too important a market to abandon. Most of them barely squeaked when Hitler Aryanized the German film industry. Hollywood moguls transferred Jewish employees from their German offices and submitted newsreel footage to Nazi censors. Constrained by the Production Code Authority (Hollywood's self-censorship board) and by their conviction that the German market would improve some day, movie moguls refused to produce anti-Nazi pictures.

Some movie folk bucked this deferential trend. In 1936, liberal and leftist dissenters seeking to raise awareness of Hitlerism's evils formed the Hollywood Anti-Nazi League (HANL). Doherty situates HANL within the mid-1930s Popular Front movement, connecting the league's fund-raisers, rallies, and boycotts to the broader crusade for social justice. HANL eventually claimed between four and five thousand members and became a prime example of using star power to convey a political message.

The tipping point came in 1938, the year of Kristallnacht, the Munich Pact, the Austrian Anschluss, and the Sudetenland. With Hitler marching and European markets slipping away, studios began criticizing Nazism. HANL, for example, led a successful campaign to ostracize German director Leni Riefenstahl when she visited the United States. On-screen, however, this new activism remained confined largely to newsreels, best shown by the March of Time's incendiary Inside Nazi Germany docu-drama. Confined by the Production Code and by their instinctive fear of controversy, the moguls still squashed anti-Nazi scripts. Congressman Martin Dies's well-publicized 1938 hearings on communism's influence in Hollywood reminded the moguls that many Americans objected to mixing politics with entertainment.

The 1939 Nazi–Soviet Pact fractured HANL as hardcore communists, the group's most passionate organizers and speakers, followed the new party line of nonintervention in Europe. But the movie moguls sensed a shift in the political winds. Anti-Nazism was moving into the mainstream. Seeking to claim the ideological center (and to fill seats), studios began issuing a trickle of anti-Nazi films. Confessions of a Nazi Spy (1939), The Mortal Storm (1940), and The Great Dictator (1940) set the stage for a wartime cinema grounded in antifascist, pro-democracy pictures.

Much of Doherty's story has been told before, but never so well. Relying heavily on trade journals and Production Code Administration records, he has crafted an engaging narrative that blends fascinating set pieces, such as his account of Vittorio Mussolini's ill-fated 1937 Hollywood visit, with insightful breakdowns of key films, organizations, and political developments. He unearths a number of gems along the way. His discussions of the Yorkville Theatre (a Manhattan movie house that screened Nazi films) and of little-known anti-Nazi pictures, including Hitler's Reign of Terror (1934) and the Soviet-made Professor Mamlock (1938), are fascinating. His treatments of newsreel content and of Warner Bros's patriotic shorts series are similarly sterling.

A broader base of research could have pushed Doherty's analysis even further. Records from the State and Commerce Departments are underused, as are other Roosevelt administration documents. Other sources, including the voluminous papers of Will Hays, head of the studios' trade organization and a key player in overseas negotiations, were not consulted, or at least are not cited.

Doherty also drifts into related but tangential matters, such as Hollywood's response to the Spanish Civil War and the making of Idiot's Delight, a 1939 picture that angered Italian Fascists. This blurry focus works to an extent, as it helps to chart Hollywood's broader shift from aloofness to activism, but it also highlights the difficulty of isolating the Hollywood–Germany relationship from other developments. Moviemakers' response to Nazism stemmed in part from their reading of the overall European market, their interest in penetrating Latin American theaters (whose censors often forbade anti-Nazi material), and their desire to stay on the Roosevelt administration's good side. Striking a proper balance is tricky, as fully incorporating these threads into the book would muddy the central narrative line. But merely hinting at them can create a misleadingly bilateral perspective, implying that Hollywood viewed Germany as its own entity rather than as part of a greater galaxy of issues.

Nevertheless, Hollywood and Hitler is an excellent addition to Doherty's impressive oeuvre, well worth reading for its important insights, strong narrative, and mastery of the period.