So Ends Our Night (1941)

So Ends Our Night is a 1941 drama starring Fredric March, Margaret Sullavan and Glenn Ford, and directed by John Cromwell. The screenplay was adapted by Talbot Jennings from the fourth novel Flotsam by the famous German exile, Erich Maria Remarque, who rose to international fame for his first novel, All Quiet On The Western Front.

Written and filmed in a 1940 America which was still primarily isolationist even as FDR began to meet with Churchill, So Ends Our Night was one of the most explicitly anti-Nazi films to be made in the Hollywood studio system before America's entry into the war after the attack on Pearl Harbor in Dec. 1941. Throughout the 1930s, filmmakers had been prevented from making accurate films about the Nazi regime by a Production Board controlled by the isolationist, anti-Semitic Catholic, Joseph Breen, who insisted any criticism of Hitler's Germany and Third Reich was a violation of the Neutrality Act and who frequently consulted with the German consul in Los Angeles, Georg Gyssling, on his approval of upcoming films. Thus it took independent producers David Loew and Alfred Lewin to purchase Remarque's serialized novel on the struggles of three German exiles who have been deprived of their citizenship and hence, passports, under Nazi persecution and are now "forced to roam in an alien world like a hunted beast," as the New York Times reviewer wrote after the film's premiere in February, 1941.

Synopsis

The story begins in 1937 Austria, before the German occupation which would arrive the following year. Josef Steiner (Fredric March) is a middle-aged German veteran who has been an ideological opponent to the Nazi regime from its inception and already escaped from two years in a concentration camp. He's in hiding in a dodgy Austrian boarding house with young Ludwig Kern (Glenn Ford in an early and outstanding performance), a bewildered 19-year-old German from a prosperous family that was found to have Jewish forebears when the Nazis came to power and now "half-Aryan," are abruptly deprived of their German citizenship and passports, rendered stateless and ordered to leave the country.

Actors