What do "
Captain America: The First Avenger", "
Casablanca" and Roland Emmerich's latest "
Midway" have in common? They are all set in what seems to be the most pivotal year of the 20th century, the midway point of World War II and America's entry into the war after Pearl Harbour -- 1942. 1942, noticeably, features in dozens more international films to date.
I was sitting in the premiere of Christian Petzold’s masterpiece "
Transit" at the Berlinale 2019 –set in Marseille in 1942—when it occurred to me that I must have seen a dozen films set precisely in that year. The same happened at Berlinale 2020 when watching Vadim Perelman's very good
Persian Lessons. The Nazi commander who is planning to open a restaurant in Tehran after the war says to the Jewish prisoner who is supposed to teach him Farsi: "It's 1942, the war will go on for a couple of years... If I learn four new words a day, I will have quite a vocabulary after the war." And we see the Jew calculate in his head how long he can survive on borrowed time as a language tutor.
The fact that the world's fate was hanging in the balance makes it fertile ground for suspenseful story-telling, where everything hinges on one person's conviction, one group's action, one general's reaction, one country's courage or cowardice. Things did not look good in 1942 and the world‘s chips could have fallen on either side, the Allies' or the Nazis'. German Hollywood emigre Ernst Lubitsch ominously titled the two comedies he shot that year "
To Be or Not to Be" and "
Heaven Can Wait“, the latter aptly the story of a man who needs to prove he belongs in hell.
Another Jewish European emigre in Hollywood, Otto Preminger, in 1965 gathered John Wayne, Kirk Douglas, and Henry Fonda to make the last black-and-white World War II epic: "
In Harm's Way" follows the lives of American naval officers in 1942 Hawaii.
The most famous of all 1942 films, "Casablanca" (so close to yet so far from Petzold’s Marseille), is not just set in 1942 but was also
created that year in a whirlwind of quick decision-making. In January, Warner Bros. bought the film rights to an unproduced stage play called Everybody Comes to Rick's. The Epstein brothers, who at the time were already working on Frank Capra's "
Why We Fight" series, were hired to write the script. The soon-to-be-multiple-Oscar-winning film was shot from May to August (entirely in California) and released in November to ride the wave of attention the Allied invasion of North Africa was receiving.
Others tried to replicate this success, namely Raoul Walsh the next year with Turkey-set "
Background to Danger", also starring "Casablanca"’s Peter Lorre. The story, which takes us from Ankara to Aleppo, is set against the backdrop of Nazi Germany trying to make (neutral) Turkey an ally by staging an assassination attempt on German ambassador Franz von Papen in 1942.
Canada also features in fictional(ized) 1942 stories, most recently in "
Allied", the 2016 British-American war thriller starring Brad Pitt as a Canadian intelligence officer and Marion Cotillard as a French Resistance fighter, who meet in … Casablanca.
Artists have ample reasons to use 1942. Dramatic events rippled from the European theatre to the fronts of the world. Anne Frank and her family had to vanish behind a bookshelf for years before being found and killed. Leningrad, Odessa, Sevastopol were under siege. Singapore had already fallen. Battles that would sadly go down in history were raging in Stalingrad (Russia), El Alamein (Egypt), Bataan (the Philippines), the Coral Sea, and Darwin (Australia) that year. The latter is the backdrop for Baz Luhrmann‘s 2008 romance "
Australia" with Nicole Kidman and Hugh Jackman.
The Australians prepared for the Pacific war with Operation Stepsister (see the film "Curtin"); the Czech valiantly tried to assassinate Nazi leader Reinhard Heydrich in Prague in Operation Anthropoid (see "
The Man with the Iron Heart"); the British with Operation Frankton tried to disrupt German cargo shipping (see "
Cockleshell Heroes"). The US Doolittle Raid on Japan was captured on screen as early as 1944 with Spencer Tracy in "
Thirty Seconds over Tokyo". Also in 1944, British war film "
Candlelight in Algeria" took the secret October 1942 conference in Cherchell, Algeria, as its premise, where US General Clark and a group of high-ranking French Vichy commanders agreed not to resist the imminent Operation Torch landings in Vichy France-controlled French North Africa.
No part of the world is spared. German U-Boats are sighted in the Caribbean Sea (see Venezuelan drama "
Venezzia"). TV's "Das Boot" season 2, coming out in 2020, will arrive in 1942, nine months after the original (
teaser trailer!). Ang Lee‘s "
Lust, Caution" is set in Japanese-occupied Shanghai in 1942; and Turkey in 1999 submitted "
Mrs. Salkım's Diamonds" to the Academy, the little-known story of Varlik Vergisi, a 1942 tax scheme that pretended to raise money in case neutral Turkey had to join the war, but was really meant to intern or evict non-Muslims and minorities like the Armenians from Turkey. Scandinavian countries have produced filmst that show them precariously hanging on to neutrality against the Germans or Russians in 1942 (for example "
Beyond the Border").
Two films even put the year in their titles. "
Back to 1942", the (2012) Chinese historical film by Feng Xiaogang –China‘s Oscars submission-- introduces us to the major famine in Henan, China, during the Second Sino-Japanese War. In the 1994 Hindi romance "
1942: A Love Story", meanwhile, a young couple grapples with the tumultuous decline and looming breakdown of the British Raj.
Fatally, 1942 was also the year of the Wannsee Conference, where the Nazi machine put into writing their ideas for a “Final solution to the Jewish question“, i.e. industrial-size genocide, a meeting only really explored in the 2001 BBC drama "
Conspiracy", starring Kenneth Branagh, Colin Firth, and Tom Hiddleston.
A few miles down the road in Potsdam, Nazi propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels that year tries to uphold morale post-Stalingrad disaster with royal Prussian epics (Veit Harlan's "The Great King") or distract the nation with waltzes as in Willi Frost's fluffy "
Viennese Blood".
There is no end in sight for analyses of 1942. American auteur Terrence Malick has already visited the year twice, first with "
The Thin Red Line" (starring Penn, Brody, Clooney, Harrelson, Nolte, Travolta) and this year at Cannes with German-US co-production "
A Hidden Life", an all-enveloping story of quiet resistance and conviction based on a real story (which of course ends in death).
Last month, German Hollywood director Roland Emmerich talked about his fears of a WWIII as he was introducing his drama WWII "Midway", set post-Pearl Harbour between 4 and 7 June 1942 in the remote Pacific Midway islands, where a weakened US force beat the Imperial Japanese army in a massive air and sea battle that swayed the outcome of the war. One battle nearly could turn the war, as Emmerich's poster would have us believe. As a companion piece, Netflix currently offers John Ford’s actual 1942 documentary "The Battle Of Midway", a montage of original war footage.
1942 is here to stay. "Shadows of Freedom" is a 2020 feature length documentary on the Jewish Algerian resistance of 1942. This resistance movement --which also identified strongly as French-- had a significant impact on the war, yet remains virtually unknown. It was part of the 1st Allied collaboration of WWII called "Operation Torch" which has also been largely forgotten. As Petzold, German writer-director Maggie Peren ("The Colour of the Ocean") has chosen questions of identity and survival for her next film. She is in production for a new feature, "The Forger" ("Der Passfälscher"): Berlin, 1942. The Jew Cioma Schönhaus has no intention of letting people spoil his joie de vivre, most certainly not the Nazis. To evade deportation, he discovers his talent for forgery – not just of passports but also his own identity. Similarly,
Tom Hanks (who also wrote the screenplay) is about to travel back to 1942 in Aaron Schneider's 2020 "Greyhound", a US war drama revisiting the U-boat Battle of the Atlantic (Apple TV+ launch July 10).
"I think I'll hate 1942 till I die, just on general principles," author J. D. Salinger once said, as he had been drafted into the US Army and fought on Utah Beach on D-Day, in the Battle of the Bulge, and the Battle of Hürtgen Forest.
by
@JuttaBrendemuhl
