THE MORTAL STORM (1940)

M-G-M got on the anti-Nazi bandwagon in 1940 with two films: the fluffy gloss & fake grit of ESCAPE (Mervyn LeRoy/Robert Taylor/Norma Shearer) and this unbearably moving, tough yet romantic, torn-apart family drama. Margaret Sullavan and James Stewart, in their fourth and final pairing, are the last decent couple standing when their tightly interwoven German town celebrates Hitler’s rise with a series of restrictive measures that tempt away her original fiancé (Robert Young) and her two step-brothers. Her father, ere the town’s most beloved professor (Frank Morgan, in a beautiful ‘straight’ perf) is proscribed as Non-Aryan (Hollywood code for Jewish); while the couple’s only hope, as the town turns rabid with Nationalist Fever, is to escape to pre-Anschluss Austria (it’s 1933) skiing a dangerous mountain pass. Fatalistic romantic melodrama, usually with a religious theme, was director Frank Borzage’s specialty, but only rarely in his sound films was he able to balance so many story elements & characters this well. Even certain dated features of studio production at the time, like the scale-model town miniatures, help to dramatize a fairy tale land destroyed by modern politics & intolerance. With fabulous casting on all sides (young Dan Dailey as a fervid Nazi and, of all people, Maria Ouspenskya, showing remarkable range as Stewart’s proud mother) putting over its fearless ending. Devastating, beautiful stuff.

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID: Concerned over the prospects of a war-themed pic, M-G-M’s trailer emphasizes this as ‘A story of love and sacrifice, NOT WAR!’

SCREWY THOUGHT OF THE DAY: Stewart won his Oscar® this year for THE PHILADELPHIA STORY, supposedly in belated tribute to Frank Capra’s MR. SMITH GOES TO WASHINGTON from the year before. Maybe . . . but with this film, STORY and Lubitsch’s SHOP AROUND THE CORNER (also with Sullavan & Morgan) all in 1940, who could have deserved it more?

DOUBLE-BILL: Two years back, Sullavan, tackling WWI war-torn romance, was pulled in three directions by Robert Taylor, this film’s Robert Young and Franchot Tone (stealing the pic) in Borzage’s THREE COMRADES/’38, the only film to boast an F. Scott Fitzgerald script credit.