Hotel Berlin

This "grand hotel" ensemble drama, adapted by Alvah Bessie* and Jo Pagano from a novel by Vicki Baum, brilliantly treats the end of Nazism in swanky surroundings. Periodic bombing raids drive all but the feckless into shelters. Meanwhile, high members of the Reich, rushing in and out, are making larcenous plans, as one puts it, to "prepare better for the next war." Against this background of crisis and intrigue, private life continues, its characters avoiding or coping in various ways with the approaching cataclysm. Thus an agent of the partisans, on the run, is hidden in the hotel, aided by the little bellboy, himself part of the Underground. Peter Lorre, in real life a militant anti-fascist, has one of his best non-campy roles as an apparently maddened Nazi popularist who secretly writes Allied propaganda. Even the German general (played memorably by Raymond Massey) is part of a late-war plot to kill Hitler. What Hotel Berlin and a handful of other films by future blacklistees dramatized was the system of privilege and power that had flowed from aristocratic times into Nazism practically undisturbed. The notion that the sources of fascism were deeper than the National Socialist Party and were likely to survive the war in undiminished positions of authority put Bessie and others beyond the acceptable limits of postwar American thought, conservative or liberal. Such artists were soon to be barred from the popular audience that had so eagerly paid to see their movies. -Paul Buhle *Blacklist victim