The Mortal Storm (1940) on Netflix
In a German Alpine village, Professor Victor Roth turns sixty on the day Adolf Hitler becomes chancellor. His stepsons join the party; his daughter Freya and friend Martin Breitner do not.
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- Netflix4.4/5
- IMDb7.7/107,022 votes
- Rotten Tomatoes100%
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Plot summary
Victor Roth teaches in a village in the German Alps and is admired by his students. He lives there with his wife Amelie, his daughter Freya, his small son Rudi and his stepsons Erich and Otto von Rohn. On January 30, 1933, the household celebrates his sixtieth birthday, and Freya's suitor Fritz Marberg announces their coming marriage, which she has not agreed to. Word then arrives that Adolf Hitler has become chancellor of Germany. Amelie worries about free thinkers and non-Aryans, and while the young men leave for a party meeting, the family friend Martin Breitner stays behind. At an inn that evening, Fritz warns Martin to join the movement or be counted among its enemies.
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Did you know?!Facts and trivia about The Mortal Storm (1940)
Can contain spoilers, watch the movie first.
- After Warner Bros. films were banned in Germany over Confessions of a Nazi Spy (1939), MGM's Louis B. Mayer, unwilling to lose the lucrative German market, had MGM films submitted to the Nazi German consul for approval, with objectionable scenes modified before their German release.
- When the German publisher of the "Horst Wessel Lied" demanded script approval in 1940 as the price of using the song, MGM refused and had Eugene Zador arrange it with English lyrics by Earl Brent, titled "Close Up The Ranks".
- The Mortal Storm was the first MGM production to dramatize the persecution of Jews under the Nazi regime in Germany during World War II, and it did so without ever using the word "Jew".
- It was the only MGM movie to explicitly criticize the Nazi regime before America entered World War II in December 1941, although it made only oblique references to the regime's antisemitic policies.
- The film was the last of five to pair Margaret Sullavan and James Stewart, following Next Time We Love (1936), The Shopworn Angel (1938), Land of Liberty (1939) and The Shop Around the Corner (1940).
- The film adapts a 1937 novel by the British writer Phyllis Bottome, who moved to Austria in 1924 when her husband Alban Ernan Forbes Dennis, a British diplomat and MI6 station head for Austria, Hungary and Yugoslavia, was posted there; she later witnessed the rise of the Nazi party.
