Which Film About Shanghai Did Hitler Really, Really Hate?

Well apparently, according to Ben Urwand’s fascinating new book The Collaboration: Hollywood’s Pact with Hitler, it was the 1935 Charles Boyer/Loretta Young movie Shanghai. It seems Hitler demanded the projector be switched of half way through.

Why this dislike of an otherwise rather unexceptional film about Shanghai? In the movie Loretta Young and Boyer fall in love – Boyer (Dmitri Koslov, a half-Russian/half-Chinese millionaire industrialist in the film) is actually Eurasian, though denying his mixed heritage. Loretta Young is an all-American gal and, as the film’s slogan exclaimed, “Love hurls a challenge at a law as old as civilisation itself.” Hitler though wasn’t much of a fan of mixed heritage or mixed relationships and couldn’t stand the film. As a footnote Warner Oland (of Shanghai Express and numerous Charlie Chan flicks) appears in yellowface, as he so often did. Adolf should have stayed to the end – it all ends badly for the leads (or well, if you’re Hitler I suppose) and true love doesn’t win out.

the original, and rather mixed, 1935 New York Times review is here by the way

And here is a review of Urwand’s book, from which I culled this interesting fact about Shanghai

 

Doomed mixed race love – hated by Adolf!