The Mortal Storm - starring Jimmy Stewart and Margaret Sullavan

The Mortal Storm”, starring Jimmy Stewart and Margaret Sullavan. I cannot recommend this film highly enough. If you’re home, definitely tune in; this one is not available on DVD or VHS (and frankly, that might make the present administration quite happy).

he Mortal Storm is a 1940 film that was one of the most direct anti-Nazi Hollywood films released before the American entry into the Second World War. It stars James Stewart as a German who refuses to join the rest of his small Bavarian town in supporting Nazism. He falls in love with "non-Aryan" Freya Roth (Margaret Sullavan), the daughter of a Junker mother and a "non-Aryan" father.

Freya and her father are implied to be Jews but the word "Jew" is never used, and they are only identified as "non-Aryans"; in addition, Freya's half brothers are all members of the Nazi Party. Though it is understood that the film is set in Germany, the name of the country is rarely mentioned except at the very beginning in a short text of introduction. MGM purposely did not mention the name of the country or the religion of Freya's family because of the large German market for its films, but it was to no avail—the movie infuriated the Nazi government and it led to all MGM films being banned in Germany.