A Film Canon

Despite commencing as a fairly one-dimensional piece of anti-Nazi propaganda, The Mortal Storm gradually builds into a compelling study of persecution. This is partly because the speechifying of the first act is either diluted, or clarified as the product of a society in which "there are no human relationships"; that is, in which conversation has been replaced with a series of announcements, or instructions, thereby imbuing any individuated utterance with transgression - a scenario that plays well to James Stewart's ponderous register, as well as Margaret Sullavan's husky earnestness. In the same way, Borzage deflects a great deal of the horror of Nazism into its sadistic infrastructure (uniforms, concentration camps) and ceremonies (mass heils, book-burning), none of which had been so extensively depicted in a mainstream film, and would have to wait for The Great Dictator to be affixed to the word 'Jew', its absence here figured in terms of all the "usual foolish things" that the central couple - a Jew (Stewart) and half-Jew (Sullavan) - never have the opportunity to say. This fuses the vertiginous disorientations of a new voyeuristic experience with that of Nazism itself, encapsulated in a series of curvaceous pans that enable the camera to ski in slow-motion, and contribute to the pervasive characterisation of fascism as an elemental malignity, "as strong as the wind and terrible as the lightning". That said, the propaganda element remains, if only by way of a peculiarly American fusion of pragmatism and grace, as well as a subsidiary, melodramatic vision of Nazism as ideological rape, committed by a mutant brand of frat-boy, in the name of a dystopian inversion of the American university.