In the San Diego Jewish Journal, Lynn Rapaport talks about the first Hollywood comedian to play Adolf Hitler on film. No, not Charles Chaplin. Try Moe Howard of the Three Stooges.
Rapaport's article is a must read despite a couple of mistakes.
For instance, Hollywood has always — not just "until the late 1930s" — relied on foreign revenues to sustain its filmmaking factories. And long before the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, there were several Hollywood movies that dealt with the Nazi menace, e.g., Warner Bros.' Confessions of a Nazi Spy (1939), MGM's The Mortal Storm (1940), Paramount's Arise My Love (1940), and the United Artists-distributed Foreign Correspondent (1940) and So Ends Our Night (1941). In addition, of course, to Chaplin's The Great Dictator (1940).
A brief quote (the regulations referred to in the paragraph below are those of the Production Code, which forbade the vilification of foreign "prominent people and citizenry"):
"Shorts, however, were not regulated in the same way as feature films. The Three Stooges were unnoticed or ignored by the censors. In mid-1939, Jules White, head of Columbia Pictures Shorts Department and long-time producer and director of the Three Stooges comedies, walked into his brother Sam's office and said that he was planning a comedy about Hitler. Moe would be Hitler, Curly would be Göring, and Larry would be Goebbels. Sam told his brother that the situation in Europe was grim, and asked if he could make it funny. 'I'll make it funny,' Jules replied.
"Filming began on December 5, 1939. It was shot quickly, in seven days. Cutting was finished on December 26, 1939, and on January 19, 1940 Columbia pictures released its 44th Three Stooges comedy, You Nazty Spy. The film cost about $18,500 to make, and preceded the release of Charlie Chaplin's The Great Dictator by nine months. Moe Howard of the Three Stooges was the first American actor to lampoon Hitler in film. It was also his favorite Three Stooges short."
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