Oppenheimer and World War II's enduring template for Hollywood

By Max Hastings

This Oscar weekend, consider how weird it is that many of the most garlanded movies released in 2023 were inspired by events nine decades ago. With all of history to choose from, the six years of World War II continue to exercise a towering influence upon Hollywood’s imaginations. The conflagration’s impact is especially great upon Western audiences, but I have also seen some Chinese WWII epics, from which the Japanese don’t come out too well.

 The year’s period films are dominated, of course, by Oppenheimer. But Jonathan Glazer’s Zone of Interest, portraying the happy home life of the commandant of Auschwitz, is stunning in a different way. Fewer people outside Britain have noticed One Life, starring Anthony Hopkins, but it offers a moving true account of how a 30-year-old London stockbroker, Nicholas Winton, helped save hundreds of Czech Jewish children from the Nazis. Though Steven Spielberg’s Masters of the Air is a television mini-series, he used its $250 million budget to show the 1943-45 US bomber assault on Germany with a realism never before achieved on screen, even in 1990’s Memphis Belle. 

We will return to these titles later, but first I want to reflect upon the fashion in which the fight to defeat Hitler and the Axis took up the moral mantle worn, in my childhood and maybe yours, by the American West. Today, scarcely any children that I know watch Western films — “oaters,” as Hollywood used to call them. But we lapped them up.

They mostly depicted uncomplicated contests between standard-bearers for good and evil, with none of the former likely to be Apaches. Until new wave Wild West movies such as The Wild Bunchand Clint Eastwood’s spaghetti shootouts appeared in the 1960s, nobody got up from watching a Western, even one like The Alamo in which all the good guys die, having seen enough gore to disturb their dinners. Nor did anybody care that the stories were fantasies. In 1962, How The West Was Won took for granted that its closing shot, a bird’s eye view of a vast modern freeway junction, symbolized a triumph for American values and civilization.

None of the above is intended to sound priggish.  Even if my grandchildren won’t watch, for instance, The Big Country, I still enjoy it. But gay screen cowboys and noble natives had to wait for the 21st century, together with an acknowledgement that Marshal Wyatt Earp probably handled himself no better than a modern Minneapolis cop. 

The eclipse of the Western, or at least the end of its cultural niche, reflected growing awareness that it projected a travesty of history. The true story was that of the forcible seizure of much of the West, with the extinction by violence of its historic owner-occupiers. 

When moviemakers and moviegoers started to realize that cowboys were by no means always the good guys, how infinitely reassuring it was to turn Hollywood’s cameras upon World War II, which is where many have stayed. Whatever uncertainties exist about right and wrong as defined in Tombstone, scarcely anybody since 1945 has doubted the absolute wickedness of the Nazis.       

Almost any World War II movie has thus been set on a rock-like moral foundation.  Even in the 21st century, we readily relate to movies about the experience.  A host of modern Americans, like their British counterparts, boast an ancestor who participated, of whom we can remain proud. A woman was recently pointed out to me at a party with the accolade: “Her dad won a Military Cross on D-Day.” My Jewish wife hates screen violence but regards it as her duty to watch any significant movie about the Holocaust.  

I am a pretty hardened viewer of war films, but the scenes in One Day of terrified Jewish children menaced by stormtroopers still rouse a rage in my heart, as they must also in yours, toward those who were capable of such unspeakable crimes. In times gone by, I interviewed scores of old Nazis for my books. Almost all remained impenitent: They had enjoyed their work. 

Spielberg’s Masters of the Air mini-series is spectacular to watch but unimportant as art because it tells us nothing significant or new about war, or those who wage it. Vastly more impressive is Glazer’s sepia portrayal of Rudolf Hoess, the commandant of Auschwitz, pursuing a blameless domestic life with his blonde wife and children, while just over the rose-clad wall — literally — the gas chambers and ovens work night and day. No one is seen dying in Zone of Interest. But never for a moment can any of us watching forget that, only yards out of frame, the Holocaust is unfolding.

 Hedwig Hoess tells dear Rudy in 1942 that these are the happiest times of her life, and we believe her. In portrayals of the SS, the issue of class is often overlooked. The majority of its officers came from humble homes. Their roles in Himmler’s elite enabled them to ape the manners and privileges of gentlemen, while their wives played at being ladies. How they loved those black uniforms and especially exciting boots!

Glazer’s movie deserves to win prizes at Sunday’s Academy Awards because it is so original, a spine-chilling new take on the habit of evil. It’s unlikely to triumph, however; Oppenheimer is oddsmakers’ runaway favorite for Best Film. It’s too long, and sometimes gets bogged down in the 1950s investigations that resulted in the withdrawal of Robert Oppenheimer’s security clearance. I regret that director Christopher Nolan didn’t give more depth to the portrayal of Leslie Groves, Oppenheimer’s boss, an army engineer who is one of the least-known US generals of the war, yet among the most important. One of Groves’ officers said of him: “He was the biggest sonofabitch I’ve ever met, but if I had to do the whole thing over again, I would put him in charge of it.”

Cillian Murphy portrays Oppenheimer pretty much as I imagine the man, whom I’ve studied closely. The scientist was ambitious, tortured, brilliant, charismatic, flawed, arrogant, elusive and not infrequently duplicitous. Nolan, Murphy and their movie would be worthy winners because they show all that. They tell us far more than most works of art contrive about mankind, or at least American-kind, at a decisive historical moment. 

Yet it is a further frightening curiosity of our times that despite all the movies and books about the Nazis, some 21st century people — including those who marched in their name in Nashville a few weeks ago — seem heedless of the wickedness that Hitler’s people represented. In more than one region today, authoritarian regimes oppress and murder the weak and innocent in a fashion that Nazi functionaries would immediately recognize.

In the virtual age, some decent people living in law-abiding societies seem to find it impossible to learn from movie depictions of Nazi depravity because they regard everything that appears on a screen as mere fantasy, like Barbie.  Yet in the 1940s, few of our forefathers found it hard to recognize the absolute evil of the fascists. And as the last of that generation perishes, maybe with their passing a vital clarity of vision is being lost about the distinction between good and evil. 

The great Philip Roth wrote a 2004 novel, The Plot Against America, fantasizing about the ghastly consequences of isolationist Nazi sympathizer Charles Lindbergh, the aviation pioneer, winning the 1940 presidential election. Yet today, there is a real risk that an even more deplorable Republican will be returned to the White House in November.

As we watch World War II movies, we can fortify ourselves with the reflection that our forefathers fought and died for the right cause, even if it was the one that laid waste Hiroshima and Nagasaki. We should also ask ourselves, however, on which side the US might have found itself 80 years ago, had Lindbergh, Donald Trump, or somebody like either, occupied the White House.