Morlan theorized it escaped controversy for a couple of reasons: 1) Columbia Pictures wasn’t a frequent target of the Hays Office and 2) the Stooges’ were considered too slapstick to be considered important. In Rapaport’s essay, she noted that actress Mattie Herring, who appears in You Nazty Spy!, said the short created a stir because “none of the studios had done that kind of thing at the time.” The latter was true - Moe Howard was the first American to satirize or portray Hitler on screen - but little evidence suggests the short created any kind of uproar. ![]() ( Mel Brooks ’ The Producers had a similar reference: “I was just a paper hanger, no one more obscurer” ).ĭespite its political nature, when You Nazty Spy! arrived in theaters, it was met with virtually no opposition. The title of the short is an obvious play on the word “Nazi,” and the Stooges originally worked as wallpaper hangers because it was commonly believed that Hitler had been a wallpaper hanger. There are other pokes at the Nazis as well: Moronika’s symbol is a swastika made up of two snakes, Moe dons Hitler’s characteristic mustache for a few seconds and the German stormtroopers are clad in raincoats. From there, Hailstone delivers some very Hitler -esque speeches, declares some books to be burned and sends his political enemies to a “concentrated camp.” (In the end, all three of them are fed to lions.) They begin the short as wallpaper hangers when the leaders of the country “Moronika” decide they need a dictator and they hand Hailstone the job. In it, Moe plays Hitler stand-in “Moe Hailstone” Curly plays “Curly Gallstone,” a parody of German military leader Hermann Göring and Larry was propaganda minister “Larry Pebble,” a takeoff on Joseph Goebbels. movies didn’t offend other nations, the Motion Picture Producers and Distributors of America - also known as the Hays Office - played a heavy hand in regulating the content of American pictures, wrote sociology professor Lynn Rapaport in her essay “‘Hang Hitler!’ - The Three Stooges Take Potshots at Nazis” from the book Stoogeology. There was a financial aspect to all of this, too, as American films made a lot of money overseas. Two decades after the end of World War I, the shadow of the Great War still loomed large and Americans had no desire to intervene in another European conflict.Īs a result, Hollywood played it safe by generally not taking a stand on the burgeoning war. Moreover, public sentiment in 1939 was strictly isolationist. Sam expressed concern about how to make such a dire situation funny, to which Jules promised, “I’ll make it funny.”Īs the Wright Museum ’s Daniel Schroeder explained in his lecture “The Three Stooges Take on the Axis Powers,” it was a Hollywood rule at the time not to depict foreign heads of state in American films for fear of upsetting those world leaders. In the fall of 1939, he walked into his brother Sam’s office at Columbia and proclaimed that he was going to make a Stooges movie about Hitler, who had just invaded Poland. Per the late Don Morlan, a professor of communications at the University of Dayton, You Nazty Spy! was first dreamt up by frequent Stooges director and head of Columbia Pictures’ Shorts Department Jules White. But that doesn’t mean You Nazty Spy! wasn’t a brave, landmark piece of satire that was surprisingly layered for the proudly lowbrow Sultans of Slapstick. In reality, it seems that the rumor was the product of a rather notorious supermarket tabloid. The oft-repeated story says that, because of the 1940 short You Nazty Spy! - where Moe dressed as Hitler and the Nazis were lampooned - Hitler placed The Three Stooges on his list of high-profile targets. ![]() Wells, Virginia Woolf , and at least according to sources like Mental Floss and Empire, Moe Howard, Curly Howard and Larry Fine, aka The Three Stooges. Included among it was Winston Churchill, Franklin Roosevelt, H.G. Adolph Hitler’s infamous “Death List” wasn’t without star power.
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