Fox’s German connection began when William Fox invited F.W. Murnau to create the towering Sunrise in 1927 and continued through an association with the producer Erich Pommer – who founded Fox Europa after the Nazis chased him out of UFA – and extended to a number of contracts with leading figures of the Weimar cinema, many of whom were able to emigrate to Hollywood as a result. Foremost among them was Erik Charell, a brilliant theatrical director who had been an assistant to Max Reinhardt and has directed one of the finest of the Weimar musicals, the bittersweet operetta Der Kongress tantz (1931). In Hollywood, Fox Film gave Charell all the resources of the struggling studio, as well as allowing him to bring over composer Werner Richard Heymann, screenwriter Robert Liebmann and production designer Ernst Stern. With a screenplay by two Lubitsch associates, Samson Raphelson and Hans Kraly, the result was Caravan, the greatest Weimar musical not made in Germany. Droll, sophisticated, bittersweet, this tale of a Hungarian countess (Loretta Young) who impulsively marries a gypsy violinist (Charles Boyer, who also starred in a simultaneously made French-language version of the film) is full of pointed observations about class and race in Old Europe. And yet American audiences rejected it out of hand, perhaps because the experienced Charrell, Jewish and gay, could not bring himself to provide a traditional happy ending that would allow the minority outcast to live in eternal harmony with the aristocratic insider. Seen today, Caravan is not without its flaws of taste and scale, but it is a both a bitterly ironic and emotionally commanding film, as well as one of Hollywood’s earliest coded protests against Hitler. Restored from the only known nitrate print, held in MoMA’s collection.

Dave Kehr