The Spanish Civil War in Hollywood

When the military uprising that led to the Spanish Civil War began on July 17, 1936, Hollywood studios rushed to create scripts about the conflict. It was a hot topic, and the production companies were eager to make as much profit from it as possible.

Universal Pictures, Twentieth Century-Fox, and Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer considered a number of possible storylines, including the siege of the Alcazar, but in the end, only three feature films about the Civil War were actually made while the conflict was ongoing: The Last Train From Madrid (James Hogan, 1937, Paramount Pictures), Love Under Fire (George Marshall, 1937, Twentieth Century-Fox), and Blockade (William Dieterle, 1938, Walter Wanger/United Artists). Although the number may seem small, in reality it was significant, since Hollywood under the studio system generally avoided making films about controversial contemporary political issues, and even less so about wars still in progress, the outcome of which remained unknown. In fact, Hollywood was the foreign film industry that produced the most fiction films about the Spanish conflict while it was still unfolding.

The studios abandoned their original projects largely due to pressure from the Motion Picture Producers and Distributors of America (MPPDA) and the Production Code Administration (PCA), which insisted that bringing such films to the screen was inadvisable and sought to discourage them. The ultimate goal of both organizations, which were part of the Hollywood industry, was to to maximize profits by ensuring that American commercial feature films would be unobjectionable in any country in the world and from any perspective—including political.

For this reason, the Hays Office urged film companies to follow a series of guidelines regarding the treatment of the Spanish Civil War on screen. These were based on neutrality and were set out in the following terms: (1) the war in Spain had to appear only as an “environment,” “backdrop,” or “dramatic setting”; (2) the term “civil war” had to be omitted; (3) the uniforms were to be imaginary, different from those used in Spain; (4) there could be no mention of “loyalists” or “rebels”; (5) governments could not be named, nor the collaboration of Adolf Hitler’s Germany and Benito Mussolini’s Italy in the conflict mentioned; (6) the identification of the warring factions was prohibited; (7) neither Francisco Franco nor any other real military figure or leader could be named; and (8) an almost total absence of specificity regarding cities and locations was required.

It was truly difficult to construct logical and believable narratives within such constraints. Hence the great confusion and disorder that prevailed in the three films that were actually made. Likewise, such limitations may have been the reason why both Paramount and Twentieth Century-Fox chose to classify their productions as low-budget, sensing that adherence to these guidelines would undermine their quality and also that, even while complying with them, any film set during the conflict would face distribution problems in numerous countries.

CG