NO POETRY AFTER Auschwitz,” said Adorno. Except for Chaplin—who said that he wouldn’t have made The Great Dictator had he known about the Holocaust—few moviemakers were listening. Boulting, Boetticher, Ford, Fuller, Losey, Lang: all of them put their shoulders to the World War II movie wheel. Even those lifelong aesthete decadents Hitchcock and Hawks felt obliged to churn out films that applauded the Allies while knifing the Nazis and jerking the Japs around. (Not at all incidentally, Lifeboat and Air Force are among their directors’ worst movies.)
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