Wednesday, September 8, 2010

Watch on the Rhine, 1941

Paul Lukas reprised his role in the movie version and won the Academy Award for Best Actor; the movie also starred Bette Davis. The drama centers on a German engineer in Washington D.C. with his American wife,  working underground to defeat the Nazis. He encounters ignorance and blackmail that puts his family at risk. The play, set in 1940, opened in April 1941, eight months before Pearl Harbor, when there was still a public debate about how involved the U.S. should be in the war against fascism.


On the back of the postcard: great blurbs from famed gossip columnist Walter Winchell and the NY Times critic Brooks Atkinson, who later had a theater named in his honor.

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