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rogcompant
posted over 1 year ago
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During World War II,
Hollywood kept busy by churning out truckloads of propaganda.
There were straightforward films like Frank Capra’s Why We Fight series and action movies like The Fighting Seabees.
Then there was the weird stuff like Russian Rhapsody,
a Warner Brothers cartoon where Russian gremlins frighten Hitler with a mask of Joseph Stalin.
The weirdest propaganda flick to ever hit the silver screen was Hal Roach’s crazy comedy,
The Devil with Hitler.
Released in 1942 as a 42-minute short,
The Devil with Hitler begins with a business meeting in Hell.
Evidently,
the underworld is run by a board of directors who aren’t happy with the way that Satan,
the chairman,
is managing things.
The Devil is clearly falling behind on the job because people just aren’t sinning enough these days.
Frustrated,
the board considers replacing their horned boss with someone who’s really nasty—Adolf Hitler.
When Satan learns what’s happening,
he makes a demonic deal with the board.
If he can convince Hitler to do one good deed,
then the board will drop their plans to hire Adolf and keep the Devil as chairman.
The rest of the film follows Satan as he tries to trick the fuhrer into performing a kind act.
In spite of the Devil’s best efforts,
Hitler sticks to his evil roots,
forcing Satan to get creative.
Desperate,
the Devil decides to impersonate the dictator and set a few prisoners free.
However,
things backfire when Hitler finds out and orders the recently freed prisoners executed.
That’s when Satan locks Adolf in a munitions factory,
threatening to blow up the building unless the fuhrer pardons the prisoners.
Hitler agrees,
thus performing a “good deed,
” but the factory explodes anyway,
sending Satan and Hitler straight to Hell.
When the two arrive in Satan’s lair,
the board of directors is pretty impressed with the devil’s trickery and keeps him on as chairman.
Feeling full of himself,
Satan orders his henchmen to grab their pitchforks and give Hitler “the works,
” and ta-da,
that’s how the film ends.
Interestingly,
the actor who played Hitler was Bobby Watson,
a guy who appeared as Adolf in nine separate films.
When The Devil with Hitler went to theaters,
it played alongside a documentary about Japanese war crimes and a public service announcement calling for all good citizens to donate their scrap metal.
However,
this satanic short didn’t do all that well with critics.
The New York Times claimed the film was “an affront to public taste and the public interest,
” and it more or less disappeared from Hollywood history,
sinking into cinematic Hell.
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