Censorship and propaganda in the Warner Brothers war films of World War II, 1942--1945

Warner Brothers was one of the leading Hollywood film studios in the twentieth century. Not only did this family-owned studio pioneer sound films, but also it exposed the horrors of German militarism in World War I and later the fascism of Nazi Germany. Like rival studios, Warner Brothers had little room to negotiate with the puritanical industry censors of the Production Code Administration. The PCA censored movie content to safeguard the industry against the threat of federal censorship. It could not make a movie without PCA approval. Nevertheless, Warner Brothers made a name for itself with its social problem films of the 1930s that depicted the plight of the poor, the downtrodden, and the scourge of the gangster. When Hitler came to power in Germany, Warner Brothers was the first studio to warn the world about the Third Reich. After World War II erupted, Warner Brothers offered its resources to President Roosevelt and made fiercely patriotic movies. Like its rivals, the studio had to contend with two U.S. Government agencies, the Office of War Information and the Office of Censorship. Although Warner Brothers cooperated with them, the studio enjoyed greater latitude with the OWI propagandists and the OOC censors than with the PCA. Warner Brothers had the last word about film content despite the advice of the OWI or the OOC. The OWI could only persuade the studio to add its propaganda to plot, while the OOC could only prevent the studio from exporting films that violated national security or portrayed democracy in a negative light. This dissertation is a case study of the interactive process of censorship and propaganda that one studio encountered during wartime with the PCA, OWI, and OOC, and it shows how the interactive process changed and did not change Warner Brothers' films like Casablanca (1942) prior to release.