NR | 1h 22 min | Drama | 1944
The year 2023 marks the 80th anniversary of the Broadway play “Tomorrow, the World!” that inspired the eponymous film that critiques the insidious impact of fascist propaganda.
Orphaned child Emil (Skip Homeier), indoctrinated for years by Hitler’s “Jungfolk” (Hitler Youth) in Nazi Germany, acts out his antisemitism even after he’s adopted by a kind American family headed by his uncle, professor Mike (Frederic March). In spite of Emil’s provocative ways, Mike’s Jewish fiancée Leona (Betty Field), Mike’s daughter and Emil’s cousin, Pat (Joan Carroll), try to impart empathy to him.
Emil’s intransigence shocks them, but what strikes them more is his borrowed falsehoods about his late father Karl, killed in a concentration camp for defying Nazism and upholding tolerance and peace. Emil appears to have unquestioningly swallowed Nazi propaganda that Karl was a traitorous coward who’d committed suicide.
To Leona, his new teacher at school, Emil looks like any other 12-year-old, but speaks and acts with malice beyond his years. Even his games mirror Hitler’s maxim of domination, “Today Germany, tomorrow, the world.”
Outsiders, Leona and Emil, evoke different reactions.
Pat’s Aunt, Jessie (Agnes Moorehead) is cold to both. Mike loves Leona but dismisses her concerns about Emil, bound by a sense of obligation as his new guardian. Pat showers Leona with fondness and Emil with affection, introducing him to schoolmates, bearing no grudges, buying him a gift, and orchestrating a party for his birthday.
But identity complicates things.
Before he’s told that she’s Jewish, Emil shakes Leona’s hands warmly, “You are most kind.” When he sees her as merely American, he’s blind to her Jewishness. Likewise, that he’s German, suffices for Jessie to detest Emil and want to “exterminate” the German race, well before she discovers that he’s a little Nazi.
Emil tries to befriend the maid Frieda because she’s German, before realizing she’s not, by default, also a Nazi. Convinced that boys are superior to girls, he tries to bully Pat into betraying Mike’s confidential work with the American military.
The Antidote to Fascism
Using the family as a metaphor for the nation, Fenton studies not full-blown fascism but its seeds and roots. It doesn’t always arise from without, it can arise from within too (a nephew, an aunt). It isn’t always explicitly hostile, strutting about in a forbidding uniform: Emil has to be ordered to shed his silly “Jungfolk” insignia.It can start small, look harmless, even playful or friendly. But if not tackled soon enough and well enough it can overwhelm. And it can spread as swiftly in peacetime as during a war or revolution.
Fenton is also saying that given the right dose of freedom and equality from a benevolent but vigilant family or state, anyone can turn, from callous to caring, from reckless to responsible. He says this through two seemingly frail characters, Leona and Pat, who embody noble ideas and values.
First, just as children’s minds can be twisted by demagoguery, they can be molded by democracy. Second, what makes us human is our ability to make new choices that defy, even confound, the old if they’re too destructive. Finally, faith in the goodness of man justifies sunny optimism even under the darkest fascist clouds.
It’s why, in response to Emil’s bravado, Mike and Leona hint at “secret weapons” of American power: truth, ideas, reason, equality, liberty, and fraternity.
Fenton’s also saying that being misguided (as “Jungfolk” here appear) is no less dangerous than being malicious (as Nazi adults are). Beyond a point, the onus for thought, word, and deed rests on individuals, no matter how misguided they are when young and impressionable. After a point, “I was brainwashed,” is a poor excuse.
Fenton so gutsily allows his child stars to carry entire scenes that it’s hard to quibble over inauthentic German accents and rushed character arcs.
Homeier (Emil in the play), is chilling in his film debut. Carroll is outstanding as the girl determined to find a gentle nature in Emil, no matter how much he masks it. Field sensitively portrays a teacher who prides herself on transforming her stubborn wards through empathy, but is frustrated by the slippery Emil.
Trivia fans may be interested to know that the Nazis executed real-life brother and sister, Hans and Sophie Scholl. They too had “Jungfolk” roots as children, but turned anti-Nazi as adults, after stumbling upon what concentration camps were really up to.
It’s unclear if they inspired the play that opened in 1943 (the year they were executed) and, therefore, this film, released a year later in 1944. Still, there’s enough in their true stories to suggest that the disturbing, if fictional, Emil isn’t as far-fetched as he seems.
