La casa dei Rothschild

Before Paul Muni was doing biographical films at Warner Brothers, George Arliss was doing them before. Arliss a veteran of the British theater was one of the first to recognize the importance of film in preserving the actor's art. He did even more silent films than sound which took advantage of his magnificent speaking voice and perfect English diction. His acting today is considered hammy by many, but for me I like the idea of being able to understand every enunciated word.

In The House Of Rothschild Arliss plays the dual role of patriarch Meyer Rothschild and later Nathan, one of the five sons whom he dispatched to various European capitals to establish the family banking business. This was in the 1780s-90s. By 1814 the House is well established throughout Europe and even when countries are at war, The House Of Rothschild acts as a unit. Though the Paris branch has to be a bit discreet with Napoleon Bonaparte making war on all the rest of the places the brothers have set up shop.

The money lender is never a popular figure. It's the reason why when Jews were forbidden to own land and frozen out of certain businesses and trades, they were allowed to be bankers. That way it was a double whammy in unpopularity for them.

The House Of Rothschild even with Napoleon making entreaties to the Jewish people backs the Allied cause to the hilt. It wins the gratitude of someone no less than the Duke of Wellington played by Sir C. Aubrey Smith. But Prussian banker Ledranz played by Boris Karloff makes no secret of his anti-Semitism. Quite a daring piece for 1934 as Hitler was starting his war on the Jews and few were speaking out.

Florence Arliss the real life wife of George Arliss plays his wife Hannah in his Nathan persona. But Helen Westley is mother Rothschild and she gives a lively performance. It is she whom you will remember best from this film after George Arliss.

Robert Young and Loretta Young play a Wellington aide and a Rothschild daughter who fall in love and are the secondary romantic plot in this film. But it's Arliss's portrayal of the shrewd and intrepid Nathan Rothschild and the story of the fortune that is the heart of the film. And it is a big heart in every sense of the word.

This is quite a rousing film for a biopic, and sports one of Arliss's best performances. Made two years after Hitler's rise to power, the whole subtext of the film is anti-Semitism and the then-current events in Europe. Napoleon is the stand-in for Hitler--the man all peace-loving men must join together to wage war against to secure peace. There are scenes of violence in the Jewish ghetto--stirred up by anti-Semite Karloff. Everything Rothschild does he does to end anti-Semitism; many speeches on this theme. Rothschild's father is shown as a Shylock-type, making money with money, fooling the tax collector, but with reluctance and great bitterness, doing so only because other professions are denied him, and because the tax collector overcharges Jews. C. Aubrey Smith gives a really delightful performance as Wellington. The final scene is one of the first live-action sequences to be made in three-color Technicolor, before BECKY SHARP. The topicality gives the film an immediacy that is often lacking in period films.

Darryl F. Zanuck covered Napoleon's sweep across Europe in two early films: "Lloyds of London," in which Tyrone Power plays a fictional character who continues insuring the British fleet so that his childhood friend, Horatio Nelson, can win the war; and "The House of Rothschild" in which Nathan Rothschild and his banker brothers provide the financing to beat Napoleon. Both are excellent films.

There are a few historical liberties in "The House of Rothschild," but the film is based on fact. George Arliss has a dual role as Mayer Rothschild and his son, Nathan. When the film begins, the family is living in a Prussian Jewish ghetto where Mayer is doing well but doesn't want the tax collectors to know. On his deathbed, he instructs his sons to establish banking houses throughout Europe as so much money is stolen when it is being carried by messengers. The plot then focuses on Nathan and goes into the rampant anti-Semitism which forces Nathan out of an important loan. It also shows his brilliance for business as he fights Count Ledrantz (Boris Karloff) who spreads propaganda and incites pogroms. The climax of the film takes place when it appears Napoleon is winning and Nathan starts buying up everything on the stock market, which is bottoming out, in order to keep the deal he made for the war effort. Though not much is made of it, the Rothschilds had informants everywhere, which enabled them to get information before anyone else. He is able to announce before it is made public that Napoleon has been defeated at Waterloo.

"House of Rothschild" stars one of the great actors, George Arliss. Other actors from the stage entering films often used tremulous voices and melodramatic gestures but Arliss had a tremendous speaking voice and a grand acting style that made a powerful impression on the screen and infused the characters he played with a believability as well. A blond, beautiful Loretta Young is on hand as his daughter, who is in love with a Gentile named Fitzroy (Robert Young) - and though one would expect the love story to be fiction, it isn't.

This film has an interesting history of its own: Excerpts from it, taken out of context, were used in the anti-semitic Nazi films Der ewige Jude and Die Rothschilds. Despite persecution, the Rothschilds remain an extremely powerful family in the present - the original name of the family was Bauer; Rothschild is actually German for "red shield," which is in the center of the family coat of arms. Today, they're in a variety of occupations besides banking - actress Helena Bonham Carter is a Rothschild due to a marriage on her mother's side.

This interesting early talkie from 1934 is a biopic of Nathan Rothschild, the British-German-Jewish banker from the times of Napoleon that is considered one of the founders of international finance. Rothschild is famous among many things from making a fortune in the London Stock exchange by speculating successfully on Wellington's victory over Napoleon at Waterloo (this is in this film, though apparently according to recent historians it probably never happened).

Rothschild, as portrayed in the film by George Arliss, is not a very likable person: unabashedly ethnocentric (he is adamant that his daughter must not marry a gentile suitor), he is always ready to take offense, views almost every non-Jew as anti-Semitic, is willing to use money to exercise power, etc. Probably because of this, the Nazi propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels was an unlikely fan of this film, releasing an edited version in Germany (that emphasized the most negative aspects of the protagonist) and in 1940 he used an unauthorized clip from this film in the infamous anti-Semitic documentary "The Eternal Jew" and also had his own German remake, "The Rothschild's shares in Waterloo". The German film, by the way, despite its obvious propaganda intentions, is well made and has a literate, intelligent script. In a way, Rothschild is a more sympathetic character in the German film than in the Hollywood version! The Hollywood film is also notable for the last scene (in which Rothschild is knighted by the King) being shot in an early Technicolor process.

I also watched it the other day on the Fox Movie Channel and the final sequence was indeed not in color. That surprised me because I thought that surely their vault would have contained a print with the Technicolor finale.

About 15 years ago, the Castro Cinema here in San Francisco showed a series of 20th Century Fox classic films, all with 35 mm prints. The House Of Rothschild was shown with the beautiful Technicolor final sequence. The fact that it was not shown that way on the FMC was disappointing, but it was still great to see the film again, as it's so rarely shown.