An Old Movie Reminds Me of Two Lost Freedoms

A few weeks ago, I watched a movie from 1943 titled Watch on the Rhine. It starred Bette Davis and Paul Lukas. I highly recommend it.

I won’t say much about the plot because it develops as it goes and to say much would be to give away too many spoilers.

Here’s the Wikipedia write-up for those who are impatient.

It takes place in 1940 in Washington, D.C. or its suburbs, when the U.S. is not yet explicitly at war with Germany.

I noted two things that highlight the loss of two of our important economic freedoms.

First, one of the characters needs to carry a great deal of money with him: $20,000, which would translate to over $400,000 today. Yet he doesn’t worry about being stopped by police and facing almost certain asset forfeiture.

Second, someone calls an airline to get one of the characters a flight to Mexico. She gives the name Ritter. That’s not his real name. But wouldn’t they figure that out when he checked in by comparing that name with the name on his ID? No. There was no such check.

It isn’t just that in 1940, people had freedom to carry large sums of money and freedom to travel without being ID-checked. I first travelled on an airline in the summer of 1969, when I flew from Winnipeg to Chicago to attend a conference in Rockford, Illinois. I didn’t carry large sums of money but I could have. Also, no one checked my ID. I just gave my name to the Northwest Orient ticket guy in Winnipeg, who wrote it out.

Interesting fact: Lillian Hellman, the author of the play, may have been a Communist. Dashiell Hammett, the screenwriter, was a Communist. Why is that interesting? Here’s what Wikipedia says:

Hellman wrote Watch on the Rhine in 1940, following the Nazi-Soviet Non-Aggression Pact of August 1939. The play’s call for a united international alliance against Hitler directly contradicted the Communist position at the time. Its title comes from a German patriotic song, “Die Wacht am Rhein“.

Good for her.

Dashiell Hammett would have had no trouble writing the screenplay because he did so in 1942, after the Communist Party had turned against Hitler.