Professor Mamlock (1938)

04/09/1938

Overview

Made in Stalin’s Soviet Union, Professor Mamlock was one of the first films worldwide to tackle Nazi anti-Semitism openly. Based on a play by a German-Jewish exile in Moscow, Friedrich Wolf, and directed by an Austrian-Jewish exile in Moscow, Herbert Rappaport, the film tells with the story of an apolitical humanitarian Jewish doctor and his politically-aware, fascism-resisting son, an intern, as their lives become entangled with the Nazis’ rise to power in 1930s Germany, where they live and practice. Things come to a head when the Nazi organization takes control of their hospital, and place a rabid antisemitic physician in charge over Mamlock and his staff.