“The Mortal Storm,” a 1940 film directed by Frank Borzage, produced by MGM, and starring Jimmy Stewart, Margaret Sullavan, Robert Young, and Frank Morgan, was one of the first Hollywood movies to show the deportation of Jews to concentration camps in Germany. In conjunction with the screening of the film on Saturday at 6 p.m., the Sag Harbor Cinema will open a companion exhibition, “The Art of Mary Stewart,” which will showcase the artwork of Jimmy’s sister, an award-winning artist in her own right whose work during World War II forms a parallel story to that of her brother.
The screening will be introduced via Zoom by Kelly Stewart, one of Jimmy’s daughters, and will be followed by an in-person question-and-answer session with David Perry, Mary’s son and Jimmy’s nephew.
“I’m very excited about this event,” said Mr. Perry in a phone conversation. “We had a similar event in Vermont, we had a whole bunch of Jimmy Stewart movies, but the one that really got the most buzz was ‘The Mortal Storm.’ It’s not a well-known film, but it’s a really important film.”
Adapted from Phyllis Bottome’s 1937 novel of the same name, the film tells the story of Hitler’s rise to power as seen through the microcosm of one German-Jewish family. Set in 1933 in a bucolic mountain town near the Austrian border, it centers on the world of Viktor Roth (Morgan), a professor celebrating his 60th birthday.
His family consists of his wife, Emilia (Irene Rich), his daughter, Freya (Sullavan), his young son, and two adult stepsons. His class greets him with applause, and a trophy is presented by two students, Martin Breitner (Stewart) and Fritz Marberg (Young).
Emilia is listening to the radio when news of Hitler’s ascent to chancellor arrives, and she worries about what will happen to freethinkers and non-Aryans. (Her family is never actually identified as Jewish.) Her prescience is confirmed when most of the young men in the town join the Hitler Youth (except for Martin). Her husband loses his job and is sent to a concentration camp, where he speaks out against Hitler.
In a 2004 review for Slant magazine, Jaime Christley described the transformation of the village. “One day the Nazis are everywhere and everything, brutally masculine, arrogant, and capable of easy and sudden violence, but the natural landscape remains the same.”
After Martin confesses his love to Freya at his mountain farm, another professor arrives and asks for protection from his imminent arrest. Martin, who, like Freya, is a critic of the regime, takes him on skis through a secret pass to Austria, returns to the farm, and later attempts to cross the border with Freya. Fritz, who has joined the Nazi Party, betrays them.
“It’s important that the film demonstrates how quickly a totalitarian regime can take over,” said Mr. Perry. “It’s very striking how the changing of the regime changed the family.”
The film’s second unit director, Richard Rosson, had been interned for a month in an Austrian Nazi camp. Based on his account, a team of 150 workers created a replica of a concentration camp in Culver City, Calif. The film showcased the brutality of the Third Reich, and two weeks after it opened, Joseph Goebbels, Hitler’s propaganda chief, banned all MGM films from Germany, which at that point was MGM’s biggest market in Europe.
In the aftermath of “The Mortal Storm,” Jimmy Stewart was the first Hollywood star to enlist in the military. A certified pilot, he went in as a private, according to Mr. Perry, but was sent to Boise, Idaho, as a flight instructor, acquainting pilots with the B-17 and B-24 bombers.
The actor “really wanted to get overseas,” said Mr. Perry, but his appeals to various generals brought only thanks for his patriotism and the repeated insistence that he was needed in Boise.
Stewart was finally posted to England, where he became a decorated bomber pilot and squadron commander, flying 20 missions over occupied Europe and Germany, where he bombed the site where V-2 rockets were being developed. He won two Distinguished Flying Crosses and the Croix de Guerre.
“He never talked about his war experiences,” Mr. Perry said. “When he came back, the studios wanted him to be in war movies, but he refused most, except for ‘Strategic Air Command’ (1955) and ‘The Mountain Road’ (1960).”
After Stewart joined the military, his sister wanted to get involved as well. “My mother really wanted to do her bit for the Allies,” Mr. Perry recalled. “She tried to get a post in Europe, because she was a nurse’s aide and wanted to minister to the troops. Eventually she became a Candy Striper, moved down to Miami, and worked in a hospital there during the war.”
Mary Stewart was also a talented artist. She’d attended Carnegie Tech (now Carnegie Mellon), before moving to Manhattan, where she landed a job at Charm, which called itself “the magazine for women who work.” There, she created a comic strip called “Susie,” about the trials and tribulations of a young working girl in New York.
Influenced by the work of Kathe Kollwitz, an anti-Nazi German artist whose paintings were repressed under National Socialism, Mary began a series titled “War Orphans,” which depicted what was happening to children in Poland and other occupied countries. She also joined Artists for Victory, whose members created posters to raise awareness about Nazism and money for War Bonds. In 1942, her poster won first prize in a juried National War Poster Competition at the Metropolitan Museum; among her competitors were Saul Steinberg and Charles Addams.
The Stewarts, brother and sister, remained close throughout their lives. Mr. Perry recalled a visit from Jimmy and his wife, Gloria, to Bucks County, Pa., where the Perry family lived. “Somehow the people there found out about it, so when he and Gloria arrived in a big black limo, everybody came out in their front yards and waved at him when he drove by.” That was when Mr. Perry first realized his uncle was a movie star.
Mr. Perry, a former advertising art director and magazine publisher, is the author and illustrator of three children’s books. His family still has Uncle Jimmy’s yearbook from his time at Mercersburg Academy, a boarding school in Pennsylvania, he said when asked whether the family’s artistic bent had influenced him. “My uncle did all the illustrations for the yearbook, and they were really quite good.”
“The Art of Mary Stewart,” which focuses on the work she created during World War II, will remain on view in the cinema’s third-floor exhibition space through March 31.
