Brian Gilbert – Through the Shattered Lens

In 1991’s Not Without My Daughter, Sally Field plays Betty Mahmoody, a Michigan housewife who marriage to Dr. Sayyed “Moody” Mahmoody (Alfred Molina) is perfect until he convinces her to travel with him to his native Iran. Moody says that the trip will only be for two weeks and that it will give his family a chance to finally meet their five year-old daughter, Mahtob (Sheila Rosenthal). Once they arrives in Iran, Betty meets Moody’s family and is immediately made to feel unwelcome. The men glare at her and the women seem to be annoyed that she’s bringing unwanted attention to them. Betty struggles to fit in, covering her head and trying not to complain. But then Moody announces that he’s decided that he will not be returning to America and that Betty and Mahtob will be staying in Iran with him.

I’m not really a huge fan of saying that a show or a movie “could not be made today,” because I often feel that’s just code for saying that you’ve reached the age where people younger than you no longer care about your taste in music or have the patience to explain the latest slang to you. There’s no real shame in reaching that point. It happens to everyone eventually. (Even I find myself getting unreasonably worked up over people using “ate” as a way to praise something.) There’s a lot of movies that would not be made today because cultural changes. Sometimes that’s a good thing and sometimes that’s a bad thing but it’s mostly just an inescapable fact of life. The thing to remember is that there is a difference between would and could.

Could Not Without My Daughter be made today? Of course, it could. It just wouldn’t be made by a major studio and it probably wouldn’t star an acclaimed actress like Sally Field. Today, Not Without My Daughter would probably be made by a small studio somewhere in Utah and it would probably star Taryn Manning. The major studios would be too worried about being accused of being Islamophobic to make a movie in which a seemingly charming man turns into a monster as soon as he returns home to the Middle East. One imagines that they would probably move the action to a Mennonite community.

And it must be said that Not Without My Daughter does not feature many sympathetic Iranians. There are a few who help Sally Field escape but they are presented as being the exception to the rule. Even more importantly, they’re portrayed as not being particularly religious. While Moody does start to change as soon as he and his wife land in Tehran, the film suggests that Moody’s main problem is that he’s desperate to please his male relatives. He seems to be desperate to show that he has not allowed himself to become westernized. For him, that means turning his wife into a virtual prisoner and declaring that she will not be allowed to see their daughter unless she submits to his demands and accepts his abuse.

Here’s the thing, though. Iran has one of the worst human rights records out there. Women’s rights are severely restricted in Iran. Women are legally required to cover their hair and wear modest clothing. Legally, husband do hold the power in the household. They can forbid their wives from leaving the country and, as shown in this movie, they are given sole custody of their children. The Morality Police are a real thing and women have been killed for not covering their hair. There’s a reason why so many brave Iranian women have risked their lives to protest the Iranian government. Being opposed to the War with Iran is not a justification for turning a blind eye to Iran’s human rights record. Yes, one can quite rightly complain that there aren’t many sympathetic Iranians to be found in Not Without My Daughter but let’s not pretend that there isn’t some truth to the scenes where Betty is warned that she has not properly covered her head.

In the end, Not Without My Daughter is a heavy-handed but crudely effective film. Sally Field is instantly sympathetic as Betty. Alfred Molina is frightening as Moody. There’s not a subtle moment to be found but I still cheered when Betty made her escape.

In 1939, an ocean liner named the MS St. Louis set sail from Hamburg. Along with the crew, the ship carried 937 passengers, all of whom were Jewish and leaving Germany to escape Nazi persecution. The ship was meant to go to Havana, where the passengers had been told that they would be given asylum. Many were hoping to reunite with family members who had already taken the voyage.

What neither the passengers nor Captain Gustav Schroeder knew was that the entire voyage was merely a propaganda operation. No sooner had the St. Louis left Hamburg than German agents and Nazi sympathizers started to rile up anti-Semitic feelings in Cuba. The plan was to prevent the passengers from disembarking in Cuba and to force the St. Louis to then return to Germany. The Nazis would be able to claim that they had given the Jews a chance to leave but that the rest of the world would not take them in. Not only would the Jews be cast as pariahs but the Germans would be able to use the world’s actions as a way to defend their own crimes.

Captain Schroeder, however, refused to play along. After he was refused permission to dock in Cuba, he then attempted to take the ship to both America and Canada. When both of those countries refused to allow him to dock, Schroeder turned the St. Louis toward England, where he planned to stage a shipwreck so that the passengers could be rescued at sea. Before that happened, Belgium, France, the Netherlands, and the United Kingdom jointly announced that they would accept the refugees.

Tragically, just a few days after the passengers disembarked, World War II officially began and Belgium, France, and the Netherlands all fell to the Nazi war machine. It is estimated that, of the 937 passengers on the St. Louis, more than 600 of them subsequently died in the Nazi concentration camps.

The journey of the St. Louis was recreated in the 1976 film, Voyage of the Damned, with Max von Sydow as Captain Schroeder and a collection of familiar faces playing not only the ship’s passengers and crew but also the men and women in Cuba who all played a role in the fate of the ship. In fact, one could argue that there’s a few too many familiar faces in Voyage of the Damned. One cannot fault the performances of Max von Sydow, Malcolm McDowell, and Helmut Griem as members of the crew. And, amongst the passengers, Lee Grant, Jonathan Pryce, Paul Koslo, Sam Wanamaker, and Julie Harris all make a good impression. Even the glamorous Faye Dunaway doesn’t seem to be too out-of-place on the ship. But then, in Havana, actors like Orson Welles and James Mason are awkwardly cast as Cubans and the fact that they are very obviously not Cuban serves to take the viewer out of the story. It reminds the viewer that, as heart-breaking as the story of the St. Louis may be, they’re still just watching a movie.

That said, Voyage of the Damned still tells an important true story, one that deserves to be better-known. In its best moments, the film captures the helplessness of having nowhere to go. With Cuba corrupt and the rest of the world more interested in maintaining the illusion of peace than seriously confronting what was happening in Germany, the Jewish passengers of the St. Louis truly find themselves as a people without a home. They also discover that they cannot depend on leaders the other nations of the world to defend them.

Defending the passengers falls to a few people who are willing to defy the leaders of their own country. At the start of the film, Nazi Intelligence Chief Wilhelm Canaris (Denholm Elliott) explains that Captain Schroeder was selected specifically because he wasn’t a member of the Nazi Party and could not be accused of having ulterior motives for ultimately returning the passengers to Germany. Canaris and his fellow Nazis assume that anti-Semitism is so natural that even a non-Nazi will not care what happens to the Jewish passengers. Instead, Schroeder and his crew take it upon themselves to save the lives of the passengers. It is not Franklin Roosevelt who tries to save the passengers of St. Louis. Instead, it’s just a handful of people who, despite unrelenting pressure to do otherwise, step up to do the right thing. Max von Sydow, who was so often cast in villainous roles, gives a strong performance as the captain who is willing to sacrifice his ship to save his passengers.

Flaws and all, Voyage of the Damned is a powerful film about a moment in history that must never be forgotten.