Earlier I'd been watching all the Warner-Night-at-the-Movies contents of the DVD of All Through the Night--- a kind of comedy gangster film of WWII patriotism, with a hefty dose of xenophobia. That's not what I needed the antidote for, though the (Friz Freleng) cartoon had some cringe moments, too. About Chinese people.
All Through the Night opens with three comic actors who will later be B-I-G in TV---Wm Demarest, Phil Silvers, and Jackie C. Gleason (as he's credited)---getting laughs from one-upsmanship of blowhardy homefront anti-Nazi battle strategizing. We're in a restaurant on Broadway; shortly gangster Humphrey Bogart ("Gloves") will show up & complain that they don't have the cheesecake he insists on, and soon, through motherlove, he'll be ensnared in defeating a bunch of German spies, including Peter Lorre and Judith Anderson (Mrs. Danvers in Rebecca). Some great action stuff with an industrial elevator. Some jokes around movie gangster talk. But, too, and get this---the film was made in 1941, and Dachau is referenced (Bogie spelling it out, trying to figure out what it means) as the concentration camp in which the main dame's father was held (and has died)... [edited to say: Dachau, E tells me, had been a "regular" prison/concentration camp since the 1930s--- extermination and death camps didn't get going until 1942.]
