Based on a book by Neal Gabler and first aired on A&E, I'd give HOLLYWOODISM a B-rating but it has some interesting points.
I'd previously read that in the 1930s, American Jews in leadership positions were reluctant to say too much about Hitler and German anti-semitism. In some cases, the U.S. government told them not too.
Yet at the same time, there was a largely forgotten level of interest in Nazism in America in the 1930s; it was far from a taboo subject. See the ten minute recent documentary, A Night at the Garden (here), about the mass-scale 1939 New York Pro-German (Pro-Nazi) rally (Wiki here). That rally wasn't an isolated event. See recent books like Hitler's American Friends (here). And Hitler in Los Angeles (here). There was also the pro-fascist book by Anne Morrow Lindbergh, Wave of the Future, appearing as late as 1940 (here).
Just two months after that landmark scale of that Pro Nazi rally, in Spring 1939, Warner Brothers released "Confessions of a Nazi Spy," which was intended to make real the breadth and energy of pro-Nazi interests in the United States. Thus, the movie falls between the Anschluss of Austria (March 1938), Kristallnacht (November 1938), and the invasion of Poland (September 1939).
Confessions of a Nazi Spy
Confessions of a Nazi Spy isn't a class-A film, but it was a very interesting one. See Wikipedia here, see an online ten-page deep dive article by S.J. Ross, here.
The plot. Basically, we are introduced to some unhappy or disgruntled German-Americans who are lured into the spy world by ringleaders of Nazi interests in America, playing out against a background of "German Bund" or German-American clubs, associations, and summer camps. Eventually, the Feds are tipped off and a film noir detective drama ensues. German-Americans are made more sympathetic because if they try to turn down Nazi requests they are brutally threatened for life and limb.
As noted in HOLLYWOODISM, Confessions never mentions anti semitism directly but there are several clear indirect references, e.g. a reference to rights of man regardless of religion.
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Tidbits
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There are numerous references to Hitler's social engineering and propaganda, something timely today in 2019 as we discuss politics, social media, and fake news.
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The movie Confessions builds up to wide arrests of infiltrated Nazi spies in American military and industry, which is hailed as a victory. However, just the same spirit of bravely ferreting out and rounding up the enemy in his stateside nooks and crannies also occurred, largely falsely, as part of McCarthyism.
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Confessions also shows many "bad Germans" in the US amongst the acknowledged "good Germans," but it's impossible not to forsage the concentration camps for Japanese of 1942, in this 1939 movie.
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Edward G. Robinson has a lead role as an FBI agent. EGR was born Emanuel Goldenberg in a Yiddish-speaking family and came to the US age 10 in 1904. (He attended City College of New York with the plan to become an attorney.)
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As mentioned in HOLLYWOODISM, there is another obscure and unusual 1940s movie with Cary Grant about anti-semiticism in the executive world of New York, Gentleman's Agreement (1947). This too was part of an era when Hollywood dealt rarely and gingerly with anti-semiticism, even less so as the McCarthy hearings dawned and often associated Jewishness with Communism.
