Zeus

Writers:

Nunnally Johnson (screen play),  George Hembert Westley (based on a play by)  

George Arliss,  Boris Karloff,  Loretta Young   

 

George Arliss plays Nathan Rothschild, the head of a family of celebrated 19th century Jewish bankers. Despite the anti-semitic efforts of a powerful politico (Boris Karloff), Rothschild moves in the best European social circles. He is ultimately knighted for his services to the English crown, which include the financing of the Duke of Wellington's battle against Napoleon at Waterloo. This being a Hollywood picture, the political and financial intrigues have to be offset by romance--in this case the love affair between Rothschild's daughter (Loretta Young) and a handsome military officer (Robert Young). The final scene was photographed in the newly perfected three-strip Technicolor process, though for many years the TV distributors either removed this sequence or reprinted it in black and white. Designed in part as an attack against the burgeoning anti-semitism movement in Hitler's Germany, House of Rothschild was ironically exploited by Nazi functionary Joseph Goebbels,  who redubbed and re-edited the film to serve as anti-Jewish propaganda!