That Time Hal Roach Went Into Business with Mussolini

Don’t squawk, Weisenheimers! This is VITTORIO Mussolini, the Duce’s son, imitating his Fascist dad in a bit with Hal Roach on radio

Don’t shoot the messenger — I don’t make the news, I just report it! And the extraordinary news is true: in 1937 Hal Roach and Benito Mussolini announced their joint project, to be called “RAM” — “Roach and Mussolini”.

The idea was for Roach to produce a dozen patriotic movies trumpeting Italian culture, starting with an adaptation of Rigoletto. Italy would put up the money, Roach would make the movies. After all, Roach had done operas before: Fra Diavolo in 1933, and The Bohemian Girl in 1936. But of course…Mussolini had done some things before, himself, including “pacifying” Libya, invading Ethopia, creating a police state, and forming an alliance with Hitler, although he hadn’t yet signed off on an official program of anti-Semitism (that would come the following year). Still, it was already enough for Hollywood, including Roach’s distributor MGM (run by, oh, guys like Louis B. Mayer and Irving Thalberg) to be pretty pissed off about the arrangement. So it was quickly scuttled.

It would be beyond unfair to call Roach a Fascist. The most “right wing” behavior he was guilty of was serving on the exec committee of the American Liberty League (1934-36), which was against FDR’s more radical economic programs, almost all of which were unprecedented in America at the time, after all. Roach was a businessman. But, if the history of those years has taught us nothing else (or maybe not), businessmen are often among the chief collaborators in enabling authoritarianism.

Anyway, surely financial desperation was what lay primarily back of Roach’s scheme. The market for comedy shorts was dead by 1937. By this time he had stopped producing all shorts except for the Our Gang series. As he had with Laurel and Hardy, he attempted to move that series up to features as well with General Spanky (1936) but it hadn’t done well at the box office. After the RAM deal fell through, Roach passed Our Gang off to MGM to produce it themselves, and he busied himself with making semi-feature length “streamliners”. And Mussolini contented himself with his OWN film studio, Cinecittà, which still thrives today.

For more on classic comedy film history, the good and the bad, please see Chain of Fools: Silent Comedy and Its Legacies from Nickelodeons to Youtube.