The Fox of Glenarvon (Der Fuchs von Glenarvon in German) is a German propaganda film from the Nazi era portraying the years of the Irish fights for independence during World War I. It was produced in 1940 by Max W. Kimmich and starred Olga Tschechowa, Karl Ludwig Diehl, Ferdinand Marian and others. The screenplay was written by Wolf Neumeister and Hans Bertram after a novel of the same title by Nicola Rohn that had been published at Ullstein publishing house in 1937. The shootings lasted from December 1939 to February 1940. It passed censorship on April 22, 1940 and had its debut in Berlin's UFA palace at the zoo two days later.
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The film takes place in the fictional Irish county of Glenarvon, somewhere in the northwest of Galway, and tells the story of Gloria Grandison, the Irish wife of the local British magistrate, who falls in love with an Irish freedom fighter and leaves her husband for him. The story is set in 1884, during the Irish fight for freedom and independence from Great Britain.
At the beginning of the fights between Nazi Germany and Great Britain, this film stands in a long line of anti-British propaganda films that portray the British as suppressors or traitors of minorities.[1] For this reason, the love story is only a vehicle for the theory of the superiority of the "earthy" Irish race over the "rotten" British suppressors. In this film as in My life for Ireland, the British are brutal and unscrupulous oppressors.[2] It does not, however, operate on such crude anti-British stereotypes as such later films as Ohm Krüger and Carl Peters, which were filmed after Hitler gave up hope of making peace with Great Britain.[3]
The fight against the British, furthermore, is depicted less historically and more in the manner of the Nazi seizure of power, including the disruption of a funeral as in the film Hans Westmar.[4]
Shortly after release, the film was graded artistically valuable by film checkers of the Propaganda Ministry. This attribute was given to movies that fulfilled special esthetical criteria besides the actors' performances and meant that cinemas had to pay less entertainment tax when showing this film. Even Goebbels was quite enthusiastic about the final movie: on April 22, 1940, he wrote in his diary: "Now it's great and very useful for our propaganda."
The film was also shown in many foreign countries, especially those who were allied with Nazi Germany, such as Finland, where it made its debut on March 8, 1942 under the title of Rakkaus voitta kaikken. Later it was renamed there as Vapauden liekki, and in 1941, it was banned from the stages. The movie was also shown in Italy (La volpe insanguinata), Greece (I epanastatis) and even in the Soviet Union (Vozmezdie). After the war, it was banned by the Allies.