The House of Rothschild is a 1934 American pre-Code historical drama film directed by Alfred L. Werker and starring George Arliss, Loretta Young and Boris Karloff.

It was adapted by Nunnally Johnson from the play by George Hembert Westley, and chronicles the rise of the Rothschild family of European bankers.

Later, as Mayer is lying on his deathbed, he instructs his five sons to start banks in different countries across Europe: Amschel in Frankfurt am Main, Salomon in Vienna, Nathan in London, Carl in Naples, and James in Paris.

Nathan learns that the quarter of the loan not awarded to Barings will fall to Ledrantz, Metternich and Talleyrand, who stand to make enormous profits.

With Ledrantz and others once again desperately in need of financial support, he extracts a treaty from them granting Jews rights, freedoms and dignity long denied them.

Just before he is bankrupted, he receives word that Wellington has won the Battle of Waterloo, and he is not only saved, he becomes the richest man in the world and a baron.

The story was suggested to him by George Arliss (also non-Jewish) who had made successful film appearances as Jewish characters like Shylock and Benjamin Disraeli.

[2] While nearly all of the film is in black and white, its final sequence was one of the first shot in the three-strip Technicolor process, along with the MGM musical The Cat and the Fiddle, released in February 1934.

In a close contest The House of Rothschild was voted the second best picture of 1934 in Film Daily's annual poll of critics, narrowly edged out by The Barretts of Wimpole Street.

[5] Two scenes from The House of Rothschild were used in the German antisemitic propaganda film The Eternal Jew (1940)[6][2] without the permission of the copyright holders.

The Prussian Count Ledrantz, Nathan Mayer's antagonist, was a purely fictional character written into the story by Nunally Johnson.