When the Depression hit Broadway, Ratoff headed to Hollywood, as part of the exodus of New York theater pros who were quickly snapped up by producers terrified of films with dialogue, the "talkies". He arrived in 1931 and caught a lucky break: in Gregory La Cava's "Symphony of Six Million", producer David O. Selznick had insisted, very unusually for the time, that this Fannie Hurst story of a brilliant Jewish doctor escaping his tenement roots be cast with authentic Yiddish actors from the Lower East Side. His role as the beloved immigrant father who dies on his son's operating table led to five more jobs in 1932 alone, ranging from a George Kaufman comedy to a prestigious Selznick production, George Cukor's "What Price Hollywood?".