Fascism on Film Podcast

This week, we take aim at Nazis as pop-culture film villains and the tropes associated with them in a discussion on Quentin Tarantino’s "Inglourious Basterds," in which the auteur shakes up World War II history with his revisionist caper war film. He makes an audience hungry for Nazi revenge, questioning how far one must go along in the journey to experience catharsis in foiling the Nazis. And in the ultimate act of revenge, Tarantino gives the masses something they always wanted to see, and Hitler gets his comeuppance. This film, shaped by a director with a history of fascist propaganda movies and WW2 films at his disposal, creates a Nazi-revenge, blood-soaked, brain-splattered pop culture sensation in a culture where sex gets you an NC-17 rating, and violence gets you Oscar nominations.

François Truffaut’s "The Last Metro" is a deceptively quiet film about survival, resistance, and performance under Nazi occupation. Set in a Parisian theater during the German occupation of France, the story revolves around a company that tries to continue producing art while hiding the theater’s Jewish director in the basement. Beneath its surface—a war-era romance and backstage drama—is a nuanced meditation on repression, complicity, and cultural resistance. The title refers not just to the curfew imposed by the occupying forces (forcing audiences and actors alike to catch “the last metro” home) but also to a kind of societal and moral deadline. Everyone must choose whether to act, to pretend, or to disappear. "The Last Metro" is often read as a metaphor for how artists and intellectuals maneuvered under occupation, and how repression forces performance in every sphere of life. For Truffaut, born in 1932 and whose family had complex wartime allegiances, the film is also a personal reckoning with French memory—how heroism, compromise, and fear intermingle beneath the surface of everyday life.

"The Testament of Dr. Mabuse" is Fritz Lang's 1933 German detective thriller that arrived on the heels of Hilter coming to power, making it the regime's first official 'banned' movie.  The film is a fascinating look at how an evil ideology spreads beyond one man when that man make it his mission to make evil the rule of law.  "Mabuse" is a semi-sequel to Lang's masterpiece, "M," and it packs a punch visually and through its innovative use of audio.  Our discussion hits on its fascist interpretations, some of the misunderstandings about the movie, and the film's place in time when it was created under one set of rules, and ready for release under another.

In this episode of the Fascism on Film Podcast, we look at Mr. Klein (1976), Joseph Losey’s haunting story of identity, complicity, and erasure in Nazi-occupied France. Alain Delon plays Robert Klein, a Paris art dealer who lives comfortably off the desperation of others, buying paintings and possessions from Jewish families needing to flee persecution. He’s charming, detached, and perfectly suited to the opportunism of wartime Paris until the day a Jewish newspaper arrives in his mail, addressed to “Mr. Klein.” Trying to prove he is not that Mr. Klein, he enters a maze of bureaucracy that slowly consumes him. What begins as a misunderstanding becomes an obsession and, finally, a collapse of identity. Losey’s film moves between realism and dream. Mirrored rooms double Klein’s reflection, a grotesque cabaret mocking Jewish caricatures, and the quiet efficiency of the French police preparing for the 1942 Vel’ d’Hiv roundup. Beneath the surface elegance lies what we call the “machinery of murder” a portrait of fascism carried out through paperwork, compliance, and silence. We discuss how Mr. Klein reveals fascism not as spectacle but as routine, and how easily a society can lose its moral center when categorizing people for persecution becomes routine bureaucracy. Watching it today, the parallels are chilling. Join us as we unpack Mr. Klein, a story that asks what happens when the system decides who you are and how easily anyone can disappear inside it.

We open our second season of "Fascism on Film" with Jean Renoir’s wartime drama "This Land is Mine." This  film boldly dramatizes the internal resistance to fascism—not on the battlefield, but in the classroom, the courtroom, and the soul.  Released in 1943 while the war was still raging, "This Land is Mine" explores what it means to live under occupation, and what it takes to speak the truth in a world governed by fear. Set in a fictional European town under Nazi rule, the film centers on a timid schoolteacher, Albert Lory (played by Charles Laughton), who undergoes a moral awakening from passive compliance to active resistance. Through this journey, Renoir offers a commentary on education, conscience, and the price of dissent. This episode looks at the film’s idealistic framing of national character and moral clarity, while also situating it within the political context of wartime Hollywood and Renoir’s own exile from Vichy France.

In the season 1 finale episode of Fascism on Film, we turn to Paul Verhoeven’s "Starship Troopers," a gory, flamboyant, and darkly hilarious satire that asks viewers to confront their own appetite for militarism, propaganda, and authoritarian spectacle. Released in 1997 and adapted (loosely and subversively) from Robert A. Heinlein’s 1959 novel, the film uses the grammar of classic war movies to tell the story of a society where service guarantees citizenship, where democracy has failed, and where a perpetual war machine feeds on loyalty, violence, and spectacle. Propaganda as entertainment: Verhoeven replaces the opening title cards common in war films with a “Federal Network” commercial—state‑run media commanding the audience: “Would you like to know more?” Recruitment videos, live battlefield feeds, and grotesque lab footage turn war into a televised brand, complete with slogans: “We have the ships. We have the weapons. We need soldiers!” Militarism as a civic religion: In this world, only those who serve in the military earn the right to vote. A high‑school teacher (Michael Ironside) lectures students that “violence has resolved more issues throughout history than any other factor,” a mantra repeated until it becomes gospel. Fascist aesthetics played straight—then satirized: Nazi‑inspired uniforms, brutalist eagles, banners, chants, and blood sacrifices permeate the mise‑en‑scène. Verhoeven draws directly from Triumph of the Will while exaggerating those tropes to absurdity. The construction of the enemy: The Arachnids are depicted as both pathetic and existentially threatening—a core contradiction of fascist propaganda. They are not just an enemy; they are a species to be eradicated. The audience is invited to cheer at genocide, then left uneasy with that reaction. The illusion of choice: Echoing Edward Bernays’ Propaganda (1928), the film shows how a regime offers superficial choices while shaping thought at every level. The viewer’s cursor clicks “Would you like to know more?” but every path leads back to the same militaristic narrative. The humor and horror of complicity: Verhoeven’s satire is deliberately unsubtle—Rico, Carmen, and Carl are glamorous poster-children for the regime, even as they march deeper into moral compromise. When a captured “brain bug” is tortured and soldiers cheer, we are forced to ask: Who are we rooting for? While this is the end of our first season, it is by no means the last. We plan to be back in mid-to-late October with a whole new season of movies that examine fascism. 

"To Be or Not to Be" was made during the war, not after—a rare example of a Hollywood film that mocked Hitler and the Nazis while the outcome of the war was still uncertain. The U.S. had just entered WWII following the attack on Pearl Harbor (December 1941), and the mood of the nation was tense and somber. At the time, making jokes about Hitler and concentration camps was controversial. Many critics (including the New York Times’ Bosley Crowther) objected to the tone, accusing Lubitsch of bad taste. But others defended the film as a brilliant weapon against totalitarianism. As time passed, the film’s reputation grew enormously. It’s now considered a masterpiece of wartime satire and is frequently cited as one of Ernst Lubitsch’s greatest achievements—and one of the finest examples of antifascist comedy ever made. As the first season of Fascism on Film reaches its penultimate episode, James and Teal look at the ways in which comedy and farce is used to critique the dangers of fascism, and its absurdities. 

Italian filmmaking master, Federico Fellini, takes a nostalgic look at his early life as a teenager in fascist Italy with his final masterpiece, 1973's "Amarcord." While this film is not heavy on the violent and repressive aspects of fascism, it does offer an intricate portrait of a town mostly at ease with its repressive government. Filled with many classic Fellini moments and characters, this time Fellini uses his canvas to portray Italian citizens trapped in a fool's paradise, unable to see the horrors that will befall the country in a few short years.

This episode explores the haunting beauty and quiet devastation of "The Garden of the Finzi-Continis," Vittorio De Sica’s adaptation of Giorgio Bassani’s semi-autobiographical novel. Set in Ferrara, Italy, during the late 1930s and early 1940s, the film focuses on an aristocratic Jewish family who, shielded behind the walls of their estate, remain willfully detached from the mounting threat of Italian fascism. As racial laws erode their rights and community life, their retreat into games, nostalgia, and gentility becomes an allegory for bourgeois denial and complicity. De Sica renders fascism not through spectacle, but through absence, silence, and subtle exclusion—making this a vital film for understanding how fascism consolidates power not just through violence, but through social norms, legal frameworks, and cultural passivity.

This week, James and Teal take listeners back to where Fascism officially started, Italy, with Bernardo Bertolucci's 1970 film, "The Conformist." The movie is a cautionary tale on the human desire to fit in, and how fascism bends its will on a people, and its architecture. This movie is a dazzling array of set design and color cinematography that amazes, shocks, seduces, and leaves the audience spellbound.

This episode explores the rise of homegrown authoritarianism as depicted in two groundbreaking Warner Bros. films from the late 1930s. "Black Legion" dramatizes the radicalization of an American factory worker into a shadowy paramilitary group that targets immigrants, Jews, and labor organizers—mirroring the real Black Legion active in Depression-era Detroit. "Confessions of a Nazi Spy," the first explicitly anti-Nazi feature from a major Hollywood studio, presents a procedural exposé of a German-American espionage ring based on real FBI case files. Rather than framing fascism as an imported ideology, both films root it in domestic conditions: economic precarity, masculine humiliation, and the failure of democratic institutions to confront violent nativism. This episode examines how these films use the language of noir, crime, and realism to dramatize the emotional mechanics of American fascism. They offer a stark warning: that fascism in the U.S. won’t arrive with spectacle—it will arrive as self-pity, secrecy, and patriotism.

This episode examines how early American cinema didn’t reflect ideology—it actively shaped American political imagination through opposing forms of propaganda. In "The Birth of a Nation," white supremacist violence is transfigured into sacred national myth, glorifying the Ku Klux Klan as heroic saviors.  "The Birth of a Nation" is still one of the most shocking and abhorrent works of cinema, and yet, we believe historians are reluctant to fully dismiss this film, one we see lacking in any merit or societal value. We don't recommend you see this film, but we encourage you to listen to our thoughts on it, and how we arrive at the conclusion that this movie, intentional or otherwise, serves as a template for European fascism that would soon threaten an entire world.

This episode explores Leni Riefenstahl's "Triumph of the Will"(1935) as both a landmark in cinematic innovation and a chilling demonstration of fascist aesthetics in their purest form. Directed by Riefenstahl, the film is less a historical document than a sacred text of Nazi ideology—one that transforms politics into religion, mass into myth, and submission into beauty. We examine how fascism uses spectacle to overwhelm critical thought, offering audiences not arguments but ritualized emotion. Through architecture, lighting, choreography, and montage, "Triumph of the Will" doesn't persuade—it anoints. Riefenstahl’s camera doesn’t show Hitler taking power. It shows that he already reigns, divinely ordained by unity and desire. It's not a pleasant filmgoing film experience, but we felt it necessary to discuss it.

This episode of the Fascism on Film Podcast centers on István Szabó’s "Mephisto" (1981), a haunting study of artistic compromise under fascism. Loosely based on the life of actor Gustaf Gründgens, the film follows Hendrik Höfgen, a talented but insecure stage actor in Nazi Germany, who ascends to national fame after aligning himself with the regime. Höfgen does not believe in fascist ideology—he considers himself apolitical, a man of the theater. But through a series of seemingly small decisions, he trades principle for opportunity until he becomes a mouthpiece for totalitarianism. The episode explores how fascism recruits artists and intellectuals, not only to serve its ideology but to sanctify it with prestige and style. We examine the roles of ambition, vanity, self-deception, and silence in the making of complicity. The question is not just why people betray others—but why they betray themselves. For more episodes, visit: fascismonfilm.com.

This episode of the Fascism on Film Podcast examines "The Mortal Storm" (Dir. Frank Borzage, 1940) one of the earliest Hollywood films to confront Nazism directly. Released before the U.S. entered World War II, the film portrays the ideological unraveling of a tight-knit German family under Hitler’s rise. It is a story of creeping authoritarianism, social fracture, and moral choice—one that dramatizes fascism not as an external invader, but as a virus that colonizes relationships, institutions, and inner lives. This episode explores how fascism thrives by exploiting the cracks in civil society—co-opting education, splitting families, demanding obedience, and redefining loyalty. Through Borzage’s sentimental but politically charged direction, "The Mortal Storm" becomes a cinematic forecast of what happens when fear and ideology eclipse community and love.

On this episode of the Fascism on Film Podcast, we focus on the 1972 film, "Cabaret," James and Teal introduce the guiding ideas behind Fascism on Film: that cinema is not simply a record of political events but one of the primary arenas where fascism is imagined, stylized, reproduced, and resisted. For the series, we will explore how fascism expresses itself through regimes and ideologies, images, gestures, narratives, tones, and aesthetic forms that live on in the cultural unconscious. This episode explores the collapse of democratic culture in the Weimar Republic through the lens of Bob Fosse’s "Cabaret"(1972). Set in Berlin during the early 1930s, the film depicts the slow-motion unraveling of liberal society, where decadence and denial mask the encroachment of fascist power.  Rather than portraying Nazis as an external threat, "Cabaret" shows them as emerging from the very heart of a fractured society—at once ignored, tolerated, and eventually embraced. The episode investigates how art, performance, sexuality, and political evasion interweave with rising authoritarianism. "Cabaret" becomes a parable for the death of democracy by distraction: it asks whether culture can resist collapse—or whether it dances on as the world burns.  

On this premier episode of Fascism on Film, hosts James Kent and Teal Minton introduce the guiding ideas behind the show, and set the stage for what's to come.  For this series, James and Teal will explore how fascism expresses itself through regimes and ideologies, images, gestures, narratives, tones, and aesthetic forms that live on in the cultural unconscious. The episode makes the case for why this particular way of understanding fascism is vital, human, and uses empathy to transcend political abstraction. It doesn't merely tell us that fascism is evil; it lets us feel it.