Fascism on Film Podcast

Paul Thomas Anderson's "One Battle After Another" is both a thrilling action film, and a mirror-holding look at current American society. Baked into its absurdist right vs. leftist fantasy are truths about how each side views the other. Anderson doesn't let anyone off the hook, as he finds the humor in taking each side to a comical extreme. 

Make no mistake, through the humor of "One Battle After Another," it's clear who the villai...

Released just months after Hitler came to power, "Hans Westmar" stands as one of the earliest cinematic expressions of Nazi ideology. Ostensibly a biopic of Horst Wessel—the Sturmabteilung (SA) activist turned martyr whose death became a rallying cry for the Nazi movement—the film dramatizes the transformation of a young man from aimless nationalist to disciplined Nazi believer. But more than a tale of political awakening, "Hans We...

Between 1933 and 1945, more than 1,000 feature films were produced under the Nazi regime—most of them not overtly propagandistic, but melodramas, musicals, comedies, and historical epics. Hitler’s Hollywood, a 2017 documentary by German critic Rüdiger Suchsland, explores this vast and often overlooked cinematic universe. Narrated by Udo Kier in haunted tones, the film argues that Nazi cinema was not just an arm of propaganda but a ...

Romance as Resistance: ‘Casablanca’

In this episode of Fascism on Film, we look at Michael Curtiz’s Casablanca (1942), one of Hollywood’s most enduring films and one of its quietest acts of persuasion. Beneath the romance and intrigue, Casablanca tells a story of political awakening—about a man, a city, and a country choosing between indifference and action against fascism.

We discuss how Humphrey Bogart’s Rick Blaine, with his fam...

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, complic...

"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 innovat...

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 th...

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 f...

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 se...

"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’ B...

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 portr...

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 ...

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 ...

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 reluc...

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 t...

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 ...

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 inv...