1.11 The Question of Fascism: 'To Be or Not to Be'
"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.
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1.10 Remembering Fascism: 'Amarcord'
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.
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1.09 Hiding from Fascism: 'The Garden of the Finzi-Continis'
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.
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1.08 The Italian In Crowd: 'The Conformist'
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.
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1.07 American Anti-fascism: 'Black Legion' and "Confessions of a Nazi Spy'
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.
What do movies teach us about fascism?
From propagandistic myths of power to stories of suffering and belonging, cinema has long chronicled the many faces of fascism. Films don’t just reflect history or envision the future; they help shape it, revealing how authoritarian movements seduce, normalize, and endure, and at what cost to our humanity.
Fascism on Film Podcast explores these connections one episode at a time. Each season (10–15 episodes) tackles a different facet of fascism on screen. Season 1 looks at pre‑war fascism, examining both notorious propaganda and lesser‑known works of resistance.
Hosted by writers and lifelong cinephiles James Kent and Teal Minton, the show blends sharp analysis with decades of shared filmgoing experience to uncover how art, ideology, and history intertwine.
Music courtesy www.classicals.de.
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