Fascism on Film Podcast

The Mistake of Identity: 'Mr. Klein'

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.

Finding the Courage: 'This Land is Mine'

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 Space Everyone Knows You're a Fascist: 'Starship Troopers'

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. 

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. 

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.

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.

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.

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.

Proto-fascism: 'The Birth of a Nation'

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.

The Ecstasy of Leni Riefenstahl: 'Triumph of the Will'

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.