The Question of Fascism: ‘To Be or Not to Be’
Fascism on Film takes a sharp, funny, and surprisingly emotional look at Ernst Lubitsch’s 1942 wartime satire To Be or Not to Be—a screwball comedy about a Polish theater troupe who find themselves impersonating Nazis, outwitting Gestapo agents, and flying to safety in Hitler’s own airplane. What starts as a lighthearted romp through mistaken identities […]
America Anti-fascism: ‘Black Legion’ and ‘Confessions of a Nazi Spy’
In this episode of Fascism on Film, we turn to late-1930s America, an anxious nation watching as authoritarian movements surged abroad and felt their reverberations at home. Long before the United States entered World War II, Hollywood began shaping stories that confronted this threat directly, laying the groundwork for an early tradition of anti‑fascist cinema […]