This episode examines "The Mortal Storm" (Dir. Frank Borzage, 1940) as 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.

Through this episode, and its focus on the 1972 film, "Cabaret," James Kent and Teal Minton 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.