Cinema's strange glamorisation of fascists

This week the Venice Film Festival – the oldest film festival in the world – celebrates its 74th edition. It was instituted in 1932 under the Italian Fascist regime; in its early years there was a Mussolini Cup for Best Foreign Film and Great Gold Medals of the National Fascist Association for Entertainment for actors and actresses. In 1940 Jud Süß, one of the vilest films of Nazi propaganda, premiered at the Festival where then-film critic and future director of Blow-Up Michelangelo Antonioni wrote a rave review, praising the film’s “cinematic refinement”. “If this is propaganda, we need more propaganda,” he wrote.

Fascism, and later Nazism, lauded cinema for its modernity and its potential as propaganda. Leni Riefenstahl’s Triumph of the Will is the apotheosis of the genre, consecrating a Nazi aesthetic of rigorously formed lines, pillars, torches, Wagnerian pomp and Aryan muscularity. Years earlier, in 1915, DW Griffith had adapted a little-known novel called The Clansman: A Romance of the Ku Klux Klan as the epic Birth of a Nation, which essentially wrote the grammar of motion pictures even as it revived a defunct paramilitary cult into the national phenomenon we still have today. Even the Klan's ardour for cross-burning is thought to have come from Griffith’s film.

Prior to World War II, anti-fascist films were limited by the Production Code Administration, which, responding to isolationism and anti-Semitism, objected to their production. Warner Bros resisted their strictures, making Confessions of A Nazi Spy starring Edward G Robinson in 1939. Even Charlie Chaplin’s Great Dictator could only be made off the back of Chaplin’s independence and huge fame. The attack on Pearl Harbor wiped this right-wing push-back out of the way and Warner greenlit Casablanca that very same week.

In the immediate aftermath of WWII, Robinson returned to his role as Nazi hunter with The Stranger in 1946. Orson Welles starred as the Nazi Franz Kindler and directed, introducing real documentary footage of the Holocaust for the first time in a Hollywood feature. The film was one of the few bona fide commercial successes of Welles’ career but stands also as an anomaly in post-war American cinema. As the war faded from memory, attacks on fascism decreased markedly as communism loomed as the ideological enemy of choice.

The post-Charlottesville viral success of the USO short Don’t Be a Sucker is fascinating but its effect is also to create a kind of “it can’t happen here” complacency. In America, someone always stands up to the bully. The conclusion of Roger Corman’s 1962 thriller The Intruder has a similar soothing denouement as the town realises that race-baiter William Shatner has been manipulating them all along.

Welles' choice to play the villain opposite fellow liberal Robinson also began a long line of young actors who would add a Nazi to their CVs. It’s easy to see why the role of a Nazi would appeal to an actor. You are playing a villain, the devil has the best tunes, and you garner some kudos for bravely putting yourself out there. Do a Google image search for Edward Norton and chances are you’ll find him in his boxers with a large swastika tattoo emblazoned on his chest. Norton’s Derek Vinyard from American History X is a brilliant performance, establishing Norton as a talented young actor willing to take risks.

The only problem is that the Nazi is far more compelling than the ex-Nazi. Is there a risk that the residue of star power will actually make the neo-Nazis more attractive once the anti-Nazi message is forgotten? Russell Crowe in Romper Stomper likewise gives his Nazi a troubled brooding interiority a million miles from the “Jews will not replace us” arseholes of the tiki torch parade. Even the strutting anti-social behaviour of Tim Roth’s runtish Trevor from Alan Clarke’s Made in Britain has an energy that’s almost admirable, even if he can’t exactly be accused of being glamourous.

The absolute summation of the cake-and-eat-it approach to many of these films is The Believer. Disney Club alumni Ryan Gosling plays Daniel, a vehement neo-Nazi who also happens to be Jewish. It's based on the true story of Dan Burros, a member of the American Nazi Party and later the Klan, who – when his Jewish heritage was publicly revealed – killed himself. Reviews of the film again focused on Gosling’s performance of this tortured soul. This might be a superficial point for some but this writer doesn’t think so. It helps that he looks like Ryan Gosling, which the real guy most decidedly did not.

As Bongwater once sang: “It’s easy to accept Jesus Christ as your personal saviour when he looks like Willem Dafoe.” And so it goes with white supremacists. Of course, there are some ugly Nazis – the Gestapo guy from Raiders of the Lost Ark or the Illinois Nazi from The Blues Brothers who looks exactly like the current US Attorney General – but these are comic villains. When the far right are taken seriously and examined, it always seems to be through a gorgeous and daringly cool avatar who's about to become the next big thing.

Maybe it’s time we started attempting some verisimilitude in this area. Instead of casting Russell Crowe, Edward Norton or Ryan Gosling, Hollywood should search for someone who looks like Dylann Roof, Anders Breivik, Richard Spencer, Dan Burros, hell even Goebbels, or Hitler himself. You know, members of the master race. But we know this won’t happen. Even when portraying the uglier side of American life, the movies still need things to be beautiful.