In the film, he gets convicted of murder after brutally executing a Black man who tries to steal his car and undergoes an unlikely conversion thanks to a saintly Black inmate, played by Guy Torry in turns charming, funny and wise. But in scenes showing Derek and his skinheads mates bonding β lonely, insecure losers desperate to belong to something greater than themselves β American History X feels terrifyingly prescient.
Jean-Pierre Melville, a former resistance fighter himself, re-stages the German invasion of Paris for the opening shot of his masterpiece, as jackbooted Nazi soldiers march through the Arc de Triumph. What follows is perhaps the best film ever made on the feel of life under fascism. In an early scene, three members of the Resistance strangle a traitor with a towel β a gunshot would attract too much attention β and Melville draws out the scene, excruciatingly, showing the true costs of heroism and war and how those fighting a monstrous system often become monsters themselves.
The parallels between the rise of fascism in s Berlin and the realities in present-day America can make Cabaret an uncomfortable rewatch. The question is: Will we listen this time, or will we keep laughing until the music stops?
The one film Musk β or anyone who thinks Hitler puns or Nazi salutes are funny β needs to watch. Forget the campy and pop-culture depictions of fascism, forget all the subtle allegories. It follows a young Belarusian teenager who joins the partisans dreaming of heroism and adventure but finds only devastation and horror.
It is nearly unbearable. But no other film reveals so completely the moral bankruptcy of fascist expansion. The rise of the Nazis triggers a mental breakdown and he comes up with the bizarre plan to collect life insurance by killing a stranger whom he wrongly believes to be his exact double. Using non-humans to highlight the dehumanization that undergirds all forms of apartheid, the South African filmmaker asks not what aliens might do to us, but what horrors we would inflict on them were they to suffer the misfortune of alighting upon our tribalistic, bloodstained planet.
