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Postscript In the years since the Depression, filmmakers have often looked back at that era with a degree of nostalgia. Movies like Bound for Glory and Honky Tonk Man merely used the Depression as a backdrop for the celebration of the human spirit during times of national and personal crisis. Woody Allen’s endearing portrait of folks coping in Purple Rose of Cairo displays the importance of movies as a refuge in the 1930s, while making audiences yearn for a simplistic, idealized past. One of the best attempts at examining the pain of the Depression is John Sayle’s independent film Matewan; however, it deals primarily with the problems associated with unionization before FDR’s administration made collective bargaining possible. Most post–World War II films about the Depression, however, sentimentalize the 1930s, making the decade appear to have been a time of relative calm in spite of economic hardship. Even films that attempt to show the privations of the Depression tend to be upbeat, almost in the tradition of the Andy Hardy series. Although the rise of Nazism abroad has been the subject of a number of films, from Cabaret to Swing Kids, little has been done concerning domestic fascism in the 1930s. Foreign films have dealt with the evil of Nazism much better than post–studio era Hollywood. A Soldier of Orange , Europa, Europa, and The Nasty Girl have examined Nazism and its legacy in extremely effective ways. John Boorman’s delightfully sentimental memoir about life in England during the blitz, Hope and Glory, has no Hollywood counterpart. Though Mel Brooks’s remake of the Jack Benny comedy To Be or Not to Be addressed America’s stance before involvement , the best film about the agonizing decision of the United States regarding involvement is still Warner Bros.’s classic film Casablanca. In Hollywood’s decidedly short memory, World War II has been glamorized as the good war, the fun war; the difficult episodes leading up to America ’s entry are glossed over or ignored. 177 Films about the American Nazi movement and its various counterparts are nonexistent. Though there have been made-for-TV movies about Waco, Randy Weaver, and the Oklahoma City bombing, nothing has yet been done with the likes of William Dudley Pelley or Father Charles Coughlin. Currently, the only screen investigation of people in a democratic country toying with the possibility of fascism focuses on Britain before the war, not America. In the BBC dramatizations of P. G. Wodehouse’s Jeeves and Wooster stories, there is a recurring character, Roderick Spode, based on Sir Oswald Mosley, the British fascist who headed the Nazi-inspired Black Shirts. Yet that character is reduced to a caricature full of bombast instead of a threat. Movies concerning the Holocaust have become almost a cottage industry , from documentaries—Night and Fog, The Sorrow and the Pity, Hotel Terminus, and Shoah among the best—to feature films and television miniseries including Holocaust, Seven Beauties, Sophie’s Choice, Escape from Sobibor, and Stephen Spielberg’s “feel good” holocaust movie, Schindler’s List. Even so, America’s role in the event has received little attention . An installment of the PBS American Experience series, “Holocaust , Deceit, and Indifference,” capitalizing upon David Wyman’s Abandonment of the Jews exposed the role the State Department played in denying Jews safe haven during the 1930s and on into the war. It, however , is the exception rather than the rule. One thing endures, though. Nazis continue to be depicted in film in the same way that Warner Bros. pioneered. The officious, sadistic, malevolent Nazi who blindly obeys orders, no matter how repulsive they might be, has become ingrained in the popular culture. The hundreds of portrayals of Hitler share two things: the absolute ubiquity of the available footage of the Fuhrer, with which they can mimic his mannerisms, and the Warner Bros. concretization of the Nazi as evil incarnate. 178 | Postscript ...

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