Ordinary Fascism

Obyknovennyy fashizm

Soviet Union

1965

138 Min

Black and White

Russian

Currently 4.2/5 Stars.
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SCR Yuri Khanyutin, Mikhail Romm, Maya Turovskaya

CAST Mikhail Romm, Adolf Hitler, Joseph Stalin, Hermann Göring, Josef Goebbels

ED Valentina Kulagina, Mikhail Romm

SOUND Sergei Minervin, Boris Vengerovsky

Synopsis

This analysis of fascism, its rise in Germany in the 1930’s, culmination in World War II, and present day manifestations, is compiled largely from German news and archival footage. The film is divided into chapters depicting Hitler’s early emotional appeal to the German people (mass rallies, Wagnerian torchlight parades, book-burnings, etc.); the conversion of “nice boys” into storm troopers (stressed by scenes of captured German soldiers with pictures of their loved ones juxtaposed with views of their atrocities); Hitler’s eventual rise to absolute power (his conquests, policy of mass murder, crimes against the Jews, and the sealing of Mein Kampf in a vault designed to last 1000 years); and his defeat. (Deletions for the U. S. release include material from the final chapter depicting neo-Nazi movements throughout the world today and the training of U. S. Marines in a manner reminiscent of the indoctrination of Hitler’s Brownshirts.) other english titles: Triumph Over Violence or Echo of the Jackboot. —TCM

Director

Mikhail Romm

A great film director as well as an instructor to a generation of young filmmakers, Romm made significant contributions to Soviet cinema. Born into a Jewish family deported to Siberia at the turn of the century, Romm moved to Moscow as a teenager to study sculpture at the Academy of Fine Arts. After serving in the Red Army during the civil war (1918-1921), he finished his studies and participated in various post-revolutionary artistic endeavors, discovering film in the early 1930s. He wrote an early talkie, called Men and Jobs, and his directorial debut was actually the last Soviet silent— Pyshka. The companion films—commissioned to celebrate the twentieth anniversary of the revolution— Lenin in October and Lenin in 1918— were successful artistically as well as politically. After a number of wartime and late Stalinist films, Romm became a professor at VGIK, the state film school in Moscow, in 1957. Beyond shepherding filmmakers during the very active and exciting years of the Soviet… read more