Nazis make the perfect Hollywood villains – instantly recognisable, obviously deplorable and easy to recreate. So why were there no anti-Nazi films until 1939, on the eve of World War 2? This week I explore the history of Nazis in Hollywood in the 1930s, how the German government influenced American ...
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Four years ago, scholar Ben Urwand revealed how the Nazis' man in Hollywood Georg Gyssling censored and rewrote film scripts to remove scenes and dialogue that criticised the Nazi regime. He also repeatedly removed references to the suffering of Jews in post-WW1 Germany. Hidden until now, the DOD continued this ...
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The latest release from the US Army's entertainment liaison office provokes many questions. Why did they refuse to support the movie Rampage? Why are the military pitching ideas to studio executives? Who is in charge of the Pentagon's operations in Hollywood? And why does the US Army have a collection ...
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Hollywood doesn’t make war films any more. This isn’t entirely true, but compared to the post-WW2 period there are a lot less war films being made today. In this in-depth episode I offer a brief history of war movies and anti-war movies, and how the Pentagon’s policy on supporting films ...
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Ever since the revelation that the radical author George Orwell had provided names of possible communists to British intelligence, liberal revisionists have claimed he was a crypto-racist and a British spy. Any honest examination of the available documents shows that not only is this untrue, Orwell was the subject of ...
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For the last few weeks I've been working a research project on how the Pentagon's entertainment liaison offices deal with the subjects of military mental health and suicide.  Today the fruits of that research were published by Insurge Intelligence, a crowdfunded journalism platform run by Nafeez Ahmed, who also published ...
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From racism and sexism to the military-industrial complex, the politics both within the Marvel Cinematic Universe and surrounding it here in the real world are a constant source of news stories and controversy. This week we look at how the world’s biggest film franchise is both the source and the ...
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This week I welcome Martin Darlington, co-host of the History by Hollywood podcast, which reviews and analyses films claiming to be based on real events. We talk about Martin’s adopted homeland of Qatar, his views on history and politics, how he and his co-host Andrew prepare and produce the podcast, ...
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The latest files to be released by the National Archives include one on Kinsgley Amis - the former novelist and critic who was knighted in 1990. Amis was a member of the Communist party while at Oxford university in June 1941, though he renounced Marxism in 1956-7. MI5's monitoring of ...
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Lionel ‘Buster’ Crabb, OBE, was a Royal Navy frogman and MI6 diver who disappeared while on an underwater spying mission in April 1956. For three quarters of a century the story around Crabb has remained a mystery – was he killed by the Soviets, whose ship he was spying on? ...
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Buster Crabb was a WW2 British Navy Frogman who in 1956 was recruited by MI6 to spy on Soviet ships docking in Portsmouth harbour during a goodwill visit. These files - some available here for the first time - detail the British government's interference in the inquest into Crabb's presumed ...
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Chris Cook had me as a guest on Gorilla Radio recently to talk about National Security Cinema, how modern military propaganda is different to that of the WW2 era, how widespread militarised pop culture has become, how the government rewrites and censors films, and why so few Hollywood movies contain ...
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