Yahoo Lifestyle Turner Classic Movies Airs Full Day Of Anti-Fascist Films After Trump Inauguration
Turner Classic Movies, a vintage film channel, filled its schedule with films featuring explicitly anti-fascist and anti-Nazi themes one day after Donald Trump’s return to the White House.
TCM’s day began with 1937′s “Black Legion,” a Humphrey Bogart crime drama that warns of the specter of white supremacy.
That was followed by the World War II-era films “Confessions of a Nazi Spy” (1939) and “The Mortal Storm,” a 1940 Jimmy Stewart drama about Nazi Germany’s persecution of Jews.
Next up was Charlie Chaplin’s 1941 black comedy, “The Great Dictator,” an anti-fascist spoof that, along with his capitalism-critical movie “Modern Times,” was used as evidence of the silent film star’s communist sympathies during the Red Scare of the late 1940s and early ’50s.
Chaplin, a British citizen, was essentially exiled from the U.S. in 1952 when he was denied reentry to America after a trip to Europe during the height of the McCarthy era.
Following the Chaplin classic was 1944′s “The Seventh Cross” and 1943′s “Edge of Darkness.”
“The Seventh Cross,” starring Spencer Tracy, follows a prisoner after his escape from a German concentration camp. The Errol Flynn picture “The Edge of Darkness” is about one Norwegian village’s fight to resist the Nazis.
The day concluded with the World War II spy thriller, “Background to Danger.”
While many online believed that Turner Classic Movies’ schedule was pointed at the Trump administration, a spokesperson for the network told HuffPost that the post-inauguration programming had nothing to do with politics.
“TCM routinely airs themed film nights, including several previous years of broadcasting WWII and Nazi-related movie blocks, and our recent lineup was part of this established programming approach,” the spokesperson told HuffPost in an email.
Though TCM said the slate of Tuesday programming was not taking aim at Trump, the network’s media mogul namesake, Ted Turner, has openly supported progressive causes for decades.
The businessman has backed health care reform and pushed politicians to confront the climate crisis. Though he has never explicitly spoken out against Trump, he did endorse former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton in her 2016 bid for the presidency.
Many of Turner’s billionaire brethren appear to be welcoming the start of a second Trump era with open arms.
Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg, Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, Google CEO Sundar Pichai and Apple’s Tim Cook were all in the room when Trump took his oath of office Monday in the U.S. Capitol Rotunda.
This story has been updated to include a statement from Turner Classic Movies.
