Popcorn doesn’t come with books published by respected university presses, but in the case of Bruce Kuklick’s “Fascism Comes to America,” maybe it should. Mr. Kuklick, a professor emeritus of history at Penn and an accomplished historian of ideas, turns his skills to Hollywood’s treatment of fascism. “Yet fascism has remained alive in Americanimaginations long after its eclipse in 1945.” Movies reveal popular sentiments in ways policy analysis does not. Hollywood’s use of farce to portray fascism illustrates a problem at the heart of this book. Another was “Red Heat” (1988), with Arnold Schwarzenegger (Soviet) and Jim Belushi (American) as “buddy-cops” catching a Georgian drug kingpin.

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