Defenders of the Faith

“Spain, torn apart by opposing factions… The Popular Front stole the elections and freed 30,000 criminals.” These forceful and tendentious sentences open Defenders of the Faith began—a documentary feature produced and narrated by the American Russell Palmer, filmed during the height of the Spanish Civil War. Far from being an objective chronicle, it served as a propaganda tool for the rebel side, aimed at winning sympathy for the Francoist cause among conservative audiences in the United States. The film glorifies daily life in Francoist Spain, marked by order, progress, and religiosity (notably the parades of the Female Section, the arrival of Nationalist troops in places like Castellón, and the leisure and peace in San Sebastián), in contrast with the chaos, evil, and suffering of Republican Spain, exemplified strikingly in close-ups of enemy prisoners. It was also the first time a military conflict was filmed in colour.

The film was shown in theaters and circulated within Catholic and anti-communist circles in the United States, directly opposing works which defended the Republican cause from a humanistic and activist perspective such as The Spanish Earth (1937), directed by Joris Ivens and written by Hemingway and Dos Passos. While The Spanish Earth sought to generate empathy for the peasants and militia members defending the Republic, Palmer’s work used an epic-religious language to justify the uprising as a restoration of moral order.

Palmer was no ordinary filmmaker. He was president of Peninsular News Service, a pro-Franco and Catholic media group in the U.S. which published, among others, the magazines Spain and Cara al Sol). He had also worked as a commercial advisor in Madrid and cultivated close ties with the Falangist elite, which allowed him to move freely within rebel territory during the conflict. Made without restrictions from Francoist authorities, Palmer’s documentary presents an openly Manichean view of the conflict: the rebels appear as heroic defenders of the faith and Western civilization, opposed to an enemy caricatured as chaotic, criminal, and communist. In this sense, Defenders of the Faith fits into the early Franco regime’s strategy to shape international public opinion through sympathetic press services, presenting the war as an inevitable crusade against Bolshevism.

Today, Defenders of the Faith represents not only a biased cinematic document but also a key piece for understanding Francoism’s early experiments with cultural diplomacy abroad, especially in the United States.

AM