This is my first time commenting on this board and I'm sorry to say I must withhold my vote.
I feel that Z is eminently worthy of inclusion, but not at the expense of an equally worthy (and not very similar) film. Yes, it's your podcast and you can do what you like, but excluding TDOTC simply to add weight to the Z decision and without at least according it a vs. episode isn't broadly consistent with what I've been hearing on The Canon.
To my mind, TDOTC is one of an entirely different collection of films which includes the likes of The Parallax View, The Conversation, and Klute in which dramatic scenarios, somewhat removed from real world events, embody the paranoia of their era. Z, by contrast, has more in common with All the President's Men with its focus on investigation and legal proceedings within a more clearly defined historical context. They differ in the degree of directness with which they depict actual events, but otherwise belong to the axis of historical drama and biography.
Yes to Z, but not at the expense of giving Condor a fair trial.
On the topic of the gay, fascist thug which seems to be such a hot button here, the first thing that went through my mind was Ernst Rohm and the disgraced SA element in the Nazi Party. Their mass murder in The Night of the Long Knives was partly precipitated by disapproval of endemic inter-generational gay relationships within the SA. On the other hand, Hitler apparently knew of Rohm's homosexuality, but is said to have remarked "the SA are a band of warriors and not a moral institution." So, it could be a comment by Gravas on the hypocrisy of fascist institutions privately tolerating behavior which they would officially condemn.
