Hollywood, and any national film industry for that matter, is both a leader and follower of public opinion. In portraying foreign characters it reflects what it believes to be the popular attitudes of the time, but it also turns these often vague attitudes into concrete images. This process is dramatically highlighted by the treatment which American films have given British and Russian characters from about 1933 to the present. Our images of foreign peoples result from a ratio between objective and subjective factors, and Hollywood can make a considerable contribution to international understanding by increasing the objective factor in its treatment of foreign characters to the extent that current public opinion will allow.
This study is one of a number of pilot studies undertaken in connection with the UNESCO project for studying international tensions.
The author is well known, both here and abroad, as a social psychologist specializing in analysis of the social and cultural implications of films. His analytical account of the German film, From Caligari to Hitler, was published by the Princeton University Press in 1947.
UNESCO has begun to inquire into the nature of tensions inimical to mutual understanding between the peoples of the world. Part of this “Tensions Project” is an analysis of “the conceptions which the people of one nation entertain of their own and of other nations.”
It seems likely indeed that international understanding depends to some extent on the character of such conceptions- particularly if they assert themselves within the media of mass communication. Among these media the film is perhaps the most impressive.
If we are to study national images as presented in films, two broad areas for research immediately confront us. How do the films of any nation represent their own nation? And how do they represent others? The first of these two problems, increasingly dealt with in current writings, can be dismissed here in favor of the second which seems to me more important for UNESCO’S quest. It is a new problem, not yet posed in a general way. Along with a whole family of similar problems, it has come into focus only now that world government is a possibility and world domination a threat. Only now, in fact, has the goal of mutual understanding through knowledge changed from an intellectual pleasure to a vital concern of the democracies.
The following study is by no means intended to provide a comprehensive analysis of the various screen images which the peoples of the world have formed, and continue to form, of each other. It is a pilot study, and merely attempts to prepare the ground for such an investigation by examining a small sector of the total subject: the appearance of English and Russian characters in American fiction films since about 1933.1
In the universe of fiction films two types are of lesser importance—films about the past of the English and Russians, and screen adaptations of literary masterworks from the two countries. This is not to say that such films are rare. On the contrary, Hollywood finds Victorian England endearing and Catherine the Great amusing. Also, it often feels compelled to exchange entertainment for what it believes to be culture, and thus it eagerly exploits Shakespeare’s plays and Tolstoy’s novels, trying to make of them entertainment.2 No doubt both these historical and literary films are well-established genres. And of course, I do not deny that they help build up the screen images of the foreign peoples to which they refer. Yet since they deal with remote events, they are decidedly less relevant to this study than films that have a direct bearing on present-day reality.
It is these latter films on which I am concentrating here—films, that is, which involve contemporary Russian and British characters in real-life situations. There has been no lack of them since 1933. I am thinking, for instance, of Ninotchka (1939), with its pleasantries at the expense of Soviet mentality, and of Cavalcade (1933), which follows the destinies of a well-to-do English family through two generations. What concepts the American screen entertains of the English and Russians can best be elicited from such more or less realistically handled comedies and dramas.
In the cases of individuals and peoples alike, knowledge of each other may progress from a state of ignorance to fair understanding. It is, for instance, a far cry from what the average American knows about the Japanese to Ruth Benedict’s recent disclosure of the set of motives that determine Japanese attitudes and actions. Her study, The Chrysanthemum and the Sword, marks progress in objectivity; it challenges us to dispose of the familiar notions and common prejudices which help fashion our standard images of that people. Generally speaking, any such increase of knowledge is identical with a closer approach to the object we seek to penetrate.
This approach, however, is bound to remain asymptotic for two reasons, one of which lies in the object itself. An individual or a people is not so much a fixed entity as a living organism that develops along unforeseeable lines. Hence the difficulty of self-identification. It is true that the successive images a people create of its own character are as a rule more reliable than those it forms of a foreign people’s; but they are not complete and definite either.
The other obstacle to perfect knowledge, alone important in this context, lies in ourselves. We perceive all objects in a perspective imposed upon us by our environment as well as by certain inalienable traditions. Our concepts of a foreigner necessarily reflect native habits of thought. Much as we try to curtail this subjective factor, as we are indeed forced to do in the interest of increased objectivity, we still view the other individual from a position which is once and for all ours. It is just as impossible for us to settle down in a vacuum as it would be to fuse with him.
Any image we draw up of an individual or a people is the resultant of an objective and a subjective factor. The former cannot grow indefinitely; nor can the latter be completely eliminated. What counts is the ratio between these two factors. Whether our image of a foreign people comes close to true likeness or merely serves as a vehicle of self-expression—that is, whether it is more of a portrait or more of a projection—depends upon the degree to which our urge for objectivity gets the better of naive subjectivity.
The ratio between the objective and the subjective factor varies with the medium of communication. It is evident that within the medium of the printed word objectivity may go the limit. In the radio, also, objective information plays a considerable role, even though it is hampered by various restrictions, most of them inherent in the nature of this mass medium. Yet for all its limitations the radio registers any signal increase of knowledge. I do not doubt, for instance, that the evolution of modern anthropology—resulting from the necessities of psychological warfare and this country’s engagements in international affairs—has been instrumental in bringing about recent radio programs which surveyed living conditions in other countries, and in particular focused on “the character and ideals of the Russian people.”3
And what about the film? Hollywood’s fiction films are commercial products designed for mass consumption at home and, if possible, abroad. The implications of this over-all principle are obvious: Hollywood must try to captivate the masses without endangering its affiliations with vested interests. In view of high production costs, it must try to avoid controversial issues lest box office receipts fall off. What the latter “must” means for the representation of foreigners is classically illustrated by the setback which the Remarque film, All Quiet on the Western Front (1930), suffered in Germany after a few Berlin performances, in December 1930. This film; with its emphasis on the anti-war mood of German soldiers in the years of trench warfare, stirred the Nazis to violent demonstrations which in turn caused the German government to suspend its further screening.4 Similar experiences, made with vaguely anti-Fascist films in neutral countries shortly before World War II, have corroborated the sad truth that foreign peoples are as touchy as domestic groups, professional or otherwise. The film industry therefore “remains afraid of portraying characters or situations in a way which will offend its existing foreign market: why jeopardize a source of revenues?”5
Hollywood, then, is faced with the task of producing films that draw the masses, in particular the American masses. The problem of how it measures up to this task has long since been a subject of discussion. Many holds that Hollywood, with the support of its affiliated chains of movie houses, manages to sell films which do not give the masses what they really want. From this viewpoint it would seem that Hollywood films more often than not stultify and misdirect a public persuaded into accepting them by its own indolence and by overwhelming publicity. I do not believe that such a viewpoint is tenable. Experience has taught us that even totalitarian regimes cannot manipulate public opinion forever; and what holds true for them applies all the more to an industry which despite its monopolistic tendencies still functions within the framework of a competitive society. The film industry is forced by its profit interest to divine the nature of actually existing mass trends and to adjust its products to them. That this necessity leaves a margin for cultural initiative on the part of the industry does not alter the situation. To be sure, American audiences receive what Hollywood wants them to want; but in the long run audience desires, acute or dormant, determine the character of Hollywood films.6
The audiences also determine the way these films picture foreigners. The subjective factor in any such image is more or less identical with the notions American public opinion entertains of the people portrayed. It is therefore highly improbable that a nation popular with the average American will be presented unfavorably; nor should we expect currently unpopular nations to be treated with condoning benevolence. Similarly, screen campaigns for or against a nation are not likely to be launched unless they can feed on strong environmental moods in their favor.
Yet its surrender to such moods need not prevent Hollywood from volunteering information about foreign peoples. It is true that we usually want to understand other nations because of our concern with mutual understanding; but fear and distrust of a people may no less urgently compel us to inquire into the motives behind its aspirations. The desire for knowledge, an essentially independent inner drive, thrives on both antipathy and sympathy. To what extent do Hollywood films satisfy this desire? Or, more specifically: what is the ratio between the subjective and the objective factor in American screen images of foreigners? And has this ratio been stable so far, or are we justified in assuming, for instance, that the images of 1948 surpass those of 1933 in objectivity?
Without anticipating answers, I wish to formulate a principle derived from the all-powerful profit motive. Hollywood’s attitude toward the presentation of any given piece of information ultimately depends on its estimate of how the masses of moviegoers respond to the spread of that information through fiction films. It seems to me important in this connection that the film industry calls itself an entertainment industry a term which, whatever it connotes, does not precisely make one think of films as carriers of knowledge (nor as works of art, for that matter). There has indeed been a widespread tendency not only to equate screen entertainment and relaxation, but to consider anything informative an undesirable admixture. This entertainment formula, championed as late as 1941 in the sophisticated Preston Sturges film Sullivan’s Travels, rests upon the conviction that people want to relax when they go to the movies; and it further implies that the need for relaxation and the quest for knowledge oppose rather than attract each other. Of course, as always with such formulas, they characterize the mental climate without being strictly binding. Many a prewar film has defied the usual Hollywood pattern and has deepened our understanding of the world.
Only since the end of the war have ideological conventions undergone a change; and again this change must be traced to mass moods. Obviously inspired by the general desire for enlightenment in the wake of the war, spokesmen of the industry now advocate films that combine entertainment with information. “Motion pictures,” says Jack L. Warner, “are entertainment—but they go far beyond that.” And he coins the term “honest entertainment” to convey the impression of a Hollywood fighting for truth, democracy, international understanding, etc.7 Eric Johnston, President of the Motion Picture Association, lends his authority to this view. In his statement, The Right To Know—which is none the less pertinent for referring to fiction films and factual films alike—he contends that “the motion picture, as an instrument for the promotion of knowledge and understanding among peoples, stands on the threshold of a tremendous era of expansion.”8
Whether the American motion picture has already trespassed this threshold remains to be seen. On the purely domestic scene it has done so—at least up to a point and temporarily. Attacking social abuses, such films as The Best Years of our Lives (1946), Boomerang (1947), and Gentleman’s Agreement (1947) reveal a progressive attitude which undoubtedly owes much to wartime experiences.9 They still play to full houses, even though political pressures have meanwhile caused the industry to discontinue this trend. Will Hollywood revert to its old entertainment formula? For the time being, we must remain in suspense.
Such foreign peoples as one does see on the American screen do not appear consecutively in films about present-day life. The English were featured in a number of prewar films succeeding each other closely—among them were the above-mentioned Cavalcade (1933), Of Human Bondage (1934), Ruggles of Red Gap (1935), The Lives of a Bengal Lancer (1935), Angel (1937), Lost Horizon (1937), A Yank at Oxford (1938), The Citadel (1938), The Sun Never Sets (1939), We Are Not Alone (1939), Rebecca (1940), Foreign Correspondent (1940), and How Green Was My Valley (1941). No sooner did the United States enter the war than the frequency of topical films about Great Britain and her people increased, as is instanced by Mrs. Miniver (1942), The Pied Piper (1942), Journey for Margaret (1942), The White Cliffs of Dover (1944), etc.
This vogue broke off immediately after the war. To the best of my knowledge, the British postwar generation would be nonexistent in the cinematic medium, were it not for The Paradine Case (1948), a murder story without any bearing on current issues, and the international-minded melodrama Berlin Express, released as late as May 1948. Between 1945 and 1948, there was a gap spanned only by a few films that focused exclusively on the past—Lubitsch’s Cluny Brown (1946) which satirized prewar attitudes, fashionable or otherwise; So Well Remembered (1947), a social-minded chronicle of small-town life between the two wars; Ivy (1947); Moss Rose (1947); and So Evil My Love (1948). The last three were mystery thrillers playing in turn-of-the-century Britain, if not earlier. Though three years may not be a long period, this sustained unconcern for the present still seems a bit strange.
During the ‘thirties, contemporary Russians were less in view than the English, without, however, being wholly neglected. I have already mentioned Ninotchka (1939). Other films of the period were Tovarich (1937), and Comrade X (December, 1940). In the war, when Stalin joined the Allies, Hollywood permitted no one to outdo it in glowing accounts of Russian heroism. Mission to Moscow, Miss V. from Moscow, The North Star, Three Russian Girls, Song of Russia—a veritable springtide of pro-Russian films—flooded the movie houses in 1943 and 1944. Then, exactly as in the case of the English, the Russians disappeared for three years. They disappeared even more completely than the English, for I do not know of a single, halfway important film since Lubitsch’s resurrection of Catherine the Great (A Royal Scandal, 1945) which has dealt with their literature or past. Of course, I discount the “mad Russian,” who reemerged in The Specter of the Rose (1946); this stereotyped favorite of American audiences—usually a Russian-born artist having sought shelter in the West—is on the whole too estranged from the country of his origin to be identified as a Soviet citizen. It is true that Russians were also rare on the prewar screen, but in those days they were not featured in other media either. What makes one wonder at the absence of Soviet Russia on the postwar screen is just the fact of her omnipresence in speech and print at this time. Between 1945 and 1948, the film alone seemed unaware of a mass obsession. That Hollywood behaved true to pattern in thus ignoring the Russians is proven by its equally conspicuous silence about the Nazis in the years preceding 1939. It is not as if Germany had played any noticeable role in American films prior to 1933. Yet precisely in the critical years 1930–1934 two grade-A films turned the spotlight on her—All Quiet on the Western Front and Little Man, What Now? (1934), a screen adaptation of Hans Fallada’s pre-Hitler novel about unemployment in Germany. Hollywood, it appears, had become mildly interested in things German. And what came out of it? During the subsequent years Hitler was a topic everywhere but on the screen. If I am not mistaken, only two films with Germans in them appeared in this interval: The Road Back (1937) and Three Comrades (1938). Both were adapted from novels by Remarque, whose name meant business, and both were laid in the early Weimar Republic, which was dead and buried at the time of their release.
This temporary withdrawal from certain peoples at certain times can be explained only by factors affecting commercial film production. Significantly, prewar Germany as well as postwar Russia provoked impassioned controversy in the United States. Before the war the country was divided into isolationists and interventionists; immediately after the war it heatedly debated the problem of whether the U.S. should be tough or soft in her dealings with the Kremlin. I believe it is this split of public opinion which accounts for Hollywood’s evasiveness in both cases. Hollywood, as I have pointed out earlier, is so sensitive to economic risks that it all but automatically shrinks from touching on anything controversial. Germany and Russia were tabooed as “hot stuff;” and they were hot stuff as long as everybody argued about them and a decisive settlement of this nation-wide strife was not yet in sight. They disappeared, that is, not in spite of their hold on the American mind, but because of it.
There has been no such controversy with regard to Anglo-American relations. Why, then, the scarcity of postwar Britons in Hollywood films? Considering the impact of mass attitudes on film content, this scarcity may well result from the uneasiness with which Americans react to Labor rule in Britain. Their disquiet is understandable, for what is now going on in Britain means a challenge to American belief in free enterprise and its particular virtues. In the United States any discussion of British affairs is therefore likely to touch off an argument about the advantages and disadvantages of the American way of life. But once this kind of argument gets started you never know where it will lead. The whole matter is extremely delicate and involved, and it is for such reasons, I submit, that Hollywood producers currently neglect, perhaps without consciously intending it, the living English in favor of their less problematic ancestors.10
These periods of silence may suddenly come to a close, with mimosa-like shyness yielding to uninhibited outspokenness. In the prewar era, the years 1938/39 marked a turning of the tide. At the very moment when the European crisis reached its height, the American screen first took notice of the Axis powers and their creeds. Blockade (1938), a Walter Wanger production, initiated this trend. It denounced the ruthless bombing of cities during the Spanish civil war, clearly sympathizing with the Loyalist cause which, however, was left unmentioned, as was Franco, the villain in the piece. Hollywood soon overcame these hesitations. The Confessions of a Nazi Spy (1939), a realistic rendering of Nazi activities in the U.S., overtly stigmatized Hitler Germany and all that it stood for. Then came the war, and anti-Nazi films, less realistic than well-intentioned, grew rampant.
During those fateful years 1938/39, other national film industries began to speak up also. The French released Grand Illusion (1938), which resurrected World War I in a pacifistic spirit, and Double Crime in the Maginot Line (1939) whose German characters were indistinct. Even though both these films shirked any direct mention of Nazi Germany, they effectively conjured up her giant shadow. A similar device was used by Eisenstein in his Alexander Nevsky, shown in the U.S. in 1939. In picturing the defeat which 13th century Russia inflicted upon the Teutonic Knights, Eisenstein—and through him Stalin—warned Hitler not to try the old game again.
Shortly after the release of Blockade, John C. Flinn, a Variety correspondent, emphasized Hollywood’s vital interest in its career: “Upon its success financially revolve the plans of several of the major studios heretofore hesitant about tackling stories which treat with subjects of international economic and political controversy.”11 This expert statement sheds light on the motives that prompted the film industry into action. Despite the protests of certain Catholic groups, Blockade was a success financially; and though Hollywood might have felt tempted to produce anti-Nazi films even before Blockade, it did so only after having made fairly sure that they would be accepted on a nation-wide scale. The appearance of Nazis on the screen was connected with the evolution of public opinion in the United States. They appeared when, after the debacle in Spain and Austria’s fall, the time of wavering controversy was practically over. Isolationism, to be sure, persisted; but the whole country bristled with indignation against the Nazis, and there was no longer any doubt that someday the world would have to stop Hitler and his associates. Since this conviction also prevailed in Britain, France, and elsewhere, Hollywood did not risk much in expressing sentiments so universally popular.
What happened in 1939, repeats itself in 1948: after a lull of three to four years, Russians now begin to reappear on the American screen as abruptly as did the Germans. The parallels between The Iron Curtain of May 1948 and The Confession of a Nazi Spy are striking. Like the latter film, this new one is a spy thriller—a pictorial account of the events that led to the discovery, in 1946, of a Russian-controlled spy ring in Canada. Both films are based on scripts by the same author; and both are narrated in documentary fashion. Should these similarities be symptomatic of analogous situations, as I believe they are, then The Iron Curtain, with its avowed hostility toward the Soviet regime, would indicate that American public opinion has come out of the controversial stage in favor of a tough stand on Russia.
For a long time, Great Britain and the United States have been entertaining an alliance founded upon the community of race, language, historical experience, and political outlook. Interchange has been frequent; processes of symbiosis have been going on. To Americans the English are an “in-group” people; they belong, so to speak, to the family, while other peoples—”out-group” peoples—do not. Where such intimate bonds exist, knowledge of each other seems a matter of course. American screen images of Britons might therefore be expected to be true likenesses.
Hollywood has tried hard to justify such expectations. Many American films about the English are drawn from their own novels or stage plays; and the bulk of these films are shot on location, involving genuine mansions, lawns, ‘and London streets. In addition, there is rarely an important English part in an American film that is not assigned to a native Britisher.
This insistence on authenticity and local color benefits films which cover a diversity of subjects: middle-class patriotism (Cavalcade, Mrs. Miniver); Empire glorification (The Lives of a Bengal Lancer, The Sun Never Sets, etc.); Anglo-American relations (Ruggles of Red Gap); upper-class ideology (again Ruggles of Red Gap, then Angel, The White Cliffs of Dover, etc.); sports (A Yank at Oxford); social issues, such as the status of physicians (The Citadel) and of coal miners (How Green Was My Valley), and so on. Strictly personal conflicts prevail in Of Human Bondage and Rebecca; public school life is featured in Goodbye, Mr. Chips (1939), a retrospective film. The wealth of themes engenders a wide range of types. I dare say that, taken together, American films offer a more complete cross-section of the English than they do of any other people. From night club musicians to Kiplingese colonels and from workers to diplomats nearly all strata of the population are presented on some occasion and somehow. Frequent among these types are well-to-do gentlemen and their manservants—a couple of figures forever illustrating the Lord-Butler relationship, which has been so delightfully patterned in Ruggles of Red Gap. Incidentally, in any film about foreigners the minor characters tend to be more true to type than the protagonists, because they are less deliberately constructed.
In short, the English are rendered substantially as befits the prominent place they hold in American traditions. The result is a fairly inclusive image of their national traits, an image which for all its emphasis on snobbish caste spirit permits the audience to catch glimpses of British imperturbability, doggedness, and sportsmanship. The Lives of a Bengal Lancer, which initiated a trend of cloak-and-dagger melodramas—films playing in an India or Africa faintly reminiscent of the Wild West—points up the frontier bravura of English Empire builders and their soldiery.12 The Pied Piper in a highly amusing sequence shows members of a London club indulging in the native penchant for understatement, while German bombers noisily drop their loads.
This many-sided approach further testifies to Hollywood’s concern with the British way of life. Small wonder that several prewar films succeeded in reflecting it faithfully. A model case of objectivity is Cavalcade, the well-known screen version of Noel Coward’s play. Before this film with its English cast went into production, its original director filmed the whole London stage performance of the play so as not to miss any of those minutiae upon which the impression of genuineness depends. Such efforts paid: Cavalcade, according to a report from London, “convinced the most skeptical Englishmen that the American film capital can on occasion produce a much better British picture than any English studio has yet managed to achieve.”13
At this point the problem of the ratio between the objective and the subjective factor arises. Can the latter be neglected in the case of the English? Or, rather, does experience show that in the long run subjective influences—influences exerted by American mass attitudes—win out over that urge for objectivity of which Cavalcade is so impressive an instance? I wish to make it clear from the outset that all the measures Hollywood has taken in the interest of authenticity do not suffice to eliminate distortions. A script may be one hundred per cent British and yet materialize in a film imbued with Hollywood spirit. Nor do views of the Tower or a Tudor castle warrant accuracy; documentary shots, as is proven by many propaganda films and newsreels, can be juxtaposed in such a way that they falsify the very reality which they candidly capture. But are not English actors a guarantee for the truthful representation of English life? They are not, for two reasons. First, the screen appearance of any actor results not only from his own acting, but from the various cinematic devices used in building up his image on the screen, and because of their share in its establishment this image may well express other meanings than those conveyed by the actor himself. Secondly, even though an English actor is under all circumstances an Englishman, he may have to appear in a film so little suggestive of typically English behavior and thought patterns that he finds no opportunity of substantiating them. He will be neutralized within such contexts. In other words, whether or not screen portrayals of a foreign people are convincing does not solely depend upon their being enacted by native actors. What counts most is the whole film’s susceptibility to the characteristics of that people.
The influence of American preconceptions shows in the selection of English character traits. Hollywood films establish a hierarchy among these traits in which snobbishness, as I have indicated, figures foremost. Inseparable from class-mindedness, snobbishness pervades the servant’s quarters in numerous films, confers upon screen aristocrats an air of inimitable superiority, surrounds as a palpable halo all those Englishmen who by provision of the plots defend advanced colonial outposts or mingle with Americans and Frenchmen, and makes itself felt everywhere not only in the manner of speaking but at decisive turning-points of dialogue. It is the one British characteristic which American movies never tire of acknowledging, ridiculing, condoning or repudiating, according to the views expressed in them.
No doubt this trait actually exists. The English writer Margaret Cole, who is all against snobbishness, nevertheless admits that much in her recent Harper’s article: “The British have a pretty lively sense of birth and upbringing: they like titles and honors, and they like to know people who have titles and honors … they are, most of them, pretty good snobs.”14 Yet this does not mean that the English are primarily snobs. Like any other people, they have a complex character structure; snobbishness therefore need not appear as their main trait. As a matter of fact, it could easily be shown that the films of different nations have conceived of Englishmen in quite different ways.15 Take the German cinema: for all their surface similarities, the German and the American screen Britons are by no means counterparts. Such German peacetime films as dealt with the English at all paid tribute grudgingly to their way of life. Among the traits featured, however, correctness and decency (e.g. of British navy officers) were more conspicuous than snobbishness—a trait whose social implications eluded a people which had never had a society in the Western sense. And when war came the Germans expressed their pent-up resentments against the British Empire in films which made no bones about the ruthlessness of the English and about their alleged hypocrisy. The latter characteristic, passed off as an English cardinal vice by the Germans, is practically nonexistent in American films.
Any nation, it appears, sees other peoples in a perspective determined by its experience of them; and, of course, its cinema features those character traits of theirs which are an integral part of this experience. Hence the emphasis on English caste spirit in Hollywood films. To Americans this trait stands out among ·others because it affected them deeply under British rule. And since nations, like individuals, tend to build on their early impressions, the mass of Americans, among them swarms of Irish immigrants, took it for granted that the typical Briton is essentially a caste-proud snob. They reacted to him in two opposite ways—a further symptom of the imprint which his conduct, or, rather, their conception of it, had left on them. On the one side, they condemned British snobbishness for offending their sense of equality; on the other, they admired and imitated it. American snobbery contributes much to stabilizing the English snob on the screen; his recurrent image is both a reflection of and a protest against native cravings for nobility, Oxford, and authentic manners. This is confirmed by Ruggles of Red Gap, which mingles gentle gibes at the foreign idol with a solid satire of its Middle-West worshipers. Another case in point is Preston Sturges’ brilliant comedy Lady Eve (1941). Even though this film does not include any Britishers, it does show a cute American girl who reconquers her lover by posing as Lady Eve, the daughter of an English aristocrat.
The American screen image of the English is more or less standardized. True as this image is to reality, as a stereotype it has also a life of its own, a life independent of that reality. The English snob, as he appears in Hollywood films, is a figure which has in some degree drifted away from its original to join those mythological figures that people the world of American imagination. Whether angry at him or fond of him, Americans consider this kind of Briton one of theirs. He “belongs”; like Huckleberry Finn or Mickey Mouse, he is part of their universe.
This permanent preoccupation with British snobbishness is not the only subjective element in Hollywood’s portrayal of the English. Other influences, equally instrumental in its composition, arise from changes on the domestic scene. In prewar days, when relations between the United States and Great Britain developed along traditional lines, there was no reason why these changes should interfere with an objective rendering of Britons. Domestic mass desires asserted themselves merely in the preference given to such film subjects as were likely to draw American audiences at a specific moment. Cavalcade was particularly well-timed. This film, with its unflinching belief in Britain’s greatness, appeared at the depths of the Depression, a comfort to all those Americans who despaired of the predicament they were in. Many wept when seeing the film, and more than one reviewer declared it to be a tribute to what is best in all national spirits. Two years later, Ruggles of Red Gap, a comedy about the molding of a class-conscious English butler into a free American, struck that tone of self-confidence which by then filled the air. And so it goes. It would, by the way, be tempting to inquire into the causes of the enormous popularity which films about British imperialism enjoyed for a stretch of years. That they had a definite bearing on domestic issues is evident even in their casting: the elder colonels in The Lives of a Bengal Lancer and Gunga Din fell to the charge of English actors, while the young protagonists, heroes or cowards, were played by stars genuinely American.
Once the war was on, national exigencies encroached on the tendency toward objectivity. American public opinion endorsed the war effort, and Britain was now an Ally. For these reasons Hollywood could no longer afford to approach the English in that spirit of impartiality which is indispensable for an understanding of others. Rather, it was faced with the task of endearing everything British to the American masses. The task was not simply to represent the English, but to make them seem acceptable even to those sections of the population whose pro-British feelings were doubtful.
Significantly, most Hollywood films about Britain at war attempt to weaken the existing antipathies against English snobbishness, thus reaffirming American obsession with this trait. Mrs. Miniver, representative of the whole trend, shows wartime Britain undergo processes of democratization tending to transform her national character. In this film, as a reviewer judiciously points out, “even Lady Beldon, the aged, local autocrat, finally realizes that her class-conscious, if gracious, civilization has been forged into the practical democracy of an entire country united against the enemy.”16 The Pied Piper features an old English gentleman whose noble impulses increasingly get the better of his outward standoffishness; The White Cliffs of Dover, a sentimental retrospect which tries to enlist audience sympathies for British upper-class people, ends with hints of their readiness to conform to more democratic standards. It is not that such motifs had been entirely omitted in prewar films; but during the war they grew into leitmotifs, coloring all films of the period and serving as their very justification.
Produced in response to powerful domestic urges, these films, I assume, would have misrepresented English reality even if they had been shot on location. To what extent they actually distorted it can be inferred from the criticism with which they were received in Britain itself. Mrs. Miniver, though recognized as a laudable American tribute to English war heroism, was nevertheless blamed for “its faults and frequent air of English unreality.”17 Of The White Cliffs of Dover the London Times said that it “misses the tones and accents of the country in which the action passes.”18 And with regard to Random Harvest, another Hollywood wartime production, a polite reviewer remarked that “Greer Garson and Ronald Colman act away the frequent obtrusion of error in English detail and behavior.”19
The war over, one might have expected Hollywood to resume its relatively objective approach to contemporary Britons. Yet it preferred, and still prefers, to ignore their existence. Nothing proves more conclusively the overpowering effect of domestic influences in the field of screen entertainment. Now that the English in some respects really live up to the image drawn up of them in all American war films class mindedness is on the decline and snobbery less domineering—it would seem natural for Hollywood to acknowledge what it praised only yesterday. Instead, it resolutely turns its back on Britain, for reasons at which I have made a guess in earlier contexts. During the war, folks at home took delight in a Lady Beldon who proved herself a convinced democrat; at present, the peculiar flavor of English democracy so little pleases many Americans that the Lady Beldons are being held incommunicado until further notice.
The meaning of this temporary blackout—all the more striking in view of the influx into America of English films about postwar life in Britain—is enhanced by those Hollywood productions which introduce British characters of the past. They not only reestablish the stereotype of the English snob (Cluny Brown), but draw on other familiar prewar patterns as well. All of them could have been made before 1941. In thus combining disregard of the present with uninhibited rendering of the past, Hollywood follows a rule of conduct which it has already practiced before. Nor is this treatment of foreign peoples unknown to other national film industries: at a time when the German pre-Hitler cinema was completely oblivious of Soviet Russia, it elaborated profusely on the blessings of the Czarist regime. I have reason to believe that in all such cases the emergence of films about the past of a people betrays discontent with its present state of affairs. What makes these films into vehicles of indirect criticism is the fact of their appearance at a moment when any direct mention of that people is strictly avoided. They manifest apprehensions not so much through their content as their sheer existence. Only occasionally do they come into the open, picturing past events for the thinly veiled purpose of dealing with present ones. In Alexander Nevsky the eyes that gleam through the visors of the Teutonic Knights are unmistakably the eyes of contemporary Nazis.
In sum, the objective factor in American screen images of the English is extremely vulnerable. Much as the age-old intimacy of Anglo-American relations favors its growth, the impact of subjective influences invariably tends to stunt it. Domestic needs and mass desires have on more than one occasion caused Hollywood to portray the English inadequately or not to portray them at all, which amounts to the same thing. There is no progress of knowledge noticeable as these portrayals succeed each other-in fact, Cavalcade, released as early as 1933, has probably never been surpassed in objectivity. Everything, it appears, hinges on market necessities which may or may not permit Hollywood to reflect the English closely.
In their America in Midpassage the Beards mention the success of the first Russian Five-Year Plan among those foreign events which augmented American anxieties in the spring of 1933· “Still Russia was far off,” they remark before turning to the more stirring repercussions of Hitler’s rise to power, “and could be discounted as a bit oriental in its ways and values.”20
To Americans the Russians are an “out-group” people indeed. There is a pronounced lack of traditions common to both countries, and there has never been an intermingling of their nationals as in the case of the English. The chasm separating the two countries is deepened by the antagonism between their regimes—an antagonism so laden with dynamite that it predetermines all popular notions Americans and Russians hold of each other. Unsustained by experience and inevitably biased, these notions are outright clichés. The average American has incorporated the figure of the “mad Russian” into the collection of his pet stereotypes; he knows that Russians are fond of music, ballet, and vodka. And, of course, innumerable editorials and the like have impressed upon him fixed concepts of Bolshevism as something with collective farms, secret police, and purges. Most of it is sheer hearsay, however true.
Hollywood, always inclined to capitalize on existing clichés, is not in the best of positions to breathe life into them. For obvious reasons American films about Russia are studio-made; and because of the scarcity of Russian actors in this country their native characters are as a rule assigned to Hollywood stars or to German actors who seem to have a knack for portraying Russians. In The Last Command (1928) Emil Jannings was a very convincing Czarist general. I have pointed out that even films with English actors in the cast may misrepresent the English; conversely, actors in the roles of foreigners need not under all circumstances miss the essentials. Nevertheless, it remains true that the reliance on outside portrayals in imitation settings thwarts rather than facilitates an objective rendering of other peoples.
Such scattered Hollywood films about contemporary Russia as did appear between 1927 and 1934 frowned upon the Soviet Union with an air of grave concern. Most of them were laid in, or referred to, the early days of the Russian Revolution when everything was still fluid. Even though they did not pass over the disastrous abuses of Czarist rule—how could they?—yet they managed to make you feel gloomy about the victory of a cause so obviously barbarian. I am thinking of Mockery (1927), The Tempest (1928), The Last Command, and British Agent (1934). Except for Sternberg’s Last Command, each of these films culminated in a romance between a Russian Red and his, or her, class enemy, which drove home the humanly destructive effects of Bolshevist class hatred. Forgotten Commandment (1932), “a sermon on the evils of Soviet Land,”21 accused Russia of having forsaken Christianity. Of these productions only the Sternberg film and perhaps British Agent had some merits. The Beards are right: “Russia was far off …”
She did not come nearer after her recognition by President Roosevelt late in 1933. Yet American attitudes changed. After a period of silence filled in by several films which involved Catherine the Great, Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina, and Dostoievsky’s Crime and Punishment (like the current films about the English past these may have conveyed polite discontent with the stubborn survival of Russian Communism), this change showed in Hollywood’s transition from serious criticism to critical comedy. Tovarich, I believe, was the first film to endorse the fact of political recognition by substituting light skirmishes for heavy attacks. Hostilities continued, but they adjusted themselves to the improved relations with the Soviet Union which after all was here to stay. Lubitsch’s Ninotchka, with Garbo in the title role, also marked a precarious rapprochement. This amusing piece of raillery which showed Marxist-trained Russians succumbing to the frivolous attractions of the West, viewed Soviet life with the condescension of an adult who watches fledgelings romp. It was a sort of shoulder-patting; why not finally grow up, the film seemed to ask. Its success bred other films in this vein: He Stayed for Breakfast, “a gay spoof of the Communistic camaraderie that flourished in Paris before the war,”22 and Comrade X which, laid in Moscow, equally jeered at the conversion of a rabid Communist. Released in 1940, both films not only lacked Lubitsch’s finesse, but struck a tone of poignant aggressiveness absent in his Ninotchka. Of Comrade X, Bosley Crowther says: “… seldom has a film … satirized a nation and its political system with such grim and malicious delight as does this … comedy.”23
The English characters in American war films about Britain still resembled their predecessors of a few years before, but no such resemblances connected the intrepid Russian woman fighter glorified by Hollywood between 1942 and 1944 with the yielding Ninotchka so popular shortly before. This was not simply a shift of emphasis as in the case of the English, but a radical change of scene, with Stalin becoming Uncle Joe and collective farming a source of happiness. I scarcely need elaborate on characters and situations in Mission to Moscow, The North Star, and so on. All these films sprang from the overwhelming desire, on the part of the home front, to keep Russia in the war. The surprising thing is their unconcern for continuity: they idolized what had been condemned in times of peace, or winked at it unashamedly. It was a complete turnabout.
In thus wooing Russia for reasons of domestic self-interest, Hollywood ignored its otherwise guiding rule of leaving controversial issues untouched. Opposition against the Soviet regime was too stable a factor of American public opinion to be eliminated by the necessities of the war. Subdued as it was, it continued to smolder. This accounts for the criticism which in particular Mission to Moscow with its indulgent references to the Moscow trials met from diverse quarters. And about The North Star, which in its opening scenes extolled the insouciant life of Russian villagers before 1941, the Daily News wrote that this film is more Communistic “than the Russians themselves who have never pretended that prewar Russia was a musical-comedy paradise.”24
Now that the spell of amnesia from which Hollywood suffered in the postwar years is over, we are witnessing another turnabout. Gone are the brave Russian women fighters, the happy villagers, and the democratic allures of the rulers. In their places, somber bureaucrats, counterparts of the Nazis, spread an atmosphere of oppression. This at least is the way The Iron Curtain pictures Soviet officials—they appear as ruthless totalitarians obeyed by devout slaves. And the only “good” Russian is a man who so firmly believes in the superior value of Western civilization that he deserts Communism and betrays his country. Similar types were also advertised in American prewar comedies; but unlike Ninotchka, The Iron Curtain avoids any satirical overtones that might weaken the impact of its accusations. Other current films draw no less determinedly on the anti-Communist sentiments of American audiences. In The Fugitive (late 1947)—a deliberately fantastic film with exotic settings—humble priests are wantonly persecuted by all-powerful authorities which everybody is free to identify as Communists. The Russian black-market racketeer in To the Victor (April 1948) is no endearing figure either. And we may soon see some more anti-Soviet films; two or three have already been scheduled for production. This general insistence on toughness, however, seems to be slightly mitigated by the fearful prospect of another war: Berlin Express and A Foreign Affair (June 1948) both laid in Germany, indulge in a relatively amiable approach to their Russian characters, thus intimating that we should not give up hope for an understanding after all.
All this illustrates Hollywood’s unconcern for Russian reality. Unlike the English characters in Hollywood films which at least give one a taste, however faint, of genuine life, American screen portrayals of Russians conform to what Americans imagine far-away Russians to be like. Even Russian-born actors are strangely colorless in plots based upon such subjective concepts; and, of course, Garbo in Ninotchka always remains Garbo in the guise of Ninotchka. The objective factor in these portrayals is negligible—they are not experienced, but constructed. Hence their remoteness from the originals they pretend to portray. Commenting on The North Star, Archer Winsten, one of the most observant New York film critics, states that its characters are “single-plane cutouts rather than those deeply modelled characterizations of the best Russian films …”25 He might have added that the many Russian films shown in the United States have not in the slightest degree stimulated Hollywood to relinquish its home-bred notions of Russia.
These notions are of a political nature. All Hollywood films about Russia raise topical issues, and many of them, I presume, would have never been produced were it not for the purpose of externalizing American attitudes toward the Soviet regime. This explains why the characters in them are so poorly instrumented. As compared with English screen figures, Hollywood-made Russians are sheer abstractions. Instead of being introduced for their own sake as are the English in many cases, they merely serve to personify pros and cons in the ever-fluctuating debate on Russian Communism. It is as if they were drawn from editorials. They resemble marionettes, and you cannot help seeing the strings by which they are pulled.
And finally, these marionettes lack the relative stability of English characters. The English snob has survived the war, while Ninotchka was popular only for a transient moment. Her ephemeral vogue is symptomatic of the frequent, occasionally hectic changes which Russian characters undergo in American films. They succeed each other with a disregard for psychological consistency which again testifies to their function of conveying domestic views of Russia. In 1941, when these views changed so abruptly that films in keeping with the latest developments were not yet available, Hollywood tried to adjust an existing film to the new situation. Under the, heading: “Whitewashing Reds,” Variety, of October 22, 1941, published the following notice: “Reflecting the changed public opinion in this country towards Russia, Metro has added an explanatory foreword on the film Comrade X to make clear that any spoofing of Russians in the picture was entirely intended as good clean fun.” Metro simply was loath to shelve Comrade X, a film released only a few months before Hitler’s invasion of Russia; yet this grim satire of Soviet life could not be kept in circulation unless it was made to appear as a meek banter among friends.
Russian characters in American films are projections rather than portraits. Chimerical figures, they unhesitatingly change with the political exigencies of the moment. Russia is far off.
The film industries of other democracies, I assume, behave in much the same way as Hollywood. Fiction films are mass entertainment everywhere, and what information they include is more or less a by-product. Any national cinema yields to the impact of subjective influences in portraying foreigners; these portrayals, that is, are strongly determined by such audience desires and political exigencies as currently prevail on the domestic scene. There are different degrees of subjectivity, though: peoples intimately connected by common experiences can be expected to form more objective screen images of each other than they do of peoples with whom they have little or nothing in common.
In other words, images of “in-group” peoples surpass those of “out-group” peoples in reliability. But even they are halfway reliable only as long as public opinion in the country of their origin does not interfere with their relatively unbiased approach. And under the pressure of alienating developments this may happen at any moment, as is instanced by Hollywood’s conspicuous neglect of postwar Britons. On the whole, screen portrayals of foreigners are rarely true likenesses; more often than not they grow out of the urge for self-assertion rather than the thirst for knowledge, so that the resultant images reflect not so much the mentality of the other people as the state of mind of their own. International understanding is in its infancy.
Or, rather, does it begin to show signs of growing up? I have not yet mentioned a new international film trend which seems to justify Mr. Johnston’s contention quoted above that the motion picture is on the point of becoming “an instrument for the promotion of knowledge and understanding among peoples.” This trend, a spontaneous reaction to the effects of the war, originates in Europe. Representative of it are the somewhat sentimental Swiss pictures Marie Louise and The Last Chance, and the two Rossellini films, Open City and Paisan—wartime and postwar semi-documentaries much acclaimed by American audiences. In a similar vein is The Search (1948), a Metro-sponsored film about European war orphans which has been made by the producer of The Last Chance and his associates in collaboration with a Hollywood director. Hollywood seems to be interested in this genre.
It is by no means a new genre. D. W. Griffith, great innovator as he was, developed some of its inherent potentialities, and his ideas were followed up by Eisenstein and Pudovkin in their classic screen epics—masterful blends of reportage and fiction, matter-of-fact statements and emotional appeals. What is new in the most recent semi-documentaries is their content: a changed outlook on the world which, of course, entails changes of cinematic approach. All these films denounce Fascist lust for power and race hatred; and whatever they picture—Nazis torturing their enemies, scenes of heroic resistance, abandoned children, indescribable misery in bombed-out cities—is rendered with profound compassion for the tortured, the killed, the despondent. They are films with a message. They not only record the frightful encounters of persecutors and victims, masters and slaves, but glorify the bonds of love and sympathy that even now amidst lies, ruins, and horrors connect people of different nations. Their goal is mutual understanding between the peoples of the world.
I do not know a single prewar film which is so deliberately international as is any of these semi-documentaries. All of them reflect, in loosely knit episodes, the vicissitudes of the war, featuring chance meetings between soldiers and civilians of diverse countries. German refugees join company with a British officer; an American G.I. makes love to an Italian girl; undernourished French children regain health in Switzerland. And most of these figures are fashioned with a minimum of subjectivity on the part of the film makers. Instead of serving as outlets for domestic needs, they seem to be elicited from reality for no purpose other than that of mirroring it. They tend to increase our knowledge of other nations out of an overwhelming nostalgia for international cooperation.
The whole trend, provided it is one, proves that screen portrayals of foreigners need not under all circumstances degenerate into stereotypes and projections. At this point the problem arises of what can be done to improve these images. It is a vital problem in view of the influence which entertainment films exert on the masses. There is no doubt that the screen images of other people help weaken or strengthen popular interest in mutual understanding.
This does not contradict the fact, emphasized throughout my study, that entertainment films on their part are strongly influenced by actually prevailing mass desires, latent tendencies of public opinion. Such desires and tendencies are more or less inarticulate, and do not materialize unless they are forced out of their pupa state; they must be identified and formulated to come into their own. Film industries everywhere, as I have mentioned earlier, are therefore faced with the task of divining audience expectations at any particular moment. Sometimes they miss their opportunities. The response which the Swiss and Italian semi-documentaries have found in the United States, for thematic rather than for aesthetic reasons, reveals a disposition in their favor on the part of American audiences which Hollywood has hitherto failed to recognize. On the other hand, Hollywood films occasionally react to well-nigh intangible emotional and social constellations with such a promptness that they seem to create desires out of nothing, especially in the dimension of taste. Characteristically, the trade has coined the term “sleeper” for films which are believed to be flops and, once released, prove themselves as hits. Film making involves constant experimenting—and many surprises.
What matters most in this context, then, is the essential ambiguity of mass dispositions. Because of their vagueness they usually admit of diverse interpretations. People are quick to reject things that they do not agree with, while they feel much less sure about the true objects of their leanings and longings. There is, accordingly, a margin left for film producers who aim at satisfying existing mass desires. Pent-up escapist needs, for instance, may be relieved in many different ways. Hence the permanent interaction between mass dispositions and film content. Each popular film conforms to certain popular wants; yet in conforming to them it inevitably does away with their inherent ambiguity. Any such film evolves these wants in a specific direction, confronts them with one among several possible meanings. Through their very definiteness films thus determine the nature of the inarticulate from which they emerge.
Once again, how can screen images of other peoples be improved? Since film producers, for all their dependence on current main trends of opinion and sentiment, retain some freedom of action, it may well be that they will find a more objective approach to foreign characters to be in their own interest. Hollywood is presently undergoing a crisis which challenges producers to probe into the minds of weary moviegoers, and documentary techniques, much-favored in Hollywood since Boomerang, lend themselves perfectly to objective portrayals. And has not The Search been a success? There is no reason why Hollywood should not explore this success and try its hand at films, semi-documentaries or not, which in however indirect a manner serve the cause of one world. U.S. audiences may even welcome a comprehensive rendering of Russian problems, or of life in Labor-governed Britain.
Or, of course, they may not. And Hollywood (any national film industry, for that matter) has some reason to believe that in the long run it knows best what spectators look out for in the movie houses. I doubt whether it will follow suggestions inconsistent with its estimate of audience reactions. Therefore, a campaign for better screen portrayals of foreigners—portrayals which are portraits rather than projections carries weight only if the motion picture industry is made to realize that the broad masses care about such portrayals. This accounts for the primary importance of mass education. Unless organizations such as UNESCO can stir up a mass desire for international understanding, prospects for the cooperation of film producers are slim. The Last Chance and Paisan come from countries where this desire was overwhelmingly strong. Can it be spread and sustained? Films help change mass attitudes on condition that these attitudes have already begun to change.
NOTES
1. Films of fact—documentaries and newsreels—will not be considered here, even though they frequently picture foreigners and events abroad. To exclude them is not to belittle their significance as a means of conveying information, but is simply an acknowledgment of the fact that all but disappear in the mass of fiction films. Except perhaps for transitory wartime vogue, films of fact still belong among sideshows, at least in the U.S.
2. Professor Robert H. Ball, of Queens College, is presently preparing a survey of innumerable American and European screen versions of Shakespearean plays. In it he plans to comment on national differences between these versions as well as on changes have undergone in each country with the passing of time.
3. You and the Russians: A Series of Five Programs Presented on the Columbia Broadcasting System, a pamphlet issued by CBS. The programs were broadcast in November 1947.
4. Siegfried Kracauer, From Caligari to Hitler: A Psychological History of the German Film (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1947), 206.
5. Leonard W. Doob, Public Opinion and Propaganda (New York: Henry Holt, 1948), 507.
6. For the whole argument, see Kracauer, From Caligari to Hitler, 5–6.
7. Jack L. Warner, “What Hollywood Isn’t,” publicity sheet issued by Hollywood Citizen News and Advertiser, 1946.
8. Motion Picture Letter (issued by the Public Information Committee of the Motion Picture Industry) 5, no. 6 (June 1946).
9. See Kracauer, “Those Movies with a Message,” Harper’s Magazine, June 1948, 567–72.
10. More immediate reasons for Hollywood’s conduct may be found in the “cold war” between the American and British film industries and also in the gloomy aspect of life in Britain, hardly attractive to a screen infatuated with glamor. But what weight these reasons carry accrues to them from the atmospheric pressures on the political scene.
11. John C. Flinn, “Film Industry Watching ‘Blockade’ as B.O. Cue on Provocative Themes,” Variety, June 22, 1938.
12. Other films in this vein: The Charge of the Light Brigade (1936), Gunga Din (1939), The Sun Never Sets, etc.
13. Ernest Marshall, “Featured Players and Costly Set …,” New York Times, April 9, 1933 (quoted from a clipping which does not include the rest of the title).
14. Margaret Cole, “How Democratic Is Britain?,” Harper’s Magazine, July 1948, 106.
15. It even seems that the images which one and the same nation forms of a foreign people in different media of mass communication are far from concurring with each other. In American radio comedies, as Mr. Oscar Katz of Columbia Broadcasting System has informed me, the English are typecast as dull-witted fellows unable to understand a joke.
16. “Mrs. Miniver’s War,” Newsweek, June 15, 1942.
17. Evelyn Russel, “The Quarter’s Films,” Sight and Sound 2, no. 43 (Winter 1942): 69.
18. Lewis Gannett, “British Critics’ Storm Lashes White Cliffs,” New York Herald Tribune, August 20, 1944.
19. Evelyn Russel, “The Quarter’s Films,’’ Sight and Sound 12, no. 45 (Summer 1943): 17.
20. Charles A. Beard and Mary R. Beard, America in Midpassage, Vol. 3: The Rise of American Civilization (New York: Macmillan, 1941), 201.
21. “It Isn’t the Screen; It’s the Story,” New York World Telegram, June 4, 1932.
22. Quoted from Kate Cameron’s review of this film in the New York Daily News, August 3, 1940.
23. Quoted from Bosley Crowther’s review of this film in the New York Times, December 26, 1940.
24. Quoted from Kate Cameron’s review of this film in the New York Daily News, November 5, 1943.
25. Quoted from Archer Winsten’s review of this film in the New York Post, November 5, 1943.