by Tony Judt
American domination of post-war European cinema did not come about through the vagaries of popular taste alone, however. There was a political context: ‘positive’ American films flooded into Italy in time for the pivotal 1948 elections; Paramount was encouraged by the State Department to re-issue Ninotchka (1939) that year to help get out the anti-Communist vote. Conversely, Washington requested that John Ford’s Grapes of Wrath (made in 1940) be held back from distribution in France: its unfavorable portrayal of Depression-era America might be exploited by the French Communist Party. In general, American films were part of America’s appeal, and as such significant assets in the cultural Cold War. Only intellectuals were likely to be sufficiently moved by Sergei Eisenstein’s depiction of Odessa in the Battleship Potemkin to translate their aesthetic appreciation into political affinity; but everyone—intellectuals included—could appreciate Humphrey Bogart.
However, American cinema’s drive into Europe was above all prompted by economic considerations. US films had always been exported to Europe and made money there. But after World War Two American producers, squeezed between falling domestic cinema attendance and the rising cost of film-making, pressed especially hard for access to European markets. European governments, by contrast, were more than ever reluctant to open up their home market to American products: the local film industry, still a significant factor in Britain and Italy especially, needed protection against American ‘dumping’; and dollars were too scarce and valuable to be spent on importing American films.
As early as 1927 the UK Parliament had passed a law instituting a quota system, under which 20 percent of all films released in Britain by 1936 had to be British made. After World War Two the British Government’s goal was to set this quota at 30 percent for 1948. The French, Italians and Spanish all pursued similar or even more ambitious objectives (the German film industry, of course, was in no position to demand such protection). But heavy lobbying by Hollywood kept State Department pressure on European negotiators, and agreement to allow entry for US films was part of every major bipartite trade deal or loan agreement reached by the US and its European allies in the first post-war decade.
Thus, under the terms of the Blum-Byrnes accords of May 1946, the French government very reluctantly reduced its protectionist quota from 55 percent French-made films per annum to 30 percent—with the result that within a year domestic film production was halved. The British Labour Government similarly failed to keep out US imports. Only Franco succeeded in restricting US film imports into Spain (despite an attempted ‘boycott’ of the Spanish market by US producers from 1955 to 1958), in large measure because he had no need to respond to public opinion or anticipate the political fall-out of his decisions. But even in Spain, as we have seen, American movies vastly outnumbered home-grown products.
The Americans knew what they were doing: when European governments after 1949 took to taxing cinema receipts in order to subsidize domestic film producers, American producers began investing directly in foreign productions, their choice of European venue for the making of a film or group of films often depending on the level of local ‘domestic’ subsidy then available. In time, then, European governments found themselves indirectly subsidizing Hollywood itself, via local intermediaries. By 1952, 40 percent of the US film industry’s revenue was generated overseas, most of it in Europe. Six years later that figure would stand at 50 percent.
As a result of American domination of the European market, the European films of this period are not always the most reliable guide to European filmgoers’ experience or sensibilities. The British viewer especially was quite likely to form a sense of contemporary Englishness as much from Hollywood’s presentation of England as from his or her own direct experience. It is a matter of some note that among the films of the forties, Mrs Miniver (1942)—a very English tale of domestic fortitude and endurance, of middle-class reticence and perseverance, set symptomatically around the disaster at Dunkirk where all these qualities were taken to be most on display—was a pure product of Hollywood. Yet for the English generation that first saw it the film would long remain the truest representation of national memory and self-image.
What made American films so appealling, beyond the glamour and lustre that they brought to the gray surroundings in which they were viewed, was their ‘quality’. They were well-made, usually on a canvas far beyond the resources of any European producer. They were not, however, ‘escapist’ in the manner of 1930s ‘screwball’ comedies or romantic fantasies. Indeed, some of the most popular American films of the late forties were (as later continental admirers would dub them) ‘film noir’. Their setting might be a detective story or social drama, but the mood—and cinematographic texture—were darker and more sombre than American films of earlier decades.
It was Europeans who were often more likely to make escapist films at this time— like the frothy German romances of the early fifties, set in fairy-tale landscapes of the Black Forest or Bavarian Alps, or British-made lightweight genre comedies like Piccadilly Incident (1946), Spring in Park Lane (1948) or Maytime in Mayfair (1949), all made by Herbert Wilcox, set in London’s fashionable (and comparatively undamaged) West End, and starring Anna Neagle, Michael Wilding or Rex Harrison as witty debutantes and capricious aristocrats. Their no-less-forgettable Italian and French equivalents were usually updated costume dramas, with peasants and aristocrats occasionally replaced by mechanics or businessmen.
The best European films of the post-war decade—those that later viewers can most readily appreciate—inevitably dealt in one way or another with the war. The Liberation saw a brief spate of ‘Resistance’ films—Peleton d’execution (1945), Le Jugement dernier (1945), and La Bataille du Rail (1946) in France; Roma: città aperta (1945), Paisan (1946), and Un Giorno della vita (1946) in Italy—in all of which a moral chasm separates heroic resisters from craven collaborators and brutal Germans. These were closely followed by a group of films set in the rubble (literal and spiritual) of Berlin: Roberto Rosselini’s Germania anno zero (1947); A Foreign Affair (1948)—American but by the Austrian émigré director Billy Wilder; and Murderers Are Among Us (1946) by Wolfgang Staudte, notable in its time as the only German film to even begin to engage the moral implications of Nazi atrocities (but in which the word ‘Jew’ is never spoken).
Three of these films, Open City, Paisan and Germania anno zero were by Roberto Rossellini. Together with Vittorio De Sica, who directed Sciuscià (1946), Bicycle Thieves (1948) and Umberto D (1952), Rossellini was responsible for the cycle of neo-realist films made in the years 1945-52 that propelled Italian filmmakers to the front rank of international cinema. Like one or two of the contemporary English comedies made at the Ealing Studios, notably Passport to Pimlico (1949), the neo-realist films took the damage and destruction of war, especially in the cities, as the setting and in some measure the subject for post-war cinema. But even the best of the English films never approached the sombre humanism of the Italian master-pieces.
The simple ‘verities’ of these films reflect not so much the European world as it then was as that same world passed through the grid of wartime memories and myths. Workers, the undamaged countryside, above all young children (boys especially) stand for something good and uncorrupted and real—even in the midst of urban destruction and destitution—when set against false values of class, wealth, greed, collaboration, luxe et volupté. For the most part Americans are absent (except for the GIs having their shoes shined in the eponymous Sciuscià, or the posters of Rita Hayworth that appear in Bicycle Thieves, juxtaposed to the impoverished bill poster himself); this is a Europe of Europeans, living on the half-built, half-destroyed margins of their cities, filmed almost as documentary (and owing something, therefore, to documentary film-making experience gained with armies during the war). Like the world of post-war Europe itself they disappear after 1952—though neo-realism had a kind of curious half-after life in Spain, where Luis Garcia Berlanga directed Bienvenido Mister Marshall in 1953 and Juan
Antonio Bardem made Death of a Cyclist three years later.
Like other amusements of its era, cinema-going was a collective pleasure. In small Italian towns the weekly film would be watched and commented on by most of the population, a public entertainment publicly discussed. In England, at Saturday morning shows for children, songs were flashed on the screen, with the audience encouraged to sing along in harmony with a little white ball that bounced from word to word. One such song from around 1946 is recalled in a memoir of childhood in post-war South London:
We come along on Saturday morning
Greeting everybody with a smile.
We come along on Saturday morning
Knowing it’s well worthwhile.
As members of the Odeon we all intend to be
Good citizens when we grow up
And champions of the Free.79
The didactic tone was not representative—at least not in so overt a form—and would disappear within a few years. But the ingenuous, old-fashioned note nicely captures the moment. Popular workingmen’s recreations like pigeon-raising, speed-way and greyhound racing reached their peak in these years before entering upon a steady decline that accelerated from the later 1950s. Their roots in late-Victorian times could be seen in the sort of headgear worn by spectators: the beret (France) and flat workingmen’s cap (England) both became popular around the 1890s and were still the norm in 1950. Boys still dressed like their grandfathers, except for the ubiquitous short trousers.
Dancing, too, was popular, in large part thanks to the American GIs, who introduced swing and be-bop which were widely performed at dance halls and night-clubs and popularized by radio (few could afford record-players before the mid-1950s and the juke-box had not yet killed off live dance bands). The generation gap of the next decade was hardly yet in evidence. Christian Dior’s ‘New Look’ of February 1947—an aggressively indulgent style meant to contrast with wartime shortages of cloth, with ankle-length skirts, stuffed ‘leg of mutton’ shoulders and a plethora of bows and pleats—was favored, where they could afford it, by women of all ages; external appearance was still a function of class (and income) rather than age.
There were, of course, inter-generational tensions. During the war, Americaninfluenced‘zoot suits’ were worn by London spivs and Parisian ‘zazous’ alike, much to the appalled disapproval of their elders; and in the later forties the enthusiasm among bohemians and intellectuals for the duffle-coat, an adaptation of what had until then been the traditional outerwear of Belgian fishermen, hinted at the coming fashion among the young for dressing down rather than up. In the ultra-fashionable Parisian nightclub Le Tabou, which opened in April 1947, sartorial permissiveness was treated with great seriousness, while a French film of 1949, Rendezvous de Juillet, makes much of the spoilt younger generation’s lack of gravitas: at lunch, the conventional father of a traditional bourgeois household is appalled at the behavior of his youngest son, above all by his insistence on eating without a tie.
But all this was the small change of adolescent revolt, hardly new. Most people of all ages in post-war Europe were chiefly concerned with making do. At the beginning of the 1950s, one Italian family in four lived in poverty and most of the rest were little better off. Less than one house in two had an indoor toilet, only one in eight boasted a bathroom. In the worst-off regions of the far south-east of Italy poverty was endemic: in the village of Cuto, in the Marchesato di Crotone, the fresh water supply to the town’s 9,000 inhabitants consisted of a single public fountain.
The Mezzogiorno was an extreme case. But in West Germany in 1950 17 million of the country’s 47 million residents were still classed as ‘needy’, chiefly because they had nowhere to live. Even in London a family whose name was on the waiting list for a house or flat could expect on average to wait seven years before being housed; in the meantime they were placed in post-war ‘prefabs’—metal boxes installed on empty lots around the city to shelter the homeless until the construction of new dwellings could catch up with need. In post-war polls, ‘housing’ always topped the list of popular concerns; in De Sica’s Miracle in Milan (1951) the homeless crowd chants, ‘We want a home to live in, so we and our children can believe in tomorrow’.
The consumption patterns of post-war Europe reflected the continuing penury of the continent and the enduring impact of the Depression and the war. Rationing continued longest in Britain, where bread rationing was introduced between July 1946 and July 1948, clothes coupons remained in force until 1949, the wartime utility clothing and furniture regime was not abandoned until 1952, and food rationing on meat and many other foods was not finally ended until the summer of 1954—though it was temporarily suspended for the Coronation of Queen Elizabeth II in June 1953, when everyone was allocated an extra pound of sugar and four ounces of margarine.80 But even in France, where rationing (and therefore the black market) disappeared rather sooner, the wartime obsession with food supply did not abate until 1949 at the earliest.
Almost everything was either in short supply or else small (the recommended size of the much-coveted new family dwellings being built by the Labour Government in Britain was just 900 square feet for a 3-bedroom house). Very few Europeans possessed a car or a fridge—working-class women in the UK, where the standard of living was higher than most countries on the continent, shopped twice a day for food, either on foot or by public transport, much as their mothers and grandmothers had done before them. Goods from distant lands were exotic and expensive. The widespread sense of restriction and limits and containment was further reinforced by controls on international travel (to save valuable foreign currency) and legislation keeping out foreign workers and other migrants (the post-war Republic in France maintained in force all the legislation from the 1930s and the Occupation designed to bar foreign labor and other undesirable aliens, allowing exceptions, mostly for skilled manual laborers, only according to need).
In many ways, Europe in the late 1940s and early 1950s was less open, less mobile and more insular than it had been in 1913. It was certainly more dilapidated, and not just in Berlin, where only one quarter of the rubble of battle had been cleared by 1950. The English social historian Robert Hewison describes the British in these years as ‘a worn-out people working with worn-out machinery.’ Whereas in the US by the end of the 1940s most industrial equipment was under five years old, in post-war France the average age of machinery was twenty years. A typical French farmer produced food for five fellow Frenchmen; the American farmer was already producing at three times this rate. Forty years of war and economic depression had taken a heavy toll.
‘Post-war’, then, lasted a long time; longer, certainly, than historians have sometimes supposed, recounting the difficult post-war years in the flattering light of the prosperous decades to come. Few Europeans in that time, well-informed or otherwise, anticipated the scale of change that was about to break upon them. The experience of the past half-century had induced in many a skeptical pessimism. In the years preceding World War One Europe was an optimistic continent whose statesmen and commentators looked to a confident future. Thirty years on, after World War Two, people had their eyes firmly and nervously fixed upon the terrible past. Many observers anticipated more of the same: another post-war depression, a re-run of the politics of extremism, a third world war.
But the very scale of the collective misery that Europeans had brought upon themselves in the first half of the century had a profoundly de-politicizing effect: far from turning to extreme solutions, in the manner of the years following World War One, the European publics of the gloomy post-World War Two years turned away from politics. The implications of this could be discerned only vaguely at the time—in the failure of Fascist or Communist parties to cash in upon the difficulties of daily existence; in the way in which economics displaced politics as the goal and language of collective action; in the emergence of domestic recreations and domestic consumption in place of participation in public affairs.
And something else was hap
pening. As The New Yorker’s Janet Flanner had noticed back in May 1946, the second highest priority (after underclothes) in France’s post-war agenda for ‘utility’ products was baby-carriages. For the first time in many years, Europeans were starting to have babies again. In the UK the birthrate in 1949 was up by 11 percent on 1937; in France it had risen by an unprecedented 33 percent. The implications of this remarkable burst of fertility, in a continent whose leading demographic marker since 1913 had been premature death, were momentous. In more ways than most contemporaries could possibly have foreseen, a new Europe was being born.
PART TWO
Prosperity and Its Discontents: 1953-1971
VIII
The Politics of Stability
‘To most people it must have been apparent, even before the Second World
War made it obvious, that the time when European nations could quarrel
among themselves for world dominion is dead and gone. Europe has
nothing more to look for in this direction, and any European who still
hankers after world power must fall victim either to despair or to ridicule,
like the many Napoleons in lunatic asylums’.