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: citta 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 emigre 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 Sciuscia (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 volupte. For the most part Americans are absent (except for the GIs having their shoes shined in the eponymous Sciuscia, 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
