Postwar: A History of Europe Since 1945 (48 page)

Furthermore: Members of Parliament were not to appear on radio programs that might be ‘undignified or unsuitable’ for public figures, nor were there to be any jokes or references that might encourage ‘Strikes or industrial disputes. The Black Market, Spivs and drones.’ These terms—‘spivs’ and ‘drones’ for louche types and minor criminals, the ‘black market’ as an all-purpose term for traders and customers circumventing rationing and other restrictions—show how much Britain at least lived for some years in the shadow of the war. Well into the 1950s the BBC could reprimand one producer, Peter Eton of the popular radio comedy
The Goon Show
, for allowing ‘Major Dennis Bloodnok’ (played by Peter Sellers) to be awarded an OBE (Order of the British Empire) for ‘emptying dustbins in the heat of battle’ (and for permitting an actor to ‘imitate the Queen’s voice trying to shoo away pigeons at Trafalgar Square’).

Such strictures, and their accompanying note of high-collared, Edwardian-era reformism, were perhaps distinctive to Britain. But their tone would have been familiar all across the continent. In school, in church, on state-run radio, in the confident, patronizing style of the broadsheet and even the tabloid press, and in the speech and dress of public figures, Europeans were still very much subject to the habits and regulations of an earlier time. We have already noted how many of the political leaders of the age were men of another time—Britain’s Clement Attlee would not have been out of place in a Victorian mission to the industrial slums, and it was altogether fitting that the prime minister who oversaw Britain’s transition to a modern welfare state should have begun his public career performing good works in the East End of pre-World War One London.

Against this image of an older Europe—moving at the pace of earlier days, at once changed by the war and restrained by pre-war routines and habits—we must set the unmistakably
modern
form of its primary source of entertainment. This was the golden age of the cinema. In Britain, cinema attendance peaked quite soon after the end of the war, with 1,700 million seats sold in the country’s five thousand cinemas in 1946. In that year one person in three went every week to the local cinema. Even in 1950, when attendance had already started to decline, the average English man or woman went to the cinema twenty-eight times a year, a figure that was nearly 40 percent higher than in the last year before the war.

Whereas the British cinema audience was to slip steadily through the fifties, in continental Europe it continued to grow. One thousand new picture houses opened in France during the first half of the 1950s, about the same number in West Germany; in Italy three thousand new cinemas appeared, bringing the national total to some 10,000 by 1956. The previous year cinema attendance in Italy peaked at around 800 million seats sold (half the UK figure for about the same size population). French audiences, which were at their largest at the end of the 1940s, were nowhere near as large as those of Britain or even Italy
⁷⁸
. Nor were those of West Germany, although in the Federal Republic cinema attendance did not peak until 1959. But by any other measure audiences were large indeed; as they were even in Spain, where cinema attendance per head of the adult population in 1947 was among the highest in Europe.

Part of the reason for this post-war enthusiasm for films was the pent-up wartime demand, especially for American films—stoked by the ban on most US films imposed by the Nazis, by Mussolini (after 1938) and by the Pétain regime in France, and more generally by wartime shortages. In 1946, 87 percent of box-office receipts in Italy were for foreign (mostly American) films; of about 5,000 films shown in Madrid between 1939 and the end of the 1950s, 4,200 were foreign (again, mostly American). In 1947 the French film industry produced 40 films, in contrast with 340 that were imported from the United States. And American films were not just available in overwhelming numbers, they were also popular: the most commercially successful films in post-war Berlin were Chaplin’s
Gold Rush
and
The Maltese Falcon
(made in 1941 but not available in Europe until the end of the war).

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.