Postwar: A History of Europe Since 1945

by Tony Judt

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 ...