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The Foreign Film Renaissance on American Screens, 1946-1973
By Tino Balio
The University of Wisconsin Press
Copyright © 2010 The Board of Regents of the University of Wisconsin System
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-299-24794-2
Introduction
Introduction
Roberto Rossellini's Open City (Roma, città aperta), a low-budget picture about the underground resistance during the Nazi occupation of Rome, opened at the World Theatre in New York on February 25, 1946, and proved a total surprise. Before the war Italian films had never compared favorably with French, German, or British imports and had played mostly in ethnic theaters in immigrant neighborhoods. Open City, the first film to come out of Italy after the war, ran for twenty-one months at the World and broke the previous New York City records set by The Birth of a Nation and Gone With the Wind—an unprecedented achievement for a foreign film. Open City went on to win the Grand Prix at Cannes in 1946 and was named Best Foreign Language Film of the year by the New York Film Critics Circle. After going into general release, Open City reputedly grossed $5 million at the box office and set another record in the United States for a foreign film.
Rossellini started work on his picture "shortly after American GIs pushed the Germans out," reported Variety. He shot it under difficult conditions in the streets of the city, inside actual buildings, and in a makeshift studio. Raw film stock was hard to come by, but Rossellini received "strictly unofficial aid" from U.S. Army Signal Corps technicians to complete his film. Rossellini chose Anna Magnani and Aldo Fabrizi, both seasoned professionals, to play the leads. To fill out the cast he recruited amateurs, and for extras he used the citizens of Rome.
The heroes in Open City are the "little people," who struggle for liberation. There's Manfredi, a Communist resistance leader on the run from the Gestapo; Francesco, a friend who operates an underground print shop; Pina, Francesco's pregnant wife-to-be, a widow with a young son who risks her life by hiding the resistance leader in her apartment; and Don Pietro, a simple Catholic priest who "carries money bound in scholarly-looking volumes" and "smuggles ammunition under his priest's robes" across the lines to aid the cause. Pina was played by Magnani and Don Pietro by Fabrizi. The heroes all fall victim to the Germans. Pina is shot down in the street on her wedding day as she rushes after Francesco, who was caught in a sweep of her tenement and is being hauled off to prison. Manfredi is betrayed by his mistress after a falling out and is arrested by the Gestapo along with Don Pietro. At Gestapo headquarters Manfredi is flayed with a blowtorch and dies without informing on his comrades. Don Pietro, who was forced to witness the ordeal, also defies the Nazis and is placed before the firing squad. Awaiting his execution, he blesses the parish children huddled outside the prison fence, who are whistling a resistance tune to give him comfort. Don Pietro's last words are, "It is not difficult to die well; it is difficult to live well."
U.S. critics had never before seen a war film quite like this. Bosley Crowther in the New York Times was overwhelmed by its "candid, overpowering realism." Open City, he said, had the "wind-blown look" of a "straight documentary" that "was inspired by artists whose own emotions had been deeply and recently stirred." "The feeling that flows most strongly through the film," he added, "is one of supreme admiration for the people who fight for freedom's cause." Newsweek described it as "the screen's most eloquent indictment of Nazism by a people who first aided them, then became virtual slaves of the Germans." James Agee in the Nation doubted that "institutional Christianity and leftism," as represented by the priest and the Communists, ever coexisted as easily as they do in the film. Nonetheless, he admired the film's immediacy: "Everything in it had been recently lived through; much of it is straight reenactment on or near the actual spot; its whole spirit is still, scarcely cooled at all, the exalted spirit of the actual experience."
Agee wrote off the German characters as "standard villains" but described the acting of most of the Romans—and "especially of a magnificent woman named Anna Magnani"—as "near perfect." Variety also singled out Miss Magnani's performance: "She is certainly not a heroine in the Hollywood conception, as she is not only homely, but even quite slovenly and rather ordinary." John McCarten in the New Yorker particularly liked Fabrizi's performance as the priest: "Aldo Fabrizi, a famous stage comedian, is superb in all kinds of disparate scenes. At one point, he is slyly humorous as he arranges a statue of a nude woman in an antique shop so that it will not confront the image of St. Rocco; at another, he is solemnly impressive as, for the benefit of a Gestapo searching party, he reads the prayers for the dying over an old man whom he has had to knock out with a frying pan to make him lie quietly beside the weapons that are hidden under his blankets; and at yet another, he is profoundly courageous as he refuses to reveal to the chief of the Roman Gestapo the identity of his fellow-conspirators."
Rossellini's film was a public relations triumph for Italy and whetted America's appetite for Italian neorealist and foreign films in general after the war. Fast-forwarding to 1963, a small but influential art film market now existed in the United States, a legacy of Open City. The number of art houses had grown from just a handful in 1946 to around 450, and a vibrant film culture had come into being. Foreign films and their directors were the subjects of reviews and feature stories in the New York Times, mass-market magazines, highbrow periodicals, and the trade press. They were also promoted by museums, film festivals, and colleges and universities. Responding to film's new status as "an authentic art form," Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts launched the New York Film Festival in September 1963. To mark the event, Time magazine ran a cover story entitled "A Religion of Film," which stated: "By its taste and high excitement, by the quality of its films and the intelligence of its sellout crowds, it may well mark for Americans a redefinition of what movies are and who it is that sees them. For in the decade since Hollywood came unstuck and television became the reigning medium of mass entertainment, the movies have suddenly and powerfully emerged as a new and brilliant international art, indeed as perhaps the central and characteristic art of the age." The article continued: "At the heart of the new movement is a hardy little band of inspired pioneers—Japan's Akira Kurosawa; Sweden's Ingmar Bergman; France's Alain Resnais and François Truffaut; Italy's Federico Fellini, Michelangelo Antonioni, and Luchino Visconti; England's Tony Richardson; Poland's Andrzej Wajda and Roman Polanski; Argentina's Leopold Torre Nilsson; India's Satyajit Ray." It noted that the audience that flocked to their films was young, mostly under thirty. "It is a vehement audience; it applauds what it likes and hisses what it doesn't. It is an expert audience; the new generation of moviegoers believes that an educated man must be cinemate [sic] as well as literate. And it is a mass audience; financially, the new cinema is a going concern."
The art film market, which introduced the "hardy little band of inspired pioneers" to American filmgoers, had antecedents as far back as the 1920s, but it was essentially a postwar phenomenon that flourished until 1966. As originally understood by the trade, the art film market was a subindustry devoted to the acquisition, distribution, and exhibition of critically acclaimed foreign- and English-language films produced abroad without Hollywood's involvement. No hard-and-fast definition existed for art films; they encompassed a range of styles, genres, and modes of production. These films were typically made with the support of government subsidies and with international distribution in mind. About the only generalization one could make about the style of these films is that they departed more or less from Hollywood narrative norms.
This history of the art film market begins with the release of Rossellini's Open City in 1946 and concludes with the release of Bernardo Bertolucci's Last Tango in Paris in 1973. The focus is on New York City, the gateway and launching pad for the market. The importance of this choice has been described by Edward Kingsley, a prominent art film distributor, as follows: "Every picture from abroad is reborn in New York. Each picture starts from scratch when it gets here. The promotion and advertising must be planned for the American market. If it doesn't get off to a good start in New York, it doesn't have a chance anyplace." To be considered a hit, a foreign film had to get a good review from Bosley Crowther in the New York Times and run a minimum of eight weeks in a first-class Manhattan art house; anything less would damage if not kill its chances for wider distribution. The Greater New York run could generate as much as half of the total revenue for a film—sometimes more.
To explain the workings of the market, I have singled out the following basics of art film distribution: (1) market structure (2) import trends (3) marketing (4) critical reception (5) censorship (6) audience, and (7) box office. Stated another way, I have identified the key foreign film distributors, their relative size, and methods of operation. In addition, I have identified the film imports that attracted the greatest attention in the press and drove the market. Lastly, I have described the audiences for these pictures and the marketing strategies distributors used to reach them. Since the art film market functioned as a subindustry, I have discussed its operations in relation to mainstream Hollywood. (N.B.: The date in parentheses following a film title indicates the year the film was released in the United States, not the year it was produced. The film title itself is the American release version. Wherever a foreign film is first discussed and not just mentioned, I have inserted its original release title within parentheses.)
This history is divided into three parts. The first describes the emergence of the market immediately after the war brought about by two import trends—Italian neorealism and the British film renaissance. The first chapter sets the stage by describing the import trends of the 1930s and the failed efforts of European producers to gain entree into mainstream U.S. exhibition. Looked at from their perspective, the art film market functioned as a ghetto for foreign films. Italian neorealism flourished until 1951. Like Open City, such later arrivals as Rossellini's Paisan (1948) and Vittorio De Sica's The Bicycle Thief (1949), were admired for "their mixture of realism and fine, voluble acting, their classic pathos and fleshy humor, their background of poverty and the picturesque, and, above all, their new technique, which turns them into documentaries of postwar history, of neighborhoods, or of human hearts and pocketbooks," as Janet Flanner put it in the New Yorker. Rossellini and De Sica worked on the fringe of the Italian film industry as independents, and their films kick-started the art film market after the war. In so doing, they also provided Italian producers with the means to break into mainstream U.S. theaters. By discovering ways to exploit elements of the trend, by the early 1950s the Italian film industry ranked "second only to Hollywood as the major supplier of films to the U.S. and the world."
Pictures that signaled the British film renaissance, like David Lean's Brief Encounter (1946) and Laurence Olivier's Hamlet (1948), appealed to discriminating filmgoers who appreciated tasteful fare with a literary bent. They were produced by J. Arthur Rank, the British motion picture mogul who launched an aggressive campaign after the war to force the Hollywood majors to open their theaters to British films. His effort failed, but certain lines of his films—Michael Balcon's Ealing comedies, for example—helped convince reluctant exhibitors to convert to art films rather than close their doors during the postwar recession. The growth in the number of art houses during the early 1950s created a truly viable art film market with relatively healthy distribution and exhibition arms.
The second part of this study covers the heyday of foreign films, from the early 1950s to 1966. Initially the market was driven by numerous independent distributors headquartered in New York who scoured international film festivals and European production centers to bid on prizewinners and discover new talent. To play it safe, distributors bid on films on the basis of what was popular the year before, or they might go after cutting-edge pictures to try and start a new trend. In either case, they faced the daunting task of making their wares appeal to U.S. audiences. Foreign films were almost always released with subtitles—fans would have it no other way. However, for marketing purposes distributors sometimes retitled their films and edited them to make them more palatable to American tastes. One thing was certain: distributors had little money for promotion and advertising; art films were released unheralded, with the result that few imports grossed over $200,000 at the box office.
Foreign film distributors had to contend with the Production Code Administration (PCA), the Legion of Decency (a Catholic group), and state and municipal censorship boards, each of which presented a separate censorship hurdle. Distributors seldom bothered with the PCA, which would likely have demanded cuts to get a seal; besides, foreign films played in art houses and independent theaters where a code seal did not matter. As a result, foreign films enjoyed one advantage over Hollywood in the United States: sex appeal. From the start, foreign film distributors understood that sex sold films and freely borrowed techniques from the exploitation market to "sex up" film titles and advertising to lure customers. The added revenue saved many a film.
The import trends discussed in this part are arranged chronologically, according to when they generated the greatest interest in the market. Although there is considerable overlap in time with this arrangement, by concentrating on trends rather than a cross section of the market year by year, one can more easily track the rise and fall of trends, general critical reception, and dynamics of film distribution. The accompanying table lists the top foreign films of the period.
French films reentered the United States immediately after the war. Most were made during the occupation in the style of the Tradition of Quality, the dominant French import trend of the 1950s. Based on French literary classics, the films were admired for their craftsmanship and intelligence, as well as for their sophisticated handling of sex. Interspersed among such pictures were a series of films produced by veteran French directors of the 1930s, plus a few modernist works by Jacques Tati and Robert Bresson. Tati's new brand of comedy as exemplified in Mr. Hulot's Holiday (1954) was a bright spot, but Bresson's minimalist style in Diary of a Country Priest (1954) found little favor. As a group French films were respected, but they met with little enthusiasm until the arrival of a series of popular thrillers, beginning with Henri-Georges Clouzot's The Wages of Fear (1955) and the appearance two years later of Brigitte Bardot in Roger Vadim's And God Created Woman (1957), which set a new box-office record for foreign films. The picture was released by Kingsley-International, a subsidiary of Columbia Pictures, and marked the beginning of Hollywood's entry into art film distribution in a significant way. The market was soon flooded with Bardot's films, both old and new. Since Bardot virtually personified the youth of the 1950s and was especially popular with college students, her films set the stage for the reception of the French New Wave.
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Excerpted from The Foreign Film Renaissance on American Screens, 1946-1973 by Tino Balio Copyright © 2010 by The Board of Regents of the University of Wisconsin System. Excerpted by permission of The University of Wisconsin Press. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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