One world, big screen
Subtitle: Hollywood, the Allies, and World War II
By: M. Todd Bennett
Publisher: The University of North Carolina Press
Published: 2012
Place of publication: Chapel Hill
Language: eng
Number of pages: 362
ISBN-13: 9780807835746
Subjects: Motion pictures and the war; Motion pictures; World War, 1939-1945; History
Description: "World War II coincided with cinema's golden age. Movies now considered classics were created at a time when all sides in the war were coming to realize the great power of popular films to motivate the masses. Through multinational research, One World, Big Screen reveals how the Grand Alliance--Britain, China, the Soviet Union, and the United States--tapped Hollywood's impressive power to shrink the distance and bridge the differences that separated them. The Allies, M. Todd Bennett shows, strategically manipulated cinema in an effort to promote the idea that the United Nations was a family of nations joined by blood and affection. Bennett revisits Casablanca, Mrs. Miniver, Flying Tigers, and other familiar movies that, he argues, helped win the war and the peace by improving Allied solidarity and transforming the American worldview. Closely analyzing film, diplomatic correspondence, propagandists' logs, and movie studio records found in the United States, the United Kingdom, and the former Soviet Union, Bennett rethinks traditional scholarship on World War II diplomacy by examining the ways that Hollywood and the Allies worked together to prepare for and enact the war effort."--Publisher's Web site.
Notes: Includes bibliographical references and index.
Table of contents: title: Introduction; title: The "magic bullet": Hollywood, Washington, and the moviegoing public; title: "Pro-British-American war preachers": internationalism at the movies, 1939-1941; title: One world, big screen: the United Nations and American horizons; title: Kissing cousins: how Anglo-American relations became "special"; title: Courting Uncle Joe: the theatrics of Soviet-American matrimony; title: Negotiating the color divide: race and U.S. paternalism toward China; title: Conclusion.