For 100 years, Hollywood has provided both the majority and the most popular of films shown on British screens. For many Britons, Hollywood films are not foreign films. Whether seen in the cinema, on television or the internet, they are regarded as normal screen fare and a part of everyday life. Hollywood and the Americanization of Britain is the first book to take a wide ranging view of this phenomenon, exploring the tastes and preferences of British audiences from the silent era to the present. Mark Glancy investigates the British reception of Hollywood films, ranging from The Public Enemy through film history to The Patriot and Grease. Drawing on rich original sources, his carefully researched and lively book explores Hollywood's capacity to appeal to British audiences, as well as its ability to alienate, enrage and amuse them.

Investigates Hollywood's ability to appeal to British filmgoers, as well as its ability to alienate, enrage and amuse them across films ranging from The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse (1922) to The Patriot (2000).

Americanizing Britain anatomizes the various ways British writers responded to the ever-increasing influence of U.S. culture on Britain and the rest of the world.

When Hollywood Loved Britain examines the Hollywood "British" film--American feature films that were set in Britain, based on British history or literature and included the work of British producers, directors, writers and actors. "British" films include many of the most popular and memorable films of the 1930s and 1940s, yet they have received little individual attention from film historians and even less attention as a body of films. While the book is centered on wartime "British" films, it also investigates wider issues: the influence of censorship and propaganda agencies during Hollywood’s studio era, studio finances, the isolationist campaign in the United States between 1939 and 1941, and American perceptions of Britain at war.

As an intervention in conversations on transnationalism, film culture and genre theory, this book theorises transnational genre hybridity – combining tropes from foreign and domestic genres – as a way to think about films through a global and local framework. Taking the British horror resurgence of the 2000s as case study, genre studies are here combined with close formal analysis to argue that embracing transnational genre hybridity enabled the boom; starting in 2002, the resurgence saw British horror film production outpace the golden age of British horror. Yet, resurgence films like 28 Days Later and Shaun of the Dead had to reckon with horror’s vilified status in the UK, a continuation of attitudes perpetuated by middle-brow film critics who coded horror as dangerous and Americanised. Moving beyond British cinema studies’ focus on the national, this book also presents a fresh take on long-standing issues in British cinema, including genre and film culture.

The setting is 1920s Berlin, cultural heart of Europe and the era's only serious cinematic rival to Hollywood. In his engaging study, Thomas Saunders explores an outstanding example of one of the most important cultural developments of this century: global Americanization through the motion picture. The invasion of Germany by American films, which began in 1921 with overlapping waves of sensationalist serials, slapstick shorts, society pictures, and historical epics, initiated a decade of cultural collision and accommodation. On the one hand it fueled an impassioned debate about the properties of cinema and the specter of wholesale Americanization. On the other hand it spawned unprecedented levels of cooperation and exchange. In Berlin, American motion pictures not only entertained all social classes and film tastes but also served as a vehicle for American values and a source of sharp economic competition. Hollywood in Berlin correlates the changing forms of Hollywood's contributions to Weimar culture and the discourses that framed and interpreted them, restoring historical contours to a leading aspect of cultural interchange in this century. At the same time, the book successfully embeds Weimar cinema in its contemporary international setting.

From politics and war, to jeans and sneakers: a look at America’s influence on the world from an international perspective On the day after 9/11, foreign newspapers ran headlines announcing “We Are All Americans Now.” Though the sentiment was not new, it was also not quite the same as when Henry Luce announced in 1941, the inauguration of what he called “the American Century,” during which the US was to raise all men “from the level of the beasts to what the Psalmist calls a little lower than angels.” When America suddenly emerged as a global power in the postwar period, the world—with pockets of resistance from France, Russia, and Japan in particular—was happy to be remade in the US image. America dazzled, and sometimes intimidated, older, staler, less innovative cultures. The affluence it placed on display was something to which most other countries aspired, and it was this fantasy that helped win the Cold War. Fast forward to today and the Chinese state news agency Xinhua, days before a possible financial default by the US government, calling for a de-Americanized world. A context for Peter Conrad’s grand tale is, inevitably, politics, war, and commerce, but for the most part he draws on his brilliant repertoire of cultural skills to assess, surprise, invigorate, and delight us with his kaleidoscopic presentation of the movies and music, jeans and sneakers, food and refrigerators, novels and paintings that have shaped so much of the world in our lifetimes.