Hollywood and the Americanization of Britain from the 1920s to the Present.By Mark Glancy.

Abstract

Studies of the American film’s influence on British culture are nothing new, but whereas most books tend to offer analyses of particular films or focus on debates about legislation to challenge the dominance of Hollywood, Mark Glancy breaks new ground in his detailed analysis of the popular culture of film-going in twentieth-century Britain. Such an approach is to be welcomed as it enables us to get a much clearer idea of the reception of American films amongst the British public and their wider cultural influence. Given its heavy use of popular film magazines, such as Picture Show and Picturegoer, Glancy’s book is strongest in its coverage of the ‘golden age’ of cinema-going, with half of the chapters focused on case studies covering the 1920s to the 1940s. Glancy demonstrates that, while Hollywood films had a great appeal to British audiences, film magazines gave a specifically British context to popular film culture, seeking to promote the development of a UK film industry and expressing anxiety about aspects of the depiction of sex and violence in American movies. In any case, many Hollywood stars, particularly in the silent age, appealed for their exoticism rather than any specifically American attributes. Rudolph Valentino, who played characters of various races, provides the classic example. As Glancy skilfully demonstrates, Valentino had a quite different reputation in Britain compared to the USA, which resulted, in part, from differing attitudes to the ‘Latin Lover’s’ racial identity (pp. 66–74).