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Stephen Gundle
In the 1930s, Neal Gabler has shown, Hollywood fictions entered the mainstream;
what had been a vision of the United States shaped by newcomers and
outsiders became the mythology of urban America. 7 As Americanism became
inseparable from consumerism, glamour defined mentalities, behavior, aspirations
and patterns of consumption, as well as ideals of beauty and so on. 8 Moreover,
from being the lingua franca of a melting pot, it became in the 1940s a powerful
tool of American war morale and self-perception as well as a weapon in the United
States’ armoury against its enemies. The independent producer Walter Wanger
probably exaggerated in 1945 when he argued that the United States won the war
because it had Tyrone Power and Lana Turner on its side whereas its enemies had
only political figures, but the alignment of glamour and power was a seductive
one that would serve the United States well in its efforts to persuade Europeans of
its virtues and guide them towards a new model of modernization. 9
Hollywood glamour was a potent force in Europe in the 1940s. People were
dazzled by the beauty and sex appeal of the stars and delighted in the dreamworld
of prosperity and luxury which they inhabited. But there were filters and factors
which meant that Hollywood glamour was never accepted en bloc. Royalty and
aristocracy, for example, occupied an important part of the space of glamour,
cultivating sensations of loyalty and deference rather than dynamic emulation.
Moreover many of the premises of the development of American glamour, like
national retail networks, department stores, modern advertising, pronounced
individualism etc., were absent. There were also domestic traditions of the
representation of the desirable and the sexually alluring which reflected the class
structure. Hollywood had the advantage of having incorporated some of these, but
its industrial model of glamour was often too big, too commercial, too artificial to
sustain simply and positively the conversion of whole societies to new ways of
thinking and behaving. Moreover, part of the intention of the European Recovery
Program (ERP) and in US postwar policy was to stimulate European societies to
develop their own mythologies of capitalism that would cut across, and ultimately
displace, political ideologies.
It is in the light of these considerations that the case of postwar Italy needs to
be examined.
American Glamour and Postwar Italy
Hollywood glamour arrived in postwar Italy through two means: filmic representations
and magazine and newsreel images of American stars in the peninsula. By
no means all US films were glamorous; the first to be shown, selected by the Allied
Forces’ Psychological Warfare Branch, were largely propaganda films justifying
the American war effort or, like Chaplin’s The Great Dictator, satirizing Fascist
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